Since it doesn't make any sense (as you say) for someone to actually do these tiny trades I've always assumed that it is algo/High Frequency trading that doesn't pay brokerage per trade and likes to create a trade list of small trades it can monitor and then react quickly (reprice some orders as trades go through). The goal obviously being to detect new buyers and buy with a goal to sell to those same buyers at a slightly high price.
WRT the PEs, it's an interesting one. Obviously the growth anticipated in the market makes the PE0 (current price/last full year reported eps) look inflated especially after the Half year figures. I mostly calc my own PE and ignore sector PEs, picking a single peer company I understand instead. I use PE0 for the first 6 months of a year and then sort of swap or average to PE1 (my estimated eps for the full year in progress). For me a confusion is that a lot of online sources don't say exactly what they mean by PE. Commsec for example is showing 10.98 today for NRW and I'm not sure what that is. It's not PE0 and it's not PE1 using their one broker estimate. It might be consensus from Reuters or another provide that for which they don't show an actual eps1. Anyway, I try to focus on how the PE compares to the historical PE, and the peer and (as you have mentioned a number of times) how the business is changing that might make it seem less risky or more prospective.
All that aside, I agree with you that NRW's PE looks low - they are very likely to do about 22c for FY2019 meaning we are at a PE of 9.4 for today. I think we know that the eps for 2019H1 will be about 10.3 cps (Guidance of EBIT $45m before Amortisation of Golding Intangibles (-4.8m) Interest (-1.5m) and No Tax is my guess). The $4.8m comes from $9.6 for FY2018 which brought Golding intangibles from $29 to $19m (so we are stuck with these non-cash charges for a bit yet). Goldings was held for only 10 months so it is possible that it will be a bit higher than $4.8m, but I'll ignore this. Given the outlook will likely talk about $1.1Bn+ full year revenue, and RCR will contribute 5 months, 22c eps full year seems conservative to me.
Needless to say, NRW looks good - the potential outweighs the few clouds by a long way for me.
Once we get into late May/June, I'd guess we'll start to get some guidance for revenue (at least) for FY20 and that might be when some fireworks start and we see the PE(2019) increasing.
Cheers,
pb
