MTW,This is a seriously big topic to try to cover, I will be as...

MTW,

This is a seriously big topic to try to cover, I will be as brief as possible & probably leave out some important stuff, that will have to be discussed another time.


"wouldn't it be advantageous for all seller's to pull their order's and wait till news comes out? I mean, what do they have to lose? "


Firstly, if a company was to make an offer for all the shares in Exco, they would have a maximum figure they would pay for Exco.
Should the share price run, before the offer had been made, and it was no longer at a significant premium to the current Share price on offer, the bid would be pulled, it would be killed off by the run up in price & would no longer take place.

Secondly, to some extent this is already happening, a lot of the supply (selling) has dryed up.
Although there will always be some supply, as the market contains holders with very different time frames, some have no interest in the fundamentals of the company (ultra short term holders), others have a very long time frame,and all sorts in between, and others still are trying to manipulate the market to their own advantage.

A close look at the Exco chart shows that there was some significant selling above 65cps, only a few days ago.
These same sellers are now trying to buy back as many of those shares that they can right now, at a lower price than they sold at, it will be interesting to see how many they can shake out, as it has been hard work for them over the last two days (dont weep for them though, I'm sure they still have a large stack in their hands, for future use).

Anyway, rather than me writing a best seller on here, if you want some further reading on how the markets move and market manipulation in general (remember, retail holders can rarely sustainably move the market), go to the charts forum on Hot Copper, find a regular poster on there called "dgoransson", click on any of his posts and in his sig. is a link called "Master the Markets", click on this for some interesting reading.
It is a 188 page PDF booklet which is selling a charting product, ignore the sales pitch and read the text, the first 101 pages in particular.
You will learn a lot, if you stick with these guys, for your entries and exits, no matter what time frame you have, you will do OK.

cheers