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Not at all, you don't sound stupid....answer is, yes of course. FOX is like any other share and will trade as such - including of course the opportunity to trade in and out of it intra-day - until around 24/5/6 May (again, I'm not quite sure when the very last trade date will fall to ensure a buyer will fall inside the 26 May record date deadline, so to be safe, check with your broker). Buying the shares AFTER this record date deadline will only mean that the buyer will no longer be eligible for their share of the segregated pool if the Company wins the litigation lottery.

Sorry radika, is that a serious question?

yes

Kenny - the answers provided were not quite correct. The original RNSs that came out regarding the reverse takeover of Eco Building had already made clear that should Fox-Eco win the litigation against the Kosovan government, any award would be segregated for legacy Fox Marble shareholders. However, since the EGM to approve the RTO and then convert FOX shares to new ECO shares will not occur until the end of May (and we therefore will continue to trade under the old FOX ticker until then), what today's announcement clarified was, essentially, that investors can still purchase FOX shares in the market anytime from now until the record date of 26 May and be eligible for their share of any litigation award as and when it may get paid. [Fwiw, 'record date', as the term suggests, is the date on which a buyer's can/is recorded as the beneficial owner of any shares they've purchased. Whereas other, related terms like 'trade date' (the date you actually buy them) and 'settlement date' (the date on which your shares land in your account and the cash needed to pay for them goes out) are straightforward, a share's 'record date' can be a bit kinky; ie., sometimes it falls the same day as the settlement date, sometimes a day before trade date and sometimes a couple days later. Therefore, unless they call your broker and find out for certain, it's probably fair to say that if a buyer wants to make sure that they qualify for a record date of 26 May at 6pm, they should buy them latest the 24th]. Given how much the share price bounced today, it's obvious that a lot of people mistakenly believed the 'record date' to own the shares with the litigation lottery ticket attached had already passed.

well now, definitely better to be lucky than smart.

A quick addendum to Canary's post from Saturday re a 'buyer in the background'. Despite the admittedly tepid price action the last few days, there is a curiously firm book building just around/above the current bid of 25.25p. Aside from the 25k advertised on the order book strip, no fewer than 5 different brokers are advertising as buyers of 50k or more on the 'RSP'. While I admit that that's a total of not even 300k shares being bid for, which is just £75k in value, I also have to say that, after over 2 years of trading this share, I have never seen so many market makers with size of ANY description near or above the current bid. Said a different way, while a seller could probably let 1/2million go at or around 25p right now, the best offer in that kind of size is currently 28p. Just a small positive, but useful on a quiet day maybe.

Fox Marble – Eco Buildings Group reverse takeover, eventually, moving ahead - STRONG BUY

By HotStockRockets | Wednesday 3 May 2023

Disclosure: I own shares in one or more of the stocks mentioned. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from *************). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Fox Marble (FOX) has, eventually, announced further details of its proposed Eco Buildings Group reverse takeover along with a proposed further £2.7 million of equity issuance at 55p per share. Exciting times ahead?

The pricing is with a prospective effectively 1 for 50.7 share consolidation, with the acquisition consideration an all-share £30 million and the prospective market cap £38.5 million, with the £2.7 million placing funds “to provide growth finance and working capital”.

Eco Buildings has a prefabricated modular offering which is up to 50% cheaper, two-thirds lighter and five times faster to build than conventionally built homes and its management has utilised its network in the Balkans to initially secure two contracts that are expected to generate sales revenue of up to €114 million for the first three years following admission. It is added that “Fox Marble's existing building products and operations should deliver revenue synergies when combined with Eco Buildings”.

There are clear risks at this stage, including the proposals still to be formally approved and then delivery of the noted revenue-generating activity profitably including with significant boardroom change. However, we’ve already noted multi-million pound profit potential soon after a year and potentially much more on the international expansion.

As such, we suggest this is currently attractive on a risk/reward basis even before considering the potential from a €195 million arbitration case against the Republic of Kosovo for current Fox Marble shareholders. Therefore, the stance is STRONG BUY at up to a post-consolidation 60p. For we existing shareholders this could be - with the arbitration - a massive multibagger. For new entrants we still see the potential for a 150p+ share price.

what do you mean exactly? It continues to progress a per usual. no change. Company will update when and if appropriate I'm sure

answer: someone cheated

Someone playing silly buggers in the closing auction again, pushing the fixing price down as much as 5% below the average for the day and to a price we hardly traded at at all today. 26/26.25p should have been the closing price.

The UK line just had a pulsating move up to 27p+, but that seems to have brought in some (smallish) sellers, so we'll likely have a battle from now until the close. Meantime though, the Israeli line is finally showing a bit of turnover as well, which bodes well.

I have to admit, at this point, the biggest risk here seems to be that this almost seems to good to be true. Let's hope the new management team can deliver on even half of what we're reading here, because it will not only help make the post-RTO valuation look very cheap indeed, but as I wrote about a year ago, will also offer institutional investors a genuinely fresh, niche growth opportunity in a broader sector they tend to favour but where the traditional builders face a tough couple of years.

Note that already, in addition to the royalty arrangement with a UK builder (if this one comes off, this would be an even lower risk profile than more traditional contracts) which was discussed in Friday's RNS, they are already hinting about further contracts beyond the Balkans AND further capital access through a debt facility (?!?). This proposition is already improving on the potential quantum of business, diversification of clients, AND leveraging the balance sheet. No wonder its absorbing - so far - the natural sellers after such a long suspension.

As I explained already unvrkw, there's no free lunch. Whether and by how much the share price can and will rally from Tuesday, is to what extent the market decides that the £30m price tag for the new business is good/great value. As I mentioned, it will all ultimately come down to the new management executing on production and delivery, etc, but on the raw numbers we have so far, just on the 2 signed contracts (though I have to believe that new business will inevitably continue to come in as the modular housing industry is kind of booming), the Newco, on very conservative margin assumptions, can be said to be trading on a low single-digit PE. Not a bad start

For my sins, I have earned the equivalent of a PhD in the trading activity in BATM, Canary, and I can absolutely support your analysis. Since we cleared that seller of around 5.5m between 21 and 21.75p that I wrote about last week, the trade in the Company has been healthier generally and, as I wrote at the time, while the seller is definitely done, it was uncertain whether the buyer was. It's very possible he/she goes on at these higher levels, but just as likely that some buyers that have been stuck on the sidelines (partly because they knew there was a persistent seller that needed to be cleared) are slowly trickling back in at these modestly higher levels. After all, what difference does it really make if you pay 21p or 25p when nearly the entire market cap is already covered by cash and real estate, while its main businesses are all projected to grow double-digits in 2023? And at a time when you know the new management is gearing up to unveil a strategic plan for the Company soon that will inevitably involve a disposal-acquisition program that will leverage arguably BATM's biggest strategic advantage in this capital-starved, higher interest rate environment: its pristine balance sheet.

Thanks steve. So as I said, the main issue is whether we re-quote at the new or old price, which hopefully will be resolved in a pre-market Tuesday RNS

I'm not sure it's in Friday's release explicitly, but we suspended at 1.09p and are re-quoting at 55p, so its a standard assumption that the consolidation is 55/1.09, or right around 50:1, as unvkrw also mentions in his post. I also believe there was reference to the 50:1 consolidation in the half-year report last September, but I've not checked officially. Finally, I have spoken to someone who invested in this raise and that ratio is also laid out in the marketing materials. Having thought about it further, what I am LESS certain of however, is whether we will open around the new price of 55p or resume trading around the suspended price of 1.09p since I believe the consolidation technically may need shareholder approval, which of course can't be done officially until the EGM. I think we have a reasonable hope that we will get a further RNS before the open on Tuesday that clears up this and any other niggly issues shareholders may have before trading resumes.

No mate, the 50:1 consolidation means you have 1/50th as many shares vs the share price which is now 50x what it was. So no free lunch. I thought that was obvious.

Trading will resume at the de-facto new price of 55p I believe, but more importantly - again - why such limp responses? 'People should be happy the company hasn't gone bust.....?' Well yeah, sure that's true - and I did call out the not insubstantial group here who snarked this potential deal was a spoof and we were dead - but damn, is that all you're taking away from this announcement? No matter how we trade from Tuesday and in the weeks to follow (and sure, we may well trade down for a while.e as small shareholders, frustrated by the long suspension, vote with their feet), but there is real potential for significant upside here now. And that, I believe, should be cause for a much higher level of enthusiasm than just relief that we didn't die.

We go from owning 100% of a small company with few prospects and no liquidity, to around 10% - that is not that insignificant - of a much larger company with E114m of business (minimum) of business to execute on over the next 3 years. This always happens when you reverse in a much larger business as is the case here (hence the term "Reverse Takeover'). Its not 'dilutive' in the conventional, pejorative sense that you guys are using the term if we and the market determine that in fact, in the process of this 50:1 consolidation, legacy Fox shareholders are buying that business on the cheap, as may well be the case here. If they execute on the existing order - and especially if they go on to sign new ones in the midst of what seems almost unlimited demand around Europe in this space at the moment - 30m can begin to look a very cheap price tag very quickly indeed. So again: we're (potentially) going from a litigation lottery ticket (which hasn't disappeared by the way) with a marble quarrying business attached trading at 1p that no one cared about in the most hostile small cap market environment in living memory, to owning a decent % of a decent-sized, vertically integrated niche construction business which is going to be an immediate customer as it executes on a couple of pretty chunky contracts to execute on immediately in a sector that doesn't seem to know there's a recession on. I'm not saying this is a slam dunk or even that we've paid the right price, but damn, you have to admit there's some pretty exciting (potential) upside here for us all of a sudden.