Painting the Tape

Painting the tape is an illegal way to manipulate the ticker and a market.

Here's how it goes down:

Two people or firms trade stocks or securities back and forth. There's no real benefit to the trades—except that everyone looking at the ticker will see lots of activity on this one stock. The idea is that the stock will seem hot and real investors will also start to buy the stock. If you get caught running this scheme, you can expect some time in the Big House (and we don't mean a McMansion).