merry christmas, page-5

Probably a genuine mistake, Gabbie, but not patently absurd. That's what you do with TA, draw trendlines over the highs and lows of the specific indicator that is being measured to illustrate the trend. A daily, weekly or monthly time period for any indicator simply smooths out the data 'noise' making longer term trends more visible.

In this respect, monthly volume has declined over an extended period of time. Go back two and half years, July 09, when the IA was announced with Sanofi, then leading up to Nasdaq early 2010. We had four straight months from July of 29, 32, 32 and 20 million shares traded. Since then, with only spikes in Feb and April 2010 post-listing, those volumes have come close, but not been repeated.

In the Oct-Dec quarter 2009, 64 million shares traded. In the corresponding quarter 2010, 35.9 million shares traded. This year, Oct-Dec, with a few days to go, only 24.49 million have traded. That's a clear drop in volume.

Over the 30 month period since the IA was announced some 435 million shares have traded at a monthly average of 14.5 million. The only month this has been exceeded in the past year was March, although August and September came close. Certainly the past three months are well below average.

Who knows? Maybe in the next few months we will see volumes increase on news or a reversal of sentiment which will pull overall monthly volumes closer to average.

What the reaons are, one can only speculate.

Statistics, statistics and damned lies, who knows? But at the moment we are below par.

Happy New Year. Hopefully healthy and wealthy too.