Private investors (not speculators/punters) do pay attention to...

Private investors (not speculators/punters) do pay attention to the stock as I was purchasing last year before the Founder and Arrum started buying in mass at an avg cost of $0.485. I am not much of a market timer so I could have purchased for as low as $0.36 if I'd have waited a few weeks. I have made comments in this forum about the increased govt funding and structural improvements in the industry generally. I even asked a question for the Board at last year's AGM as to why they thought it was fair and reasonable for them to put in place such a low hurdle rate for their performance options given the dismissal share return in recent years under their guidance of the company and the relatively strong likelihood structural improvements alone would lead to stock price appreciation rather than their effective governance and management. It was not well received and weirdly justified based on the fact they had not received options in previous years due to the poor stock price performance and should have skin in the game. It clearly had not occurred to the board any of them they could actually by shares in the company on market! Around that time Andrew (Founder) and Arrum started buying on market aggressively and since may of us private investors have done very well.

There are issues with the boards' past performance with oversight of the facilities. In my view the Board should have had better oversight and risk management processes in place to manage. In my view the stock play here is absolutely around financial metrics which are easy to model and about structure improvements in the market rather than the board or management being particularly crash hot.

Be aware if you are trading and the sale does not proceed the share price may full backwards before it moves forward and there are still a lot of moving parts to getting the business back on track. Next weeks Federal Budget and the next company update towards the end of May will be telling in terms of the near term prospects for the share price. Be interesting to see how the institutional investors react to the news and what the impact will be on the unsolicited offer on the table. I am still holding for now but this could change at any time and I do not claim to have a crystal ball as to the outcome of the acquisition, budget,the past quarters results or the forward outlook. My guess would be that trading conditions have somewhat improved, the bulk of the funding increase will go to home care and The Royal Commission’s recommendation to increase by $10 the basic daily fee paid on a per bed basis to aged care providers will hopefully be adopted.