Can only be China, page-28

Ah! the dreaded drivers and the drift.

There has been a bit of talk about VMT listing on NASDAQ which would require having two Market Makers prepared to support the stock. This is IMO why crazy things happen on NASDAQ.

I've tried putting up buy and sell orders at the same time on ASX and got a red card and suspension. Nice to have time for a bit of research while sitting on the bench.



The principal of drift is explained below. Note in the second paragraph the reference to Market Makers. Whilst we don't have market makers on the ASX we certainly have drivers trying to make a profit from duding the gullible, the Wolves of William St. Couldn't think of anything printable that rhymed with Collings St.

The drift will probably continue to happen but the lower it goes the stronger the support gets and the lower the volume available to grow ones holding gets. In the background the clock ticks and the closer we get to throwing the drift out the window with a surprise Ducati badge/Big order/merger with Super Soco/ JV with Red Dice/ record July sales etc announcement. We have an Entrepreneur sitting with $16.5m at the ready.

Looking forward to the next positive, out of the blue announcement and big jump in the SP to turn my green P&L numbers a really dark shade of Emerald.

THE DRIFT

“If you knew the stock price was going to go up, then you’d buy more now so you would profit from it,” says Tjomme Rusticus, (Assistant Professor of Accounting Information and Management at the Kellogg School of Management).

So how to explain the well-documented drift in stock prices that dog earnings reports? Researchers suspected the drift might be due to transaction costs—fees paid to market makers that stand ready to buy and sell a particular stock at a publicly quoted price on a regular and continuous basis.

An analysis of earnings reports eighteen years of quarterly trading data shows this is exactly the case, reports Rusticus and his co-authors Jeff Ng and Rodrigo Verdi (Assistant Professors of Accounting at MIT Sloan School of Management).“In the long distance past—that’s about forty years ago—the first large-scale data on company’s earnings and stock prices became available. That’s when accounting researchers could start investigating how the stock market uses earnings information,” Rusticus says.“The first thing they looked at was a rather basic question: If we have good earnings—higher than expected—is that something that investors value? If you think about it, you would say yes: If a company makes a lot of money and has higher earnings, then the stock price should go up.”An Accounting PuzzleUnsurprisingly, better earnings were followed by a boost in a company’s stock price. Conversely, lower earnings triggered a decline.

However, the analysis showed something else as well: Stock prices not only went up or down after earnings announcements, but they continued to do so for months afterward. “That was the start of a puzzle in accounting research,” Rusticus says.