SP strength, page-34

A very good question!

My market depth display will not reconcile to the totals I see. I did a quick run down the bids this morning and could only count bids of about 240,000 when the total was showing 490,000. Trouble is so much of the play these days is dark (i.e. doesn't show up on the market displays).

As the market in general is down, the fact that we are holding is a sign of some strength I think.

I also think that some of the shorters are backing off. There is a much higher portion of the trades going through that are for marketable parcels. And I am not seeing as many very small orders getting inserted between the legit orders. There are still a lot of smallish orders for amount less than 1,000 shares and I put this down to institutional programmed trading. I tend to bid or offer in multiples of thousands as most genuine investors do. So when a lot of the market is for anything but this its a sign of algorithms in play.

So I think we have one or more institutional buyers who do not want to escalate the price and one or more institutional sellers who do not want to see it go down.

And small investors being swept along.

But all in all not bad!