FDR and the 3rd Derivative: a leading indicator?We had a breakout day today, at least on CEO.ca. For some reason the number of postings on the FDR discussion group shot way up. Including two by that forum’s most trusted commentator: Eric Coffin.
Stockhouse and CEO.ca serve different but complimentary roles. Generally speaking, Stockhouse attracts the long-form comments or articles, while CEO brings the true play-by-play / colour. It takes both types to properly cover a stock. And a successful stock will soon attract more of both.
Things have changed for many aspects of life in this social media age, and stock markets are no different. It is no accident GameStop was able to surprise its complacent short sellers a couple of years ago. Market dramas are playing out faster these days. Quite possibly for FDR too.
40 (or 100) years ago, serious chart readers would look at price behavior, obviously, but also what I think might be approximately called its “first derivative”: trading volume. A given price move, or stationary water-treading, takes on an entirely different character depending on whether volume was light or heavy, and whether volume was growing or shrinking.
In 2024, we’ve got at least two new indicators that bear observation: Volume of discussion group posts (2nd derivative), and depth of discussion contained in said posts (3rd derivative). The latter perhaps measured by length of posts and/or the length of threads generated by a given post.
I was never that strong in calculus class, and I’m not even making any kind of systematic count of the chat room output. But it seems to be picking up. The number of views of my own posts also rises steadily over the days and weeks, if Stockhouse metrics are accurate.
Ordinarily, an increase of chat traffic is to be expected following big news. Today is the first day when no news or stock price/volume action was needed to trigger a surge in the 2nd and 3rd derivatives.
Is an upward re-rating of our stock price incoming? Will we even see a continuation of the traffic surge itself? If it abates, will it return quickly?
Unfortunately, there really isn’t much opportunity to study this phenomenon as it applies to FDR. Our drilling results come so frequently these days the research environment hardly has time to return to any kind of ordinary condition.
On a related topic, feedback is always welcome. I was originally going to do my next piece on FDR share ownership decisions and the philosophic concept of certainty. Upon reflection, plus some negative reactions from a small-scale test audience, I put that one on the back burner. There are some wide-ranging topics that can be related to our Suriname venture, but not all of them are necessarily sufficiently valuable to merit this audience's time and attention.
The speed at which my pieces (or any new posts on either forum) reach, say, 25 or 100 views is a sort of 4th derivative. But that is a measure whose accurate detailed study is even harder than the lower derivatives. People can read a post more than once. I probably read everything on CEO.ca regarding FDR at least twice myself.
What I *can* be certain of is that I appreciate all you readers who seem to increasingly take the time to go through my arguments. We really are in this together.