IMO i think the stock is suffering from lack of effective marketing, too great a lag between announcements & a tight register
The register is dominated by a few large groups.
Hampton Hill & assoc have 19.3%. They cant go much higher without triggering a bid for the company. Not the style of their management to make takeover plays anyway.
St Barbara have 16.3%. So they also are restricted by how much extra they could accumulate. No one knows their real intentions at this stage. They could be happy to just sit on their profits here. One would think if they intended to make a bid then they would have done so by now. Because its not going to get any cheaper for them to wait.
Directors on 14.4%. They more then likely don't have the money or inclination to buy up.
Ariki investments on 9.5%.Will Hodgson is an investor & not interested in taking over things. He also bought most of his stake well below $0.10. So he is laughing all the way & unlikely to be purchasing at current levels.
So between the top 4 groups they hold 59.5% of the stock. Then you have the rest of the top 20 with another 7%. So 66.5% in total. Also take into account quite a number of rusted on holders ( i would probably include myself in that ) with god only knows how many % between them.
That means there is easily over 70% of the stock pretty well locked up waiting & watching to see what unfolds with the drilling. That doesn't leave a lot for others to purchase. No one IMO outside of the major holders is going to make a bid. It would be just too expensive. Anyone who tries to buy more than few hundred thousand k soon finds out it pushes up the price by more than 10%. That fact would also have not escaped the attention of institutions. That's why they are hardly represented on the register.
But that is by no means the whole answer.
The lack of momentum with news releases & the prolonged periods between announcements does IMO fit right into the program traders play book. These guys make their money from churning over stock, creating doubt in retail investors minds & getting them to sell. Theirs is not a long game. Its day to day. So they are happy to run this up & down making a small margin. Which is what we have been seeing today & for many many weeks . They are playing with dozens of stocks at once. So it can be very lucrative.
That's my $0.02 worth.
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