russett to George,
That's a hard question for me to answer. You have to know who is really behind the buying and selling. I don't know what brokerages have done MMU's private placements in the past. Those brokers generally get a lot of free shares for doing the PP. Then the brokerage's trader can play with the inventory. Or the brokerage could be acting on behalf of insiders or just retail customers like us. Getting to the bottom of these questions is necessary before we can put any relevance into the trading characteristics. I didn't ask RB who he trades with, he owns about 8% of MMU shares. No shareholder controls more than 10% of the shares, so I presume the shares are spread out over many shareholders like us. Mr Capel buying 400,000 shares in August is interesting, but it could be for one shareholder who wants to take a flyer for around $45,000. We need to know who Mr. Capel is buying for.
The rally of March and April certainly seemed to be generated by anticipation of the drill results. In March the market was interested in diamonds. RB's talks at the PDAC in March were on the Alberta Diamond play. I don't recall him discussing the presence of high metal concentrations at all, but my mind was focused on diamonds and hints of other things probably would not have sunk in at the time.
Somebody certainly seemed to know something by mid-April as volume started to increase and I grabbed some shares for a flyer in the teens. When the news of anomalous metal concentrations were released I grabbed some more as it slammed up to its peaks. I was hoping analysis of cores in the library would stumble on to some really high levels of mineralization, but that was not to be, :-((( yet!
Anyone buying as the stock shot past $0.20, were probably retail suckers like me, coming in to the trough for some more shares while the big boys and girls were selling into the rally. Big sellers back then appeared to be McDermid and Wolverton with a lot of houses buying and selling the rally. High volume attracts house brokers and day traders who play for a few cents increase, or short for a few cents drop. Day traders can be happy with a couple hundred bucks profit, and you need these folks to really push the stock up. One thing they look for is increasing volume on anticipation of news, like now.
Since the heady days of March and April, I have averaged down a bit to make my purchase look respectable at todays prices. A lot of people who did the same, are probably selling some now to reduce their exposure a bit as the price starts to rise on expectation of exploration good news. The same would be true of big players. Volume is now increasing with increasing share price so we are all anticipating some news. Market dogma says high volumes in the morning could indicate the people on the Marum ground have seen something interesting and are buying. Presumably they are busy working during the day, so must put their orders in after work, or early in the morning before work. Brokers know this too, a can play psych games with us to suck us in. This makes playing the daytrader game on these little puppies tough.
I am usually a kind of position trader. I look at the potential of a play, and take a position based on the degree of hope for the future. If the stock goes up 15-20%, I will probably sell a big enough portion of my position to retain several thousand shares that have become freebies. Then I can ignore the shares until the day when they may emerge as beautiful butterflies, trading at $10.00 or more. If the fundamentals of a play stay the same, why not?? By the time they are that high, there are some usually some firm production numbers you can base a "sell or buy some more" decision on. If they become flea bitten dogs, well they didn't cost anything. All you need is a few butterflies and you are retired. At least that is the plan (gggggggg) :-))))))
good luck to us all, russett |
