Until today, the recent upward PPS movement was supported by news: mostly in the form of court documents (granted, these required speculation as to their intent), new license signings, and news of the actual settlement. So what caused the downer today? IMO today’s 18% drop is either a function of

(A) Investors that are disappointed for two reasons; the lack of news re $$$ settlements, and yesterday’s disappointing PPS performance. Investors that are over-extended financially, with very high expectations, could react to a down day by selling.

(B) Insiders trading on secret knowledge involving really bad news

(C) Day traders, speculators, that could cause this PPS move with less than $5M (estimated cost of 6M shares today). That’s small change for some traders.

IMO the cause of today’s PPS decline is likely “A”.  If this is actually the case, we seem to have moved up in the past few weeks on news, and down today on a lack of details about that news.

Following this “news detail shortage”  line of thinking, we can speculate on the $$$ settlement and longer term PPS outcome:

(1)   The settlement was close to expectations - hundreds of millions of dollars net to PTSC

(2)   The settlement fell far short of expectations - tens of millions of dollars

(3)   The settlement was 0

IMO the settlement outcome was likely closer to 1 than 2. But we’ll not know how good the settlement was until April. Between now and then we should see the signings rate continue to increase. So perhaps nothing has happened that directly impacts PTSC negatively – other than a lack of news details.

If I’m correct about the settlement being closer to 1 than 2, the sell-off caused by a shortage of news details, and signings continuing to increase, the April earnings report should be better than I expected > $60M net. I can live with that, and the resulting PPS.