Today's Action

This morning before the cease trade was lifted, the total number of lots on the offer was 24,100 @6¢. That's some 23,101 lots more than is permitted at any one given time.

The sell-side was willing to put up $700k of offers so that the price doesn't move. So they must have seen the outcome as positive with the shuffling of the board.

The buy-side put up 12 bid lots, or $33k.

Treasury yields are down today, meaning that any money taken from the offer in GBN.V shares will be put into treasury options.

TLT has gotten a very strong bid today. The TLT is an excellent proxy for long dated treasuries just about everywhere.

That means in order to catch the rise in treasury bond futures, they will absolutely have to sell into the bid on GBN.V to raise the money to play. But there's a limit to how much they can short sell, especially when the entire public float is short sold, and shareholders are mostly hanging on to their shares.

The answer why Canadian companies should specifically underperform so drastically and for so dreadfully long is the no-down-tick rule was abolished in 2011.

You have to look at the performance of long dated treasury bond futures to see why the no-down-tick rule was necessarily abolished:

http://tmx.quotemedia.com/futures-charting.php?qm_page=81820&qm_symbol=/CGB

Obviously regulators saw throwing venture exchange companies under the bus as necessary to preserving financialization in Canadian long-dated treasury bonds.

Sell-side brokers are going to have to get cracking to play this one out for March expiry:

http://quotes.ino.com/charting/?s=CBOT_UB.H13.E

-F6