alan fanton and lngn, page-27

Jamie,

What I don't understand is, for a TA, the discussion about opportunity costs for buy-and-hold investors is irrelevant - all you need to do is measure your return from your trading activities, vs whatever else you could have earned. That is your opportunity cost - your trading return vs the 'opportunity cost'.

I am well aware the share price has been flat this past 12 months.So yes, there is an opportunity cost. Had I known the RSPT and election was going to delay Santos corporate activity, I probably would've waited to buy in, until... well, about now! But our crystal balls were in for repairs - mine, HGO's, David Knox's, Kogas'... everyones.

If we want to have a discussion about FA, lets talk about fundamental value -

Santos paid $1.00+ for 218PJ of 2P + contingent resource, and ESG now trades at $0.82 cents for 988PJ of 2P + CR. Four times as much 2P reserves, at a lower price.

But if you want to talk about TA, please put up a chart and discuss. The ESG threads are very short of technical analysis. Most ESG holders, I suspect, are in ESG on the basis of value.

However, I find the idea of discussing charts on a stock whose price is so controlled a bit unreliable. The essence of charting is, 'can we interpret what is going to happen NEXT, on the basis of what has happened before'.

ESG stock trades about 2/1000th of its shares on issue daily. The other 998/1000 shares do not trade. Their value remains relatively fixed. It is for this reason that ESG will be hard to get control of in a takeover situation - the people who own it know why they own it, and are prepared to sit and keep their shares.

In fact, the more tightly held and thinly-traded a company is, the less reliable the technical data - because it is based on such a small sample of sentiment. It also makes it easier to manipulate using bot trading, because any large holder can use their muscle on such thin volumes. As we have seen!

ESG recently raised $100m at a tiny discount from institutions. So, if I was to follow any indicators of sentiment external to my own research, I would follow the $100 million (or Santos' $500 million), not the million dollars traded daily, some of which is shorting, and buying back of shorts.

Yaq