A study of specific characteristics of 30 selected stocks in bursa Malaysia that are contributing to market manipulation / Muhammad Iqbal Isham

Stock market manipulation is an act of artificially inflating or deflating the price of a security or otherwise influencing the behavior of the market for personal gain. Manipulation is illegal in most cases, but it can be difficult for regulators and other authorities to detect. (Investopedia 2021). It is one of the most serious market offences plus very hard to be detected and to solve the case as the manipulators tend to have many ways to cover up their illegal activities such as executing their transaction by using many layers of proxies and creating multiple trading accounts for disguising their size of funds.
Based on the Capital Markets and Services Act 2007 in Malaysia, stock market manipulation is defined as the act of transacting the securities of a corporation that are likely to have the effect of raising, lowering, or maintaining the price of securities for the purpose of inducing other persons to acquire or dispose of the securities of the corporation or of a related corporation (Securities Commission Malaysia, 2015) (Kan, Y. Y., 2018).
In relation to this, I have come across an article published by The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on April 12, 2021-April 18, 2021, with a title, "Special Report: Hidden hands behind penny stock surge under scrutiny". In the article, the publisher has put together a list of 30 stocks which had been claimed as 'the subject of manipulation' along with supporting details.
Hence, with this study, I aim to look at the specific characteristics of these 30 listed stocks in Bursa Malaysia that were contributing to the stock market manipulation.
This study used Average Negative Abnormal Return (AVNAR) as dependent variable while new business venture (NBV), outstanding shares, floating shares, net profit margin (NPM) and succeeding quarter result time frame as independent variables. The period involved will be from February 2020 which coincided with the start of the first Movement Control Order (MCO) 1.0 until March 2021. As mentioned earlier, these data were published from The Edge Malaysia Weekly which were sourced from Bloomberg.