Interesting point Rabbit. What you are saying I think is that...

Interesting point Rabbit. What you are saying I think is that traders shorted AYS at say 80c and now wish to buy AYS back to close their short position.

They would need to pay the Lender of the AYS stock 61c (26c Div, 24c Capital Return, and 11c Franking), so they would need to close their shorts at below 19c to make a profit.Unlikely.

Unless they borrowed AYS stock from an Offshore Shareholder in which case they would only need to pay 50c for the Apr 27^th Major Distribution Payment as Offshore Shareholders can’t use Franking Credits).Then they would need to close their shorts at below 30c to make a profit.But then why was there so much volume above 30c. Traders who short (in volume) are normally pretty smart and knowing that the price would fall closer to 20c (like it has today), surely they would have waited for the price to fall below 30c.And how many Offshore Shareholders are there in AYS that also lend out their stock to Hedge Funds.

On balance, I don’t believe it was traders who had shorted AYS. I still believe it was uninformed retail investors.At $3.5m, the volume was quite big yesterday, but not big enough to preclude the fact that it could have been Retail Investors.

The only other possibility, is that some of the buyers yesterday know more than we (who are using public info). And maybe they expect a mop up bid from WAM. But I would be surprised if Geoff Wilson is playing these sorts of games and ASIC may intervene given that WAM have said “the WAM Offer will not be extended”.

If I had a shorting facility set up, I would have shorted a bit after I had sold all my AYS at 33c, and could have easily bought back today at 22c. A quick and easy profit.Almost too easy.