The next focusIR Investor Webinar takes places on 14th May with guest speakers from Blue Whale Growth Fund, Taseko Mines, Kavango Resources and CQS Natural Resources fund. Please register here.
Absolutely bonkers...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-kxl6Q8O2A
Did your friend say the area of the planet they are using as their landing site and which Earth timezone they were referencing? 7AM is quite an early start (especially for a Monday morning) and I don't want to get out of bed too early...
Investor6, it isn't over until the fat lady sings! This week one of my zombie shares came back to life and I think it got a bit of a helping hand because of COVID-19! It was >99% down and selling the shares wouldn't even have bought lunch out with the wife and kids so I mentally wrote off the £3K I was down and moved on. The average price I paid for MTFB was around 13p and they were down at around 0.13p. Another LTH thought why not chuck some more money down the hole and I thought what have I got to lose and "invested" another £80 as a pure gamble that a miracle would happen and another pharma would buy us out - this brought my average down to 0.4p. Things didn't look good and they continued to drop to 0.04p. There were a few rumours and a "pump and dump" over Easter where the price went to around 0.7p for a day before MTFB sent out an RNS saying they didn't have a buyer for Iclaprim and it quickly fell back to 0.2p. Myself and several other holders saw patterns in the buying as if there was somebody accumulating in the background. Yesterday MTFB climbed over 600% and finished at 1.49p, but is currently sitting at about 0.9p. If it can hit the heady heights of 4p I break even on MTFB. The chances are not bad for a share that was really screwed!
JTMacs, Aston Martin is so last century. I would be tempted to put a reservation on a Tesla Cybertruck instead! We're still waiting for Tesla to land in South Africa - they were supposed to open their Cape Town showroom in Q3 2019 but it hasn't happened yet.
Amers, sw10000 is right regarding EUA. A random poster (1st post) called TOBD wrote that he was a EUA holder and he had a "friend with inside information" had told him that he didn't need to worry and an RNS would drop on Wednesday 6th of May and it was good news. He made a 2nd post with a link to 3 little birds by Bob Marley. The post was removed and TOBD was kicked off LSE.
There have been rumours that SP Angel could be the new EUA NOMAD. All the posts are like Chinese/Russian whispers. There was even a thread trying to guess what TOBD stood for - I came out with Turns Out Board Delivered The Obviously Big Deal. Let's hope this guy is right about tomorrow...
Mr Nation, they will have even less chance of buying in the US than they will here, as MTFB was delisted over there a couple of months ago to reduce cash burn and the market cap was too low to continue to be listed there! :-)
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?
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.
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!