Thursday, August 2, 2007

KCB, Why did it go against the tide?

I am one dissapointed bloke. KCB announced a share split early in the year but did not release the added shares until June. The post split behaviour we have seen in other counters which went the same way was different in KCB. There was no hype; after the split the price remanined just there; a simple division of pre split by 10. Even when at this post split level, the stock should have, to investors perception, be trading at a "cheap" level, in the tens not in the hundreds previously, coupled with the fact that the supply was still in the "expensive" regime, it did not attract buyers as such. I expected that once the 90 percent extra shares created in the split were released for trading in June there would be an avalanche of supply leading to a drop in price. True enough, an avalanche of shares, started trading, sometimes upto six million a day, but the direction of the share price took a different direction.

I am sure I am not the only one dissappointed. I had laid strategies to enter at 18, the price I expected it to get to, in the short term, but hardly was it at 21 before it shot up beyond the 25 level it had hovered at for several months.It is today headed for the 30's region. Have I missed this boat.

What are the fundamental reasons which made this stock defy the well known economic principle of demand and supply, a principle which has been been tested and proven over centuries. Why this behavior?. Since it is not expected that the growth in KCB's numbers will be higher than the sectors average, may be within the 30-50% range, what is this that I did not account for?

3 comments:

kainvestor said...

i think kcb did not defy the basic rule of demand and supply as you say. the only thing you forgot was that the information you were pegging your decision on was widely available and most probably many investors opted to buy immediately the split shares started trading. this created more demend than supply hence the price did not go downwards as expected but shoot up to near 30's.

J K said...

Ka-investor, with benefit of hind sight, the counter behaved the way it did due to hyped up expectations rom speculators. As per my prediction KCB announced a 40% growth; a good performance by any standards. And what do we see?, the counter embarks on it's journey southwards. In my opinion this market of ours has more speculators than value investors which explains why prices will rally on anything else other than companies reporting ood performance.

MainaT said...

From the number of shares that were being traded daily, I don't think it was speculators.
Note that over the last 12 months, KCB was only below 20 during the correction in March. Kenyans love value for money, and KCB under 30 is.

As for fundamentals, company financial and commercial info is just not widely available enough to allow this. And what is available tends to be of questionable quality.