Member Info for Numbers

ATISHA, I've only bought 2 AIM stocks so don't know all the MM tricks, although with EUA the other AIM I bought I saw some of the MM tricks. One time the EUA share one mid morning plummeted to about 40% of the opening price. It only stayed that price for less than 1 minute, but it seemed to be that the MMs had decided to take out lots of stop losses. After under 1 minute it was back up at around 90% of the starting price. There were loads of sells and very few buys, which made me think that the MMs managed to mug lots of PIs that were unlucky enough to set a stop loss. It was at this point I learned it wasn't a good idea to set stop losses on AIM shares! With EUA I set some optimistic limit sells on 30-40% of my shares at 10-20% above the finishing price of the previous day. If the sell was triggered (usually in the afternoon) I could usually buy in the next morning at 10-15% lower. This worked with EUA as the MMs usually did their tree shakes in the morning and the price typically climbed back in the afternoon.

BOJO2020, the 1.8p spike happened between 16:18 and 16:20 then there was a lot of frantic trades (30+ trades at 16:20). After that there was only 1 solitary auto trade at 16:25, which suggests MTFB went into auction at 16:21 and no PIs had a chance to buy shares after 16:21.

Looking at a snapshot of the 1.8p spike:

04-May-20 16:20:04 1.28 680,000 Sell* 8,704 UT
04-May-20 16:19:34 1.7998 55,009 Sell* 990.05 O
04-May-20 16:18:13 1.7998 55,231 Sell* 994.05 O
04-May-20 16:17:46 1.2002 53,592 Buy* 643.21 O

So a small buy went through at 1.2p. This next 2 transactions are rather weird, as they are fairly small sells but at 1.8p, which is 50% higher than what the price MTFB had been trading at. Straight after there was an uncrossing trade sell at 1.28p to reset the price back down again. A few subsequent sells went though at 1.3p.

So what caused the spike up to 1.8p and why were these sells rather than buys?

My guess is the MMs saw that there were a couple of limit sells set at around 1.8p and they wanted to buy these up so they raised the bid to 1.8p for a couple of minutes to trigger these sells. Did anybody see what the ask was during this time? I'm guessing it must have been somewhere between 1.9p and 2p and nobody bought during this period. It hardly seems worth it to secure just over 100,000 shares but that is what appears to have happened IMO.

Has anybody else seen this sort of thing happen before and know the reason for it?

Take Off Bobrad Desperado

The Obviously Big Deal
Turns Out Board Delivered

They just have a simple "dumb" text reader that scans posts for the presence of certain banned words. The program hasn't been programmed to look into the context of the word, as some names and places contain these banned words. I don't know if they also filter them with letters o and s replaced with numbers eg c0ck or peni5.

DUFC23 there was no mention of 07:00 RNS today on this BB. RNS 6th May (100%) was what they wrote here...

TOBD wrote a post saying they had information that next RNS was Wed 6th of May (100% guaranteed) and would be positive news...

Ian, is it too late for to put me down for 6th of May on the RNS game? :-))

Turns out board delivered

Seadogsteve, SA went into hard lockdown fairly early in the COVID-19 cycle so we are doing fairly well. Hard lockdown means only leaving your property for food or essential items, medical supplies or to see a doctor. No exercising, like jogging, cycling or even dog walking is allowed and they decided booze and fags weren't essential items! We only had a 2 day window to prepare for the hard lockdown and the start of it meant that some people were paid the day before lockdown or in day 1 or 2 of lockdown. The government needed to keep the numbers low as there are people living in tin shacks in informal settlements here that live in close proximity to each other and a high proportion of people in SA have HIV or TB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5q7xzC7l3w

The latest COVID-19 statistics are 5350 people infected, 2073 recoveries and 103 dead. The Western Cape (where Cape Town is) is the worst affected province in SA with 1935 cases, 624 recoveries and 38 deaths. 84 are in hospital with 26 in ICU.
https://www.covid19sa.org/western-cape

COVID-19 is already in the biggest township (400,000 people) in the Western Cape - Khayelitsha has 232 positive cases and their rate is rising at around 10% per day, so things are going to get much worse in a month when there is a combination of lockdown restrictions easing and temperatures are going down as we approach Winter.

Western Cape is bad due to more tourists importing the virus - one of the stand-out symptoms of COVID-19 seems to have been an overwhelming desire to travel! One Dutch guy visited over 30 wine farms in the Cape Winelands on a 10 day tour before testing positive!

Seadogsteve, I was born in Glasgow and lived there until I came out of College but couldn't find a decent job. It was the old story of I had my bit of paper but employers didn't want to give me a job due to insufficient experience, despite working at the National Engineering Laboratories in East Kilbride between my 2nd and 3rd year. In 1991 I found a job near London and thought I'd stay there for 3 to 5 years and move back to Glasgow but that didn't happen and my parents followed me down South as I found a job that my dad too. The last time I was in Glasgow was in 2000 when my girlfriend and I attended a wedding there.

I married a South African woman and we moved to here because she is an only child and wanted to look after her parents. Cape Town has much better weather than Glasgow - you know it's Summer in Glasgow because the rain is warmer! The trouble is some of the people here struggle to understand my accent so I've had to learn to talk slowly and clearly. The funniest example was when I went into a phone accessory shop that was run by a Pakistani guy. I was asking him for a phone cover for a Huawei phone and he just looked at me blankly and said "Sorry I don't speak Afrikaans". My wife and the other customer in the shop both said that I was in fact speaking English but the accent was so different to what he was used to that he thought I was speaking another language!

I'm originally from the South side of Glasgow, but moved further down South. Much further South than London - now live near Cape Town.

aandi, they should have used MACspoof to avoid any confusion. MAC is an acronym for media access control. All IP connected devices have a unique identifier called a MAC address. This person has been banned from LSE and has found a way around the ban by using a VPN to hide their IP address and MAC spoofing to hide the type of machine that they are logging on with.

Whilst going on about proper education, shouldn't proper nouns begin with a capital letter aandi? 6 of the best for you my lad!

Hi Floppyjaloppy, no the SA miners aren't back at work. SA has had one of the hardest lockdowns to delay the spread of COVID-19. People are only allowed to leave their property to buy food and essential goods (booze and fags aren't classed as essential), collect medication or visit a doctor. No jogging, cycling or dog walking is allowed. The initial 3 week lockdown that was due to end on 16/4/20 was extended for an extra 2 weeks until 30/4/20. SA even have a curfew here between 20:00 and 05:00 and this doesn't end on 1/5/20. Full lockdown is level 5 and that is what we are in now and it is likely to be reduced to level 4 in May (mines and some other businesses can open at 50% capacity). https://businesstech.co.za/news/lifestyle/393033/south-africa-is-getting-a-new-lockdown-curfew-heres-how-it-works/

The miners can go back to work starting on 1/5/20, although they must bring their workers back gradually and production will be below 50% of normal in May.
https://www.enca.com/news/mines-brace-for-potential-covid-19-infections
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/mining/2020-04-23-state-orders-mining-companies-ramping-up-to-tighten-covid-19-measures/

It is going to be tricky to have social distancing in underground mines, so the miners are going to be carefully monitored and quarantined if necessary.

24-Apr-20 15:40:06 0.20518 239,791 Buy* 492.00 O
24-Apr-20 15:37:31 0.20518 239,791 Buy* 492.00 O
24-Apr-20 15:23:05 0.22 223,638 Buy* 492.00 O
24-Apr-20 15:16:59 0.22 223,638 Buy* 492.00 O
24-Apr-20 11:20:56 0.22833 215,479 Buy* 492.00 O

23-Apr-20 16:22:53 0.2295 650,000 Buy* 1,492 A

23-Apr-20 16:09:22 0.22849 215,328 Buy* 492.00 O
23-Apr-20 16:04:41 0.22849 215,328 Buy* 492.00 O
23-Apr-20 12:43:32 0.2192 1,000,000 Buy* 2,192 O

Looking at the above trades, these could be all be buys from the same person. See how the bought value is £xx92 (where the x is either 4, 14 or 21)?

When buying shares most people select the number of shares they want and the final price ends up being a random cost like £581.51, especially with low value shares. It looks like this purchaser wants to buy whatever amount of shares they can get for a fixed price, eg £492. Would several random people decide to buy MTFB shares on the same day and decide they wanted to buy them for a fixed price of £xx92 ?

If these were all bought by the same person that is 3,222,993 shares they have quietly bought over the course of 1.5 days. This is as far back as the recent trades page shows so I don't know if they have been doing it regularly since the 14th of April.

Morten28: I'm not sure who could be buying but somebody is quietly accumulating. Look at the buys on Friday and you'll see somebody is buying shares in £492 chunks throughout the day. There have been the same pattern of buys where it looks like the same person is buying small quantities of shares several times rather than drawing attention to themselves and buying over 1m shares at a time (maybe they get an NT asking for larger quantities or they want to buy in without driving the price up).

It looks like RNSman was booted from LSE as his account has been wiped.

Our friend lamtree seems to have escaped with a yellow card rather than a red one, as their name is still searchable on the database but inactive. We'll find out how long a typical LSE suspension is when/if he comes back on the EUA BB. Hopefully we will come out of suspension with positive news of a buyer or JV before lamtree returns!

TLWilliams, Lamtree was invested with EUA and made roughly a 30% profit on his investment. They sold up at 4.1p because they felt the company was dodgy and wouldn't invest again. They even claimed they were going to actively short EUA if the share price went above 4p again, but luckily for them they didn't because after it hit 4p again it kept rising until it was suspended at 7.2p. Lamtree has admitted they don't have shares, yet was making around 10 posts per day telling people his opinions on EUA. A handful of people told him multiple times (politely or otherwise) to find another hobby and either LSE must have had too many complaints or he went too far with one comment and they were suspended.

Lamtree seems to be a glass half empty person, looking for any negatives to explain why a business isn't going to work. That in itself isn't bad, as it is good to hear things from all sides and they made some valid observations/comments that I had also noticed or agreed with. It was their tendency to wind people up and their prolific posting that finally lead to LSE finally giving them a suspension.

Don't panic BluePete as his account is still on LSE but currently inactive, so he appears to have been shown a yellow card instead of a red. I don't know the duration of a typical LSE suspension, but hopefully you will have some peace for a week or two.

TLWilliams, I'm not sure if the ever popular lamtree had made several comments on the deleted thread. Lamtree finally had their account deleted on Thursday afternoon after winding up too many people on the EUA BB with his typical comments saying that everyone invested was a mug. Look out for a brand new poster on the BT BB over the coming week, as they could be the new iteration of our old friend lamtree.