Here is an article from Chuck Diesel, which offers some compelling reasons that the market is actually healthy, and gives a nice tall glass of STFU to the people who are constantly whining, complaining, and bitching about volume. Especially the ones who do it in a sarcastic manner, and thus continue proving they know NOTHING about this market. Enjoy this, and think about it. Maybe those who are preaching volume to the masses will realize how stupid they sound. The key is how much money is being put into buying players, not which players. If people are only buying expensive SOIs, and laying off the cheap stuff, that might be an indicator of buying patterns.

~ChuckDiesel

Volume is a nice term to describe market activity when talking about the real market, but we are at a point now where the use of the term is misleading. Three big winners this week were GTZY, DRNT and PPRC, each of whom has a tiny amount of SOI’s outstanding compared to YAOM. The real market has thousands upon thousands of companies to balance this kind of discrepancy out, be we don’t.

I would recommend using total money spent in the market as a barometer. Multiply volume * average price for each player and add it up. Here’s what I get when I do that:

Week Ending, Money Moved (in thousands), Market Cap (in thousands)
_10/3/2008_____$261.2________$613_
10/10/2008_____$130.6________$303_
10/17/2008_____$358.2______$1,079_
10/24/2008___$1,973.1_____$10,437_
10/31/2008___$1,429.4______$8,628_
_11/7/2008_____$633.9______$5,268_
11/14/2008_____$259.1______$3,550_
11/21/2008_____$159.3______$2,617_
11/28/2008______$52.4______$1,929_
12/5/2008_______$77.4______$1,140_
12/12/2008______$65.6________$801_
12/19/2008______$92.1________$690_
12/26/2008______$13.6________$528_
__1/2/2009_______$8.9________$420_
__1/9/2009_____$119.2________$898_
_1/16/2009_____$368.4______$1,224_
_1/23/2009_____$178.3______$1,248_
_1/30/2009______$88.1________$968_
__2/6/2009______$71.8______$1,109_
__2/13/2009_____$73.2______$1,073_


So, we HAVE, in fact, seen a slight uptick in activity this week, albeit still at a relatively low level. I just think this metric is much more meaningful than volume,at this point (on a side note, we had 16875 shares moved this week compared to 17543 last week). Keep in mind also that this week we had just one IPO (DRNT) compared to two the previous week (BIGB & DIRK).

Lots of talk in the forums about cancelling IPO timestamps that are more than a couple minutes old. I am not, and here is why. We know that one of the things OneSeason uses to determine the maximum percentage that someone can get of an IPO is off of participation on that IPO. The market conditions are also a factor. The more people who are in the IPO, the more people who will get shares. The fewer people on the list, the higher the percentage of the shares someone can get will be. Don’t ever just assume that you are out of the game on an IPO. The longer the line, the more interest that is shown, the lower the % of shares one person can get, and there will be more total numbers of people who get the IPO.

Lots of questions today from the folks who were at the front of the line for the IPO allocation of Paul Pierce today. We knew that the maximum amount any 1 person could get is 4% of any IPO. We assumed that this meaned that Pierce hitting the market with 1000-1200 shares meant that the people in the front of the line would have the opportunity to get 1-48 shares of PPRC. It seems that the component of at least 100 people getting an IPO is a priority in allocating the shares. Here is a direct answer from OneSeason on the situation.

The maximum % a single user can obtain in any IPO will never exceed 4%.

In order to ensure IPOs are not too concentrated, the maximum % a single user can obtain in any particular issuance may be lower than the above mentioned threshold depending on the size of the time stamped orders.

Hope this helps, great seeing a new player on the market!

So OneSeason has a mechanism in place, to ensure that IPOs are distributed to a fair amount of people, dependant on how many requests are recieved. This is good news for most, bad news for the hardcore big dogs who’s fingers have blisters from the F5 refresh routine. What are your thoughts, Nation?