I posted on 2 March my concerns about shorting, spurred by a...

I posted on 2 March my concerns about shorting, spurred by a huge 350k shorts on 1 March representing about 15% of the day's sells.

But on the following 3 days to yesterday, the shorting appears to have abated with 63k/31k/99k on 2/3/4 March. So shorting doesn't appear to really have contributed significantly to the continuing declines, particularly on Tuesday & yesterday.

Looking at the volume history below since TLG started its recent heavy decline from 23 Feb, the overall TLG turnover on the ASX to yesterday had been around 15m shares - add in ChiX, & that volume will be up towards 17m shares (in 8 trading days). And today has already passed 2.5m.

What I think stands out below are the red (5 minute) volume spikes over 100k, including the huge dump on Monday of over 800k in a few minutes which decimated the buy queue. That's a lot of big sells in terms of $s, & with today's horror show, they probably account for around 5m shares.

It's hard not to conclude that some biggish shareholder or holders are exiting for whatever reason. It's unlikley the recent additions to the Top 20 list from the Smedvig sale & the institutional capital raising would be exiting at a significant loss (from $1.45). But what I did note from the new 2 Feb Top 20 list (published earlier this week - should that have been 2 Mar?) is that two of the three Swiss banks who had appeared for the first time on the previous 6 November Top 20 list, had sold down over 2.3m shares from their 6 Nov holdings.

Given those Swiss banks had accumulated their shares largely between mid September & early November 2020, their buy average would likely be well under $1. And it would appear they didn't participate on the Smedvig sale or the CR. So maybe they are our unhappy selling culprits......just a theory though!