Our old rising channel was formed on Apr 14. Since May 2 there was a short attempt for a trend steeppening (the actual objective was to rise volatility - see last weeks posts), which was not really confirmed, but volatility indeed climbed up.... Actually since May 12 a drift flattening took place.... (with rising volatility). Our (possible) new (a bit less stepper rising channel) should have its lower border at around ~2.64 (today). That is quite different from the lower border of our old rising channel (since Apr 14), which is currently ~2.70. In general, to change the drift one needs a systemic change in underlying drivers .... (usually caused by new objective info.... that we don't have yet).
Thus, if shortly, because of several reasons (trend-channel structure since Apr 14, p/v distributions in time, price-volume correlations, extremely low volume ~0.75 M/h today, absence of any objective “negative” news, and a well known reasonably high probability for e-plus deal to be approved) we most likely are witnessing an “imitation” of (actually imposed) “extended negative subtrend” (twice longer than the usual duration with strongly decreasing partial volume). That is the prob is quite high that we may actually see a downward price manipulation by small/mid-size active profs with ex-ante return optimization objectives - accumulation of bigger volumes at lower levels .... ahead of e-plus decision. Otherwise, the partial volume should rise essentially, being anti-correlated with prices, should market really anticipate the e-plus deal to be rejected.