Consider the psychology....
posted on
Sep 29, 2016 11:48PM
I think the thing I enjoy most is that the markets are an enigma....and I love puzzles. Soduku, crosswords....love them, and I read like a fiend. I just finished a book called Killing Lincoln, an historical account of the conspiracy to kill not only President Lincoln, but VP Johnson and Secretary of State Seward (General Grant would have been included but he left town)....Johnson's killer chickened out and Seward was severely (but not fatally) wounded by a knife weilding assailant at the time that Booth was killing the President....but I digress as I so often do.
But I think there's a lesson in that too....I was always under the false belief that the killing of Abraham Lincoln...that it was just a lone assassin, Booth....a southerner violently angry about the defeat of Lee's army. Turns out that while Booth was obviously the focal point, there was a lot more going on, it was a far more involved conspiracy that was discovered afterwards....with implications stretching as far as Lincoln's own inner political circle....
People fixate in on the most obvious and sensational event....missing everything else that is happening, even if its hugely significant. A good case in point is building #7 in the World Trade complex, there are still people who think only 2 buildings collapsed that day...the north and south tower, either forgetting or just eliiminating the imploding of 45 storey building #7 in the World Trade Complex.
But enough history...
Consider a retail investor.....one with we'll say 10,000 shares of RVX in his brokerage account. That's $20,000 give or take given the recent trading. $20,000 is not an insignificant sum of money, at least not for me....I would love to view $20K as nothing much to be concerned about.
Now maybe Mr 10,000 shares needs some cash...maybe his car needs to be replaced, or he needs a new roof on his house, or he has a kid going to university...or or or....he needs a few grand....we'll say he's looking for 5 grand. That's 2,500 shares if he manages to get $2 for them....but rather than hitting the ask with a market order when it gets to that price...maybe he's uses a limit order.....say for $2.05 or $2.10
What's Mr. Retail going to think if they're quickly snatched up? Is he maybe going to say to himself: "Damn....that was easy, I guess someone wanted my shares pretty badly". We live in an era of cheap money....Call your bank about any little issue and if you have a good credit score you're probably being offered a line of credit at a rate of interest your parents and grandparents couldn't dream of....while they were paying 8% or much more for mortgage debt now you can get a LOC for 4 or 5 percent in almost the blink of an eye.
Mr Retail may just say screw it and buy back the same # of shares he sold, and maybe even more. Perhaps if there are players accumulating, maybe it would be better to make Mr. Retail sweat a few days....maybe make him feel lucky to get his fill.
That's why for the past few days I've been putting a few thousand shares or so out there every now and again...well north of the current trading range. One day I cancelled the order because we were getting too close to my limit price....its just my meaningless little way of trying to screw with the real players....I know I'm a little guppy in this ocean, but its still fun trying to make waves.
On another note...chicago, you asked about the volumes currently versus the volumes when RVX had its GC back in 2015....I posted the chart and it looks like they're a little more than double what they are right now. But consider that back in early March 2015 RVX was trading for around a buck....or about half the current PPS. That would mean that the dollar volumes are roughly the same.
Peace out for now