hybrids back to all-time low - deliberate?

No news is bad news.

As the year end has now passed, obviously PPX and PXUPA holders would have been waiting for some kind of positive update to give PPX or PXUPA a lift. This could have been positive news on trading, sale or closure of loss-making businesses, more cost-cutting, fixing the capital structure, outlook for 2014, actions to turn around the revenue decline, real progress on diversification (rather than "flat growth" ! ) or something like that.

That didn't happen, and presumably the company is now not allowed to issue any announcement about things like that until the results are announced in August. So PPX and PXUPA can only continue to drift down, as investors in both draw the inevitable conclusion that the reason there was no good news was because . . . . there was no good news.

Perhaps this is deliberate, and the company is deliberately keeping radio silence so that as PXUPA continues to fall down to new historic lows, it becomes ever cheaper for the nervously awaited offer to the hybrids engineered by the advisers to be done even more cheaply ?

At $6.50 (=$18m) or $5(=$14m) or $3(=$9m), it's a lot cheaper or dilutive to PPX than it was at $12 a few months ago (= $34m) or $8 two weeks ago ( = $23m).

Maybe the success fee is based on how cheaply PXUPA can be bought back?

When results are announced in August, they will either be:

a. so bad that it will be too dilutive to do anything with PXUPA (because PPX will fall even futher on the bad results, maybe down to 3c, 2c or even below 1c?) and such bad results would not permit any cash raising. So we would not see any offer to PXUPA holders.

Or

b. accompanied by a share / cash offer to PXUPA which will have been allowed to drift down to new lows of $5 or $3 so that it becomes very cheap for PPX investors to prevent dilution by paying relatively small amounts of cash to take it out?

Just trying to start a debate - what does anybody think? Either way, the silence is ominously deafening, for both PPX and PXUPA, imho.

On the other hand the results might be fantastic with a really positive upbeat statement for 2014, who knows...

Got to keep an open mind about these things.