Shorters gambling?, page-8

That there are traditional shorters at work may not be the full story. There is a viewpoint at https://tenbagsfull.com.au/mnd/post/2015/6/28/mnd-price-and-volume-action-in-march-2015/27763 that I read as saying that the buying and selling behind ETF's is essentially robotic and thematic, and money flows independent of the fundamentals of the ETFs's underlying stocks. I understand that the large volumes involved can distort prices. The blurb mentions MND, but it may well apply to NWH and others.

Consequently, if NWH seems to be manipulated by sentient gnomes in Sydney or Melbourne, the SP may be simply reacting to a set of algorithms hosted on a computers in New York and elsewhere that belong to authorised ETF participants (see below). In the long run, which could be years, these distortions tend to wash out.

At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund you will find these words, “Only authorized participants, which are large broker-dealers that have entered into agreements with the ETF's distributor, actually buy or sell shares of an ETF directly from or to the ETF, and then only in creation units, which are large blocks of tens of thousands of ETF shares, usually exchanged in-kind with baskets of the underlying securities. Authorized participants may wish to invest in the ETF shares for the long-term, but they usually act as market makers on the open market, using their ability to exchange creation units with their underlying securities to provide liquidity of the ETF shares and help ensure that their intraday market price approximates the net asset value of the underlying assets. Other investors, such as individuals using a retail broker, trade ETF shares on this secondary market.”

ETF's, robotics and other facets of stock-market trading other than fundamental analysis are things of which I have little knowledge. There is not enough information available to support fundamental analysis either, so I have no firmly based view on where NWH may go in the long term. My gut feel is that it will hunker down for two or more years, and emerge as a much smaller, but marginally profitable business with a relatively larger non-mining segment than NWH now has – that is, NWH will go down the path that BYL is traversing. All I am hoping for by holding, is to make a lower loss when I exit than the paper loss I now have.