Disclaimer: Don't construe the following as investment advice, it's not meant to be. If it inspires you to invest even a little time in additional education to grow as an investor then hopefully one day you can pay it forward.
First off, I can understand your confusion, concerns about the SP relative to its most recent levels (and your cost basis), and questions about causality. To some it even may appear that prior events or indicators don't work anymore as they once did, especially announcements' ability to lift the share price, etc. I sympathize with any anxiety this may cause you and hope you recognize others will be in a similar situation, even if this doesn't make it less palpable for you. That offers some context for what is happening with the SP and why, and (depending on one's investment approach) may offer opportunities.
Based on your questions and the range of aspects they cover, I hypothesize that you haven't gotten decades of investment experience under the belt (yet). And that's alright, it means you have plenty of time to get really good at it and learn how to mitigate mistakes, especially behavioral ones, that may creep in. And typically the best way is learning by doing. You already got a headstart, I suggest you invest a bit more time in investor education on a continuous basis.
I am not being facetious, it is just that the range of questions indicates you are still developing a framework required to appropriately assess information to form and validate an investment thesis independently. That's the objective I'd recommend you strive to accomplish in the near term as it will pay dividends beyond expectations. You will otherwise continuously find yourself in situations similar to a person who while experiencing love for the first time in their life stumbles excited into a swingers club asking its patrons for advice on love and relationships. You might get some decent advice but are unlikely able to discern what is 'excellent but not appropriate' vs. 'good and appropriate' and as you're still building the framework to drown out the crap noise. Without it, you are also unable to determine the perspective and approach used by HC posters that invariably guide their answers and thus lack the ability to determine if they are suitable with regards to your investment philosophy and respective investment approach.
There's plenty of good material out there (including university lectures) to quickly get a basic handle on things and I'd recommend taking a crack at the following topics:
- capital markets and structure overview
- basic principles of economics
- fundamentals of accounting
- fundamentals of financial and security analysis
- a survey of investment approaches
- case studies of fundamental analysis
- a survey of technical analysis
- comparative analysis of fundamental vs technical analysis
- a survey of behavioral finance and investment psychology
- a survey on critical thinking and decision making
While this may seem like a lot, it is possible to develop and complete a course providing an adequate baseline based on which to assess and answer the questions you raised in a relatively short period of time. I also strongly recommend that you spend time reading and researching case studies on operational and management topics to develop an understanding of what it actually takes to be an operator. Without it you'll remain susceptible to fall into the same traps as many armchair experts with regards to unrealistic expectations extending to everything from market share capture/growth rate potential, the time required to build a petrochemical facility in Syria, or time and resourced needed to turn around a failing Australian consumer products company. You'll also remain vulnerable to behavioral mistakes and being unduly manipulated by others.
It pays to remember that the SP is not the company and the company is not the SP as someone once eloquently stated. Spent 5 minutes on Youtube listening to equity investors who've been at it for 60 plus years to get their perspective on how SP and value may or may not be linked, it's a lesson in human psychology more than anything. Learn how to do your own research and then come back to this forum to test your thesis or for some excitement.
With regards to your specific questions, most investors forget, especially when FOMO or FEAR dominate, that share prices over/undershoot companies' intrinsic values 99% of the time. This providing investment opportunities for everyone via price discovery regardless of which investment approach we individually choose to pray to. IMHO the same happened here, the SP got ahead of itself vs. reasonable expectations and then went in the opposite direction as more sellers came to that conclusion. At some point, the SP (IMO) will turn direction and the cycle starts again.
Most investors IMO have gotten too conditioned to expect every DW8 announcement to be accompanied by a SP rise, regardless of fundamentals, valuation, etc. "Buy the rumour, sell the news" has been again demostrated to work as human nature doesn't change. Facebook didn't go from 100 to 2.8 billion active monthly users in the span of 2 months following its launch. Likewise expecting that the announcement of the Market launch would miraculously result in an immediate doubling of cases sold at the time of the launch announcement was unrealistic IMO....but it could have possibly lifted the SP further. I simply choose to focus on what I deem probable as opposed to what is possible -- and as the SP rise from Feb-April has shown, a lot is possible when a number of factors align. If anything, this is a classic example of Amara's Law or Gates' Law if applied to the specifics of the firm and peoples' expectations. So the better you learn to relate probability to possibility at any point in time the better your return potential.
IMO nothing aside from the share price and Market now being operational has fundamentally changed vs. a month ago, so there's no impact on my investment thesis. I remain long the stock and haven't sold shares. Naturally as part of my process I am also asking a) will the SP go back to 18c or above, b) when and c) will the B2B rollout see us surpass 21c again (borrowing your Qs). My expectation is:
a) No change in my thesis means I expect the SP to surpass the 18c share price level again in the future;
b) I won't speculate on ST timeframes but based on my work/thesis I expect we will witness a multiple of that SP before the end of my (currently remaining 4 year) investment time frame;
c) I believe the B2B will play a critical role in that but I am not expecting that the SP will bounce miraculously on the announcement that the Market is operating nationwide when it is announced. I try to remain conservative in my assessments and typically expect that SP growth should be supported by concurrent expansion in the underlying fundamentals, whilst realizing that Mr. Market at any point in time may disagree with my approach by over/undershooting where I believe the FV is.
My multi-year time frame may differ from yours and it certainly differs from many of the more ST-focused posters who in their own right are correct with some but certainly not all of their assessments (IMO) posted in the past month or two. My time frame and ability to take on volatility goes a long way if you are hunting elephants, pardon the pun, but may not be suitable for faster twitching approaches. It also has an impact on how one defines capital preservation, as that is not investment approach agnostic regardless of what some may claim. So matching your investment approach to your objective (and psychological aptitude) is critical, hence my recommendations to sort all of that out so you more confidently make investment decisions.
Anyway, I wish you good luck making the right decision that works for you and leave you with this truism: "Investing is like surfing, there'll always be another wave."
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