Here's the significance - 30,000 shares probably represented the minimum (or most common) unit of unregistered shares of ASTN stock sold to these non-insider stockholders at the time of the private placements of ASTN stock. It amounted to approximately $50,000 per investor, at stock prices in the vicinity of $1.60 per share (most before ASTN's IPO, some at the UTTC level).
The only true insider to sell anything so far is John Blohm, who sold about 10% of his position, presumably to be able to afford the stock he is entitled to buy when he exercises his employee stock options. All of the others (all of the names on your list) are merely filing 144's because they had unregistered stock when they first received it. This includes a few parties who received unregistered stock, rather than cash, in exchange for services (e.g., Continental Capital).
Hey Auric - are you one of those guys who said there would nobody would ever compete against Apple and Big Blue when the desktop PC was invented because they controlled the PC marketplace at first? If you had any sense of how hard Reuters (Instinet) and the traditional exchanges has fought ATG and VWAP since they tried getting this system up and running, you might appreciate the fact that they seem more concerned about ASTN (and other ATS's) competitive threat than you do. They are not underestimating ATG as much as you are willing to.
More to the point, there have been few or no ATS's in existence to this point, so you market share projections are meaningless - and your confusion between ECN's and ATS's, and the conclusions drawn from that obvious confusion, again reflect a tainted, incomplete picture.
That's fine - trade from a position of weakness by choosing to close your eyes while you trade. Your instincts are just that good, huh?? Oh yeah - stock's still over 10 . . . go after it, you da man.
MST |
