You know, for some reason or another this particular debacle makes me sick in the stomach. I don't know if its the the handling of the auction in the first place, or the handling of the supposed TH request.
The stock market is full of private retailers who fight tooth and nail to make a dollar amidst the hedge funds, sophisticated investors, the sly board members and so forth. But if there is one thing that generally should be on a level playing field, its honest full public disclosure. But in this case, a tight ship this auction was not, and it is clear that the MUS board did not provide their duty of care. If the board and management are going to go on a "junket" in Mauritius and try to sell a few rubies, at least give someone within the company in Australia the responsibility to keep an eye on the execution of the bloody trading halt request. Blindly sticking your head in the sand is just not good enough in my opinion.
And then, the ASX, asleep at the wheel once again! They have 2000 odd stocks in their system. It's not like they're trying to track the individual movements of millions of people in a metropolis. They have the equivalent job of tracking the individual movements of the civilians of a busted up old country town. And they're a a $10 billion company!! How in this day and age they cannot set up an algorithm to put a registry halt on stocks set to plummet on high volume based on pre-auction bidding without a price sensitive announcement to support the sell-off is beyond me. Its two-thousand-and-bloody-seventeen!! We're trying to send people to Mars within the next decade, but our stock exchange cannot put a simple code in the system to at least put the brakes on for 30-odd minutes whilst getting in touch with a company representative.
This is a debacle and I feel genuinely sorry for holders. Normally I'd say that you have got to cop the consequences of the market if you're tempted to have a dabble, but this whole situation is one step too far.
Anyway, as for the stock, when a project fails, I generally assign zero value to it and see where the stock was trading prior to getting that particular project up and running. Fortunately there's something in the graphite story. Wouldn't be selling for less than 4cents if I was a holder. Not all is lost. But a 50% sell-off tomorrow is to be expected.
MUS Price at posting:
10.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
