Hi ivan965,In response to your question this was why I thought...

Hi ivan965,
In response to your question this was why I thought there would be downward pressure....

The BOL retail entitlement offer was first tradable in the afternoon of 24/12. Anyone who applied for extras was able to get 19x their entitlement (20x in total). This is a lot of shares for a retail shareholder (i.e.: if you had 10,000 shares on the entitlement date you could get 200,000 shares at 30c). Over the past 6 months a lot of people have been getting into companies that are likely to need capital then buying as many discounted shares as they can and selling them off immediately at a profit. It was fairly obvious that BOL would have a capital raising and many people would have brought in. ...Also many professionals in the institutions were on leave last week, while retail shareholders were around and had a lot of new shares to offload.

But......it looks like something else is going on?? There was a significant unexplained jump in price on 23/12 to 46c. Then as expected, on 24/12 afternoon, when entitlement shares were allotted, the price started to fall. During the week of 30/12 the price only went as far as 39.5c and is now on the way up again. This is abnormally resilient for such a dilutive raising and an excellent sign for BOL.

Shareholders who were entitled to the offer will now get a chance to buy up to another $15,000 @ 30c in the January SPP. With the current price direction it will be over-subscribed and scaled back. There will be another sell off when the SPP shares are allotted, but given the current direction this may only be minor?

On the takeover, I agree and the early ambit claims are normally conditional and general. I think they have tried before with a merger proposal during the BOL strategic review. It will be interesting to see if they pursue it further.

I think 2010 will be the "good news" year for the small caps that have survived the crisis in reasonable shape. The blue chips have had their recovery...now it is the small/micro caps turn. BOL had $92M in the tender pipeline at 13/11 and normally wins at least 40%. Australia has $180 billion in planned major projects over the next 3 years that all need cranes. BOL's profitability changes dramatically with small changes in crane utilization ($13M for every 5% increase in utilization!)
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I am not an advisor. My opinions are for discussion purposes only.