looks like reh smells like fish

A long ramble for those of you who can be bothered! It's late at night and Murphy's Law suggests CNM will announce something tomorrow morning that makes me look like a complete dill. But here i go anyway:

Is anyone else slightly perplexed with the recent action in the REH share price? I always look to REH for advance warning of a CETO ann, so given that we are expecting a CETO announcement in the next week or so, I have been paying particular attention to the REH share price action recently.

It's been very interesting in a sort of - "gee, that's weird, but is it important?" - kind of way.

I dont have access to the figures, but at the beginning of the week, trades were going through at about 39p. On Tues they went up. Then on Wed the REH SP jumped a full 10%.

REH never jumps by 10% in a day - or i cant remember it doing so. I've seen it jump 5% a day, several days in a row, but not 10%. What's weirder is that it was on relatively low volume (relative to the size of the jump that is). In the past, from memory, a 5% jump has needed volume of 200,000 -300,000 shares. On Wed it jumped an unheard of 10% on just 68,000 shares. Bugger all. I was sitting at my computer thinking "who on earth would chase REH up 10% on such low volume?" Admitedly the share price was unreasonably low, but that didnt explain the rise.

Then today(Thurs), they announce a trading update - about their costs being lower for the yr ending 31 Dec 2007 (due to Carnegie paying for the commercialisation of CETO).

Two things come out of this:

1. It does make you wonder who, other than insiders, would have pushed the price up the day before? Who else would know?!; and

2. REH were due to release those financial results in two weeks time anyway (28th April). Why come out with this "update" two weeks before the results?

I couldnt make sense of it (and still cant - if there is any meaning in it at all) but it did remind me of the curious timing of a CNM announcement on 15 May 2007, three days before the big "Holy Grail" announcement on the 18th.

I remember it well because i had already bought 3c shares and was very excited that they were going up on good volume. Then came the ann on the 15th. To me it was a relatively unimportant announcement about exploration drilling in Senegal which was meant to explain the big price increase up to that point (and presumably, the doubling of the price over the next couple of days as well). Thankfully, i looked at the Senegal announcement and thought "nah, that's complete bollocks" and bought more at 4.7c, 5.3c and so on over the next two days. Didnt i feel like a smarty pants when the truth was revealed!

Anyway, i can't help but wonder if REH are employing the same strategy - a non urgent trading update two weeks from it's scheduled release, following a 10% rise??!! Maybe I'm mad but it again seems like bollocks to me. (However, to be fair, I should note that last night's volume was only 90,000 - impressive for such a thinnly traded stock, but still not enough to imply insiders are using the Trading Update as an excuse to get stuck in - that's the biggest hole in my conspiracy theory.)

So what about the CNM share price? Absolutely nothing happening there - a low volume drift down. Does this prove nothing's up yet? Probably, but back in October 2007 the SP did absolutely nothing prior to the Liberal Party's $5 mill election pledge - in fact from the 16th Oct until the trading halt on 26th October the close price went down from 19c to 17.5c (and the volume on the 24th and 25th didnt even break 425,000 shares!). I dont have the REH figues but i remember looking at REH in the lead up to that day and thinking again - "something's up".

At the moment the REH volume and the lackluster CNM price action doesnt yet convince me that decent ann is definitely imminent, but the REH activity of late is looking fishy.