"They are clueless in even executing a simple buy back.
Now we are down to 12.5 bid, almost 1 million on offer at 13 cents, 4.2 million at 13.5 cents and 3.8 million shares at 14 cents.".
All you can see, rsah, is a share buy-back that isn't pushing the price up. Management in your view (as I read your many posts) are deficient for not pouring money into the market to boost the share price. Well, you are entitled to your view, but I see it differently.
Let's start by going back to first principles: What is the purpose (or possible purposes) of a share buyback, and what are the desired or expected outcomes?
There are a number of places where you can find information and opinions on what share buybacks are about. As I read them (and to me they make a lot of sense), the common themes there boil down basically to just two principal ideas:
1. They are a way of returning cash to shareholders. The main attractions of using share buybacks are (a) they are cheaper to do than paying dividends, and (b) they are easier to vary from year to year. Re (a) unlike dividends, the benefits to shareholders are indirect - after the buyback each remaining shareholder owns a larger proportion of the company, so the fundamental value of their holding increases. Re (b) If one year a company cuts its dividend tha market tends to go into a funk over it. If they just buy back a few less shares than usual then no-one except rsah notices.
2. They are a way of a company investing in itself - if the company considers that its share price is unrealistically low, then they can buy back shares and then at a later date when the share price has recovered they can reissue at a nice profit if there is a business opportunity for the cash (if they don't reissue, the shareholders can profit anyway). People like rsah are pretty smart investors (well, some of the time), so when they are buying shares they get them at the lowest price that they can. They don't pour huge high-priced buy orders into the market, they buy on dips, they take advantage of any selling pressure, and above all they do everything they can not to force up the share price. And that's just what companies do when they are doing a buyback.
As John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have said: "The market canremain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". So, when a company's shares are badly under-priced, there is no way of knowing when the price will recover. The web is full of experts who explain how to pick the bottom of a market or of a company, and that alone tells you that they can't (if they really could, then they would be on their yacht in the Bahamas, not busting a gut trying to scam dimes off investors like us). What that means is that when a company is doing a buyback, they aren't going to make any assumptions about what the price will do, they will quietly offer shares below whatever the market price is at the time, and wait for others to buy them. The lower the market price, the better it is for the buyback. If turnover is low, so be it, there's not much they can do about that without pushing the share price up - and pushing the share price up is exactly what they don't want to do.
So, in summary, I would be delighted if the share price soared, but I'm not expecting the buyback to do that for me. I'm more than happy for the company to be buying back shares at knockdown prices, because in the end that will increase the value of my shareholding.
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