Nathan invests in Asite

This third consecutive post on Asite concerns its Stock Exchange announcement that Asite director Nathan Doughty (see his Free Collaboration blog) purchased 307,692 Asite shares at 3.25 pence per share on 2 June 2006. For his £10k investment, Nathan now holds approximately 0.298% of the issued ordinary shares of the company.

It’s an intriguing move, especially considering the previous poor results announcement. Looking at one of the City bulletin boards, there was some cynicism about the reasoning behind the buy – one writer even suggested it might be a "share boosting exercise" with someone "working a p’n’d on it on the back of the director buy, somewhere…". (I had no idea what "working a p’n’d" was until I asked a City mate – he told me it stands for ‘Pump and Dump’, defined on Wikipedia here. More cautiously, my friend pointed out that prices can change quite dramatically for low-priced shares that are only infrequently the subject of sizeable transactions – and Nathan’s buy was the most sizeable transaction for some months).

The value of Asite shares certainly grew as a result. Having remained pretty stable at around 2.5p for the past three months, they rose 1.25p during Friday trading and closed up a further 1.25p at 4.00p today. The number of Asite share transactions had previously been very low, but today saw a dozen trades.