To: John Zwiener who wrote (268 ) 3/5/1998 1:02:00 PM From: James Perry Respond to
Sure, orders will be timed and anything which can be done to disguise heavy buying - or selling - will be done. You mentioned the whole bitter bit which cannot be avoided when one tries to buy into a stock such as IGEN. The entire float is only 8 million shares. All of the buying effort is expended in trying to persuade people to sell. A day like today is a prize: people get scared; the market is falling and they throw their stock at the wall! Such a joy! The buyer stands waiting. His only real option is to continue raising the price to the point where people worry about how long they can sit on a stock with such delightful gains! And so we see it go up, even on a day like today (but conversely, when the market jumps up it seems counter productive to raise IGEN's price still further on that day) It would be a real benefit to that buyer if the company would split the shares, so that he has a larger pool to fish from. But management would prefer to see stock held by "little guys" like us who would never dare to try to suggest how the company should be run, than by funds and people like George Soros. How does one dance with an elephant? VERY carefully! So a stock split right now is pretty unlikely because management wouldn't want to encourage big buyers to swarm in. Just let the price go up until they get discouraged. Now, I haven't mentioned it - thank goodness there is no need to do so right now - but if one of the big owners tried to sell, then a huge question would be "Who to?". We have been unusually careful to analyse, study, and find the value in this stock, and we believe in its future. But we remain a rather small group. Despite every effort we can muster to call attention to the fact that this is a gem! So there is no large pool of prospective buyers wanting to get it. A few, perhaps, but not a huge number. So if you conclude that this stock is going up, I could agree.
