For those with a long memory...... look up a company named Daylight Energy, which I believe used to trade on the TSX with the ticker code DAY-T. The story played out about 3 years ago. It was a dividend payer which was hammered 60% for seemingly no apparent reason, yet speculation galore flooded the DAY-T bulletin boards.
Here's my brief recollection of the Daylight story from a few years back. After trading around $10, a precipitous price plunge occurred in the span of just a few weeks, taking the stock to under $5. I myself traded out of the stock at $7 (my break even price), as I was unsure what was going on. Day by day, Daylight's shareprice was hammered mercilessly, on speculation that its debt was too high, that it couldn't afford to pay its dividend, etc. etc. The shorts piled in, and the momentum continued downward, despite the fact that the company had issued no news to justify such a decline (albeit in 2011 the Eurozone debt crisis had everyone in jitters).
So what happened? About 6 or 8 weeks after the precipitious decline in the stockprice, the Chinese swooped in and announced a takeover bid somewhere in the $8 range. People who bought this stock in the $5 range, following the huge sell-off, naturally tendered their shares to the Chinese bid... and in the span of a few weeks, yet another healthy Canadian company was scooped up by our friends, the Chinese.
Is this what is happening with BTE? Frankly, I doubt the Chinese would get behind another takeover bid in a similar fashion as they did with Daylight Energy, especially since Canadian regulatory reviews would not look favourable on a foreign takeover by a state-owned entity out of China. However, barring any news to suggest otherwise, my sense is that some market-maker is trying to create all-out panic-selling in this stock... forced capitulation, if you will, that will allow someone to come in and sweep up some inexpensively priced shares sometime very soon. We shall see, so stay tuned! :-)