Hi @BullftwWith the greatest respect, I have a contrary view on...

Hi @Bullftw

With the greatest respect, I have a contrary view on this. I don't think our price action can really be explained by "instos pushing it down". If you do the rounds on HotCopper retail investor favourites, you see this excuse on many, many threads (it's the HC equivalent of comfort food). I don't dispute there's some form of market manipulation - how else can we explain tiny single-dollar-digit trades going through on a constant basis - however the ASX is a well-known playground of bots and algorithm trading platforms so it's partly just the landscape we're in.

IOU's register is heavily retail-investor dominated, like many micro- and small-caps. That goes a long way to explaining why SP swings are so volatile when fear, uncertainty, disappointment, missed expectations, etc, all hit (which is also why I think the current expectation/price floor we're sitting on is a good thing leading into the next quarterly) This can be seen in heaps of other retail-heavy registers as well. There's no doubt Credit Suisse pumped the SP in February (the ASX buy/sell disclosures are there to see) but beyond that I don't see telltale signs of big institutions accumulating. The broker data shows days when they're net buyers, and days when they're net sellers. If you look closely at the numbers, they tend to balance themselves out. One week UBS look like they're building up a holding, in a week or two later they're the biggest sellers. Institutions/fundies have access to far more sophisticated platforms than retailers do, that data gives them a head start to trade swings and make margin. So this happens to a limited degree. But are they taking big positions? At this point, I doubt it. Many of them have charters/guidelines that would not allow them to put serious money (which belongs to their clients, remember) into a speculative microcap in the tech sector. The market cap would have to be a lot higher to allow that.

The market cap is the other clue. At open today, we're a $126.8M market cap. That means it 'only' requires a holding of $6.34m to hit the magical 5% mark and trigger a "Becoming a substantial holder" notice. Yet in all this time, we haven't seen a single one of these. If the insto's really were accumulating on a large scale, to my mind this most certainly would have happened, at least once.

So that's my contrarian view, for what it's worth. IOU is currently a stock for the retail investors, and that's totally fine. There's obviously some insto money dabbling, but for now it will be retail money driving this onwards and upwards, which is perfectly normal. Only when runs are seriously on the board, and there's more visibility about the company and how it's tracking in the sector, would we see significant insto funds entering. Just my two cents as usual!

Cheers
m