Ann: Trading Update, page-26

"My 2 cents: I used to hold this but I don't own any now, and I don't see I will ever own it again. I find the share price to be very volatile. Yesterday, it was down 5% early in the morning, then gradually went back up and closed at +6%, seems to be quite common on big rise and then big drop on weekly basis. I feel this is more like a day trader’s stock. It has also been range-bound between $7.50 and $8.80 over the past 6 months until yesterday. Now it's back down to ~$8.50. The business might be growing and heading in the right direction, but you really gotta be very patient."

I always find sentiment along the line of "it's a volatile share" to be a bit strange, because as a shareholder, one owns a share of a company. As such, in the case of DTL, this is what one effectively owns:



Self-evidently, that picture is quite the opposite of "volatile"; in fact, it is so predictable that you can set your watch by it.

So who cares what the share price does from one day to the next, or one week or even month to the next (one six-month period to the next, for that matter)?

Viewed another way, if you owned a company privately, meaning it was not a publicly-listed company, what attention would you pay to a crowd of people whom you don't know, if they gathered in the street outside your business between 10:00am and 4:00pm on weekdays, exchanging their opinions on what your company is worth?

Of course, it might be that there are indeed some fundamental business issues that need monitoring, such as the extent that a major customer embarks on a short-term austerity drive, which might cause a pause in a muting of growth rate.

But given the nature of things, and based on much precedence, that is likely to only be a temporary thing.

.