RE:A Key Difference - BuybacksTSX rules on share buybacks on a Normal Course Issuer Big (NCIB) generally allow you to purchase no more than 10% of the 3 months average trading volume on a given day. CET trades about 50,000 shares / day over the past 3 months.
10% of 50,000 = 5,000 shares per day and @ $0.16 per share = $800 per day
If they bought the maximum every day for 250 trading days in the year, they'd buy back around ~ 1.25 million shares out of almost 50 million shares o/s. Or ~3% of the shares in aggregate. In doing so, they'd also probably reduce the average daily volume from 50,000 shares per day to 35,000 shares per day because it would be all retail volume (i.e. what actually trades most days) and make it harder to accumulate or exit a position in the stock.
Reducing liquidity of the stock on a day to day basis is, in my opinion, a bad idea. The lack of liquidity is already one of the factors that keeps people from investing in CET. If you were to drop $100,000 into this stock, you have zero ability to exit without dramatically cratering the price. Buying back their own shares would just exacerbate that volatility.
PHX and TCW are both much larger businesses, so different comparison (though I don't think PHX should be buying back either, IMO). HWO has an insider that owns 44% of the stock. May be paving the way for a go-private on that basis.