I sold in pre-market, but the bid at $22.02 was only 100 shares. I then sold all the shares that I had purchased in January, right after the open. I am just kicking myself slightly as these short pieces have most often come out 3 or 4 days before options expiration and I didn’t buy put protection.
I didn’t sell because of the content of the short piece. Sold because I thought the market might react more strongly on this one due to the recent price gains and nervous “investors” like me who would sell first and read second. I was willing to lock in the 3-month gains (less 5%).
It made me paranoid, thinking that the shorts were reading my post saying there hadn’t been any short attacks since early February, and two days later, boom. Reminds me why my position is very small, and also reminds me about the sleaze factor.
If people keep selling, the shorts will keep attacking. They’re making big bucks off the fear and laughing all the way to the bank (no pun intended).
When people stopped selling AFSI in response to every short attack, the attacks went away. It was that simple. This has nothing to do with BOFI: these guys are just after the money, and they’ll move on to somewhere else when they can’t make it off BOFI investors anymore.
Going to watch this for awhile. Could be a day trade. Haven’t done that for a long time. Hard to do, though, when the power can go out at any time and leave me holding the sack.
This article is basically a retread of past Seeking Alpha BofI short articles based on the allegation that this “Houston” lawsuit is new litigation (filed on April 11) and unrelated to any short attacks: This excerpt straight from the plaintiff securities fraud court document proves that short sellers had nothing to do with the Houston v. BOFI case because the “Class Period” is September 4, 2013 to October 13, 2015.
But if you unpack all the layers, this is simply a bundling into a class action of three other class actions, the first of which is the “Steven Golden” class action whose catalyst was the (quoting from its complaint) the “October 13, 2015, post-market, The New York Times” allegations by “Matt Erhart (‘Erhart’), a former internal auditor at Bank of Internet.”
In short, there’s nothing new here and the Houston class action is directly related to the short attack that began last October with both The New York Times and Seeking Alpha (a couple of days later) and The Friendly Bear is lying when s/he writes otherwise.
Personally I found this company too troubling to continue to own and sold my stake back on January 7th at $19.42/share.
I have no desire to buy back in as I know as little now as I did then about the litigation around the company and the trust worthiness of the management team. In addition this company was taking up a lot of my brain cycles and was making me worry about the stock I owned.
So I redeployed the capital by taking larger positions in AMBA, SKX, and SWKS which I continue to hold and plan to own for quite a while.
I have no idea how this will all turn out - hopefully the company will do well and the stock will move upwrad for years to come.
Frank - long AMBA, long SKX, long SWKS, see profile for all holdings
It made me paranoid, thinking that the shorts were reading my post saying there hadn’t been any short attacks since early February, and two days later, boom.
Saul,
Haha ya I kind of felt the same thing as I read the article. I just read your post on how you were feeling more comfortable with coming back into BOFI. Then we were hit with this SA article basically making fun of how people were becoming comfortable with the stock all over again.
I was happy to hear you were coming back to BOFI as I really enjoy hearing your thoughts whether we agree or not.
I guess we all here have to keep in mind this board is not a “walled garden” as is true with many MF boards. I have even seen posts appear in search results. What we say is out there for the world to see. I personally would be all in favor of moving this board to a paid only section though that is not my call. Maybe it would be best to keep some of the chatter on the paid boards?
Today’s decline has cost the bank about $255 million in market cap (and no doubt cost investors significant money as well).
Backtracking through the “Houston” to the Golden class action filing, here are the claimed losses of the newly consolidated plaintiffs’ cases (and the impetus of today’s sharp decline):
Houston Municipal
Employees Pension
System: $215,340.52
Golden: $ 6,529.00 (Yes, that's six thousand dollars)
Marco: $105,381.51
Non-moving class member,
Multicultural Business
Solutions Inc. $ 46,148.60
" It’s pretty incredible how a stock can sell off 17% simply based on a seeking alpha report and no new real news."
it s the herd mentality playing out, isn’t it? You startle one (and boy are they easy to startle) and it flies away and then the signal propagates through the flock and in no time the flock is up in the air.
If you myopically consider only this particular event then it make sense for their survival. But was the big Eagle really in the neighborhood?
the problem is to make sure if the big Eagle is in the neighborhood and not react just because the next guy did so. For that you need to have a longer and broader view of things in order to make this distinction.
The market reacts like a flock of bird. That’s the market, and we see some of these startled birds right here.