Ann: Albemarle indicative proposal - due diligence to commence, page-328

I see that the trading today was quite strong with 53m shares traded. I also note that the closing auction left 13m shares in the buy queue at $3.00 with 8m to sell at $3.01. All this suggests to me that the ASX100 entry on Monday has attracted increases in portfolio weight from bigger players. It augers well for next week's trading too. More grist for the mill as far as the underlying strategy of our BoD. I previously speculated that it might have been ALB that put a deadline on their "best and final" offer the day that the announcement was made. But perhaps our advisers said that the likely upward momentum on our shareprice post the ASX100 entry was going to support a higher price and help the argument against the "fair and reasonable" test by the independent expert, so the timing to move forward with agreeing to due diligence and the BoD's qualified acceptance of the overture from ALB was at our discretion?

I also note that PLS share price rmains under pressure at the moment. This seems likely to reflect portfolio adjustment by funds switching to a new entrant in ASX100 that may provide better short to medium term returns in this industry. LTR has been undervalued relative to PLS with the large differential probably not being justified merely by execution risk. All in my opinion only...

regards
DF