Mail from Dave., page-12

@Tradewench & sydney

i think the answer to your question is already implicit in what ive written

but to spell it out - when 'risk on' tide is in, investors will bid up a stock price well in advance of those 'big fish' landing.

when 'tide' is out - they may wait until fish have landed

its somewhat subjective as to whats 'far and reasonable' valuation for a stock and what isnt - so you can argue this stuff back and forth.

But when
-ceo says SP is undervalued
- stockholders on HC clearly feel its undervalued - and many commentators seem to feel fairly hard done by on that front when it gets raised

Then its fair to say that active efforts are especially required to rectify. And quite frankly - if it had been one of the stocks I';ve run it would never have gotten to this point without significantly more small cap institutional support.

Share prices can still fall when insto get involved though - its no guarantee. But it is a high probability it would stop the rot.

Re the dual listing - BUD's position of needing to product market in the states but investment market in Australia as fairly analagous to having to investment market to two listings

the readthrough is that lots of executives find that very taxing and ultimately in case of listings that leads them to shut down the non core listing - because they find it very hard to service both

investors - esp fund managers - tend toward being somewhat high maintenance creatures. If they have a decent position in a stock they want to see mgt at least once and usually twice a year + hear from them regularly in between times - and above all they dont want rude surprises.

No CEO - with a head full of developing his company - can also keep track of the constellation of funds, brokers and analysts, who is in vs who is out of the stock + the constant personnel changes.

But its a rare IR person who has the capacity to effectively be the MD emeritus - able to hold a CEO level conversation with investors - when the CEO isnt there.

In fact some companies have moved away from calling it investor relations to corporate development - precisely because of the connotation that they need a higher more strategic skillset.

Which is why the instinctive response of most CEOs is to just see it as something too hard to attempt. Because they tend to think of PR/event management skillsets not strategic business developmenrt when they think of this space.

Wasnt until my 12th year or so that I really felt I developed that level of skill, just to give you some idea. Its only about 2-3% of the population of corporate advisors who ever achieve that level.

There's also often a considerable ego factor involved. CEOs like to run the briefings and dont like to think others can do it in fact better in some occassions.

Also doesnt get away from the fact that CEO or Chairman ultimately is required for key 'decuision making/due diligence' investor meetings.

Ultimately its a sales and marketing process - but its highly technical. You need to know where your 50ma/200ma, your ev/sales and your peers comps are at, so to speak. And then you need to be able to position company strat and product as seamlessly as the CEO.

CEO's usually can just do the latter and rely primarily on investors to work out the former. A quality corporate development and investor relations skillset covers both.

As far as it being a suggestion - yes I emailed them twice in the past 18 months. No response.

Which is perfectly fine and fair - Im purely here as an investor.

I think you will also find that - because the overall small IT sector is not thriving atm - you'll find decision makers tend to just focus on keeping expenses low and trying to do any corporate marketing themselves without extra cost.

Its a stupidity of human nature that its much easier to get budgets for corporate promotion when the stock price is surging - than when stock prices are at low ebbs.