Originally posted by SmugLex
You have to wonder sometimes, a company comes out with a profit announcement that it is 64% less than their previous yearly result and its SP falls by over 6% only to close up on the day. Meanwhile the undisputed king of the IF companies in the region closes down on the day on another company's poor result.
I know BAL's poor result was previously telegraphed but it seems not connected to reality that A2 who just recently reported a result that well and truly exceeded analysts expectations, and indicated no slow down on the horizon, would close down on a day on an other's companies failings in the marketplace.
The stock market is not for those of the faint of heart or those expecting guaranteed rises or falls on expected good or bad news. Best to play the long game with such success stories like A2M. Our share price can be manipulated in the short term but in the long term you cant keep a good man down. Continued market share, sales and NPAT gains will continue to see the SP continue to climb to new highs. I wonder what will happen to the SP once the short positions are closed. It will only take one other positive announcement from management outside the standard reporting periods to send the SP well north of today close.
Hi Smug
The drag-down that occured in A2M price is pretty much shorts firing all cylinders. I'll explain this in a sec why they threw mud at A2M.
Bellamy's, without a shadow of doubt, had "unattractive results." They are going though a hard time. I feel extremely sorry for poor Andrew Cohen, whom I must say is quite a brave CEO, to which I'd argue the bravest CEO running an infant formula company. He not only stayed with the company to watch it get burned by previous management, but literally saw his holdings go down in flames if he had any, then he picked himself up and raise his hand to steer a damaged ship onto its direction. This man just carried on with his job. Today I saw his report card, he delivered a gross margin of 43.1%, which is over a 18% improvement in gross profit margins, PCP. If BAL had a 10% decline in revenue compared with last year, through inventory management, and they didn't had to take provisions(one-off), at the same time didn't had to CAPEX spend (one-off), then we'd be looking at $18.5 normalised NPAT, with all the controllable expenses maintained, then that would only be 15% down than last year. With SAMR, that 15% will be smoked in no time. So I'm saying today myself "unattractive results", not poor results.
Now A2M. Up until mid last year, A2M and BAL were clustering together when analysed. But when you throw BUB and WHA into cluster modelling with transformed data, it came up weird. I asked a buddy of mine to cross-check it for me. He had the same results and interpretation was the same. The correlation between them (A2M and BAL only) were sitting at 77%, positive, then. Most of us knew that. Enough to make you notice but no conclusions yet. Then the divergence began between the two. It has moved somewhere below 35%, don't know exactly what it is for last few weeks, because it is statistically insignificant. The association is too week, and using one as a proxy to explain another is totally pointless and not wise at all. If I think logically, I'd say institution might know these things and perhaps shorted or didn't short A2M because of BAL. Or maybe a small position, hard to say. They'd have quantitive risk analysts within their team who'd always know a hypothetical risk to reward ratio. All i can say for retail shorters - if you sneeze - they might short your age. Haha. Them firing on all cylinders and slinging mud at A2M, today must have been the day. Overall, very naive move and living in the past maybe.
I always feel that someone is accumulating A2M when I looked at the lines getting available for swipe when I look at market depth.
Anyways today wasn't a very successful day for A2M shorters.