Too slow! Too slow! He cried. Too late! On Thursday last week shares in the New Zealand crop watcher CropLogic (ASX code CLI) tripled in value, rocketing from 1.7c to 5c. At that point the Punter had doubled his money on CLI in just under a month. Did he sell? Sell half? Alas, he didn't notice until the inevitable profit-taking had pulled them back.
Moral of the story is that when toying with tiddlers on the stock market, you can't afford to take your eye off the ball. If you can't keep your eyes on the screen all day, you should at least set up automatic price alerts and/or take-profit triggers with your online broker.
The run actually started on Monday of last week, and continued on Tuesday with 2.9 million shares changing hands. On Wednesday everyone must have gone to the races because there were no trades at all. But on Thursday a massive 41m shares were traded and the price soared.
The stock exchange issued a please-explain, to which the company replied, as companies usually do, that they had no idea why there was the sudden interest in their shares.
The Punter can only assume that it had something to do with the upbeat interview CropLogic's CEO, James Cooper-Jones, gave to boardroom media. In the interview, publicly released on the Tuesday morning, Cooper-Jones said sales in Washington State in the US had increased five fold, and with expansion into Australia in August this year, he expects growth to continue at that rate.
The Punter is not sure how that five-fold growth squares with the company's half-yearly report to the end of September, which showed a revenue growth of only 1 per cent -- and some of that revenue was investment income rather than sales. Punter is happy to hold CLI, though the next time they hit 5c he'll be quick to click "sell".
- The Punter has no financial qualifications and no links to the financial services industry. He owns shares in a number of companies featured in this column.