Member Info for chasf

MMs don't really control the price for a share on SETS, that's done by the A trades and the MMs work the O trades between the Bid and Ask top of each stack in L2. They have entries in the book but typically well out of the way of the action unless they want something. Certainly someone is controlling it well though, and has been for months. I've noticed there's often a run down and up between 1400 and 1500, and sometimes it drifts down round noon. If you put a Bid in for open, somewhere down the book but above any entry with a small quantity (250 to 3000) there's a good chance it will be filled by mid-afternoon. Well, it worked for me!

If you think this is "constantly" you haven't been on AIM very long.

Anyway, as expected, the action today triggered a Bull SELL. Such fun! It has occurred to me that a trading strategy based on baiting the Bull might work.

(A trader using a bot: I've poked it a few times, placing orders near theirs, and it moves its position instantly.)

I rather hope that Harry catches them short on the down phase by suddenly announcing finance completion well before March. As DShox suggests it could be IIs but it's been running for so many months I'm inclined to think it's just a trader.

Someone's been running a trading algorithm on this one for ages, taking advantage of some features of SETS. They pull away when there's any volume. They seem to use tiny orders as markers in the stacks, which I hadn't seen before but perhaps it's a common technique now. Accidentally or by design they've ended up trolling British Bulls on KEFI, because the Bull's BUY is triggered by one threshold and buying volume does increase, so trader[s] pull away, presumably sell at 2.15 yesterday, 2.11 today, then push it down by squeezing the spread for O orders so they can buy up for another round, triggering a Bull SELL/SHORT that only helps them. They normally keep the spread so tight in L2 that with no volume in the book there's little incentive for others to try to trade their swings.

· 17,375,000 ordinary shares as a further direct cash subscription of £278,000 with the Company, also at the Placing Price (the "Direct Subscription Shares"), which includes a subscription by major shareholder RAB Capital PLC to ensure they remain over 10% of the enlarged share capital;

· 28,251,750 ordinary shares which the Company has agreed to issue to project contractors and other third parties in settlement of outstanding invoices and debt of £452,028 (the "Settlement Shares"); and

· 30,733,097 ordinary shares representing an aggregate value of £491,729 which are intended to be granted to certain directors and management of the Company in lieu of accrued cash fees and salaries (the "Remuneration Shares").

Of those, I don't see RAB Capital disposing of theirs, since the intention is to avoid dilution, the 28m to pay bills might have been forward sold already (maybe during the period the price was locked at 1.6p), and I suspect directors and management will keep most or all of theirs, so it's mainly the 28m that might or might not be gone already. It's possible that some contractors might decide to take the risk and keep them in hopes of a bigger return. Don't know.

It's all in the RNS about the £3m placing.

Authorise the issue of the conditional shares and warrants to clear the debt. It wouldn't surprise me if that unlocks the finance.

The Ask Of Death is currently 1000 at 1.75, so I assume a bot will do something if that goes.

And for the little it's worth, British Bulls is getting antsy.

Looking back at the RNS, I suppose only the contractor shares are probably to be sold (might have been them passing by already, since someone was determined centred on 1.6), and that all the senior directors, most of the others and many of the employees might keep theirs. Most of the placing shares will have been flipped by the bucket some time before the placing was announced and well before Admission.

A bot was moving two blocks of shares back and forth between 1.72/3 and 1.74/5 every second or less in the last minute before closing auction. Curious.

I checked the London Stock Exchange data because I wasn't sure, and I'm still not sure. Normally the date on a deferred buy or sell corresponds to the start of the transaction they aren't revealing until later, so on balance given the pricing today, and the shift up, I'd suppose it was a buy.

That 2.4m was a "deferral for Large in Scale" compared to normal market size.

"my bog standard Halifax account was offering a spread of 1.60 to 3.50 at 11.40am"

I'm afraid that sounds like the position in L2 book at 0745 or so, before it started to fill up with orders between 0750 and 0800 (when it instantly changed anyway), so it's more likely incredibly stale data on the Halifax system.

Someone's worked hard to get the price to where it is and keep it there within not so much a spread as a sliver!

I prefer shares on SETS where I can deal myself directly through the book, but it has got the disadvantage that when volume is low, it's easy for a small group to push the price (the MMs usually stay well out of it), and you'll find them on SETS-traded shares because of that. The tiny values in the book surprised me though: IG won't let me do DMA trades that aren't a decent chunk of market size and I thought that was generally true of retail L2 interfaces. They appear to act as markers or tokens perhaps to drive a trading machine. Eg, a marker order trades, check its value, flip to the other side of the book and enter what the value suggests. (You can ordinarily have small values of someone sells only partially into an order, but these are too stylised to be incidental.)

On QPP that was, Tiger's bot routinely wiped out even another small but professional hedge fund, which later had to realise a big loss on their separate short, done conventionally.

Those strangely small entries in L2 are interesting, don't you think? Sometimes they jump when you get near them! What could that mean? Of course, they can happen naturally by someone trading into them by a smaller amount (and they aren't marked to retire), but here, not so much.

I'd be careful with a private short, here. (Proper short, or a CFD or spread bet?) Someone with skill and Able Bot is working the book fairly efficiently, and their target and aim might not be yours.