ERHE Volume Dropped 18 Million In July

The Over the Counter Bulletin Board released figures for volume by company today, and they reveal that while 43,777,659 ERHC Energy shares (OTCBB symbol: ERHE) shares traded in June, only 25,727,956 traded in July, a drop of 18,049,703 or 41 percent.

Since the big news of block awards came on May 31, the reason for the drop is obvious. What is interesting is where among the market makers the drops occurred.

In other words, who was working for the big seller last month?

Knight Equity Markets, L.P., or NITE, which has generally been the bane of all ERHE longs, traded 10.5 million shares in July and 10.7 million in June.

But its big competitor, UBS Capital Markets L.P. (SCHB), sold 16.1 million shares in June and just 5.8 million in July. Yet NITE continues to do the most business; for the year to date, it's traded 95.1 million shares to SCHB's 44.4 million.

The most dramatic differences in sales from one month to the next, weighted for minor volume, shows that Citigroup Global Markets Inc. (SBSH) did 1.7 million in July but just 277K in July - an 800 percent difference. Pershing Trading Company, L.P. (PERT), did 1.2 million in June and just 322K in July, a 400 percent drop.

Can we conclude anything from these numbers that helps us identify the big seller of recent weeks? Definitely not.

But playing financial detective, some of the 100K - 500K sellers might have worked through these three market makers - Bear Stearns, UBS or Citigroup.

Of course, I should point out one big logical result of the data: If NITE kept even, it did so at the expense of the other market makers, because since it did not suffer a drop of anywhere from 300 to 800 percent, it probably handled the bulk of the seller's shares. Many posters made that a priori observation long ago.

You can also observe that they probably sold somewhere between 4 million and 6 million shares.

The raw OTCBB data is ready for your take on it at:

http://www.otcbb.com/asp/tradeact_mv.asp?Issue=erhe&searchby=issue&sortby=volume&Month=7-1-2005&downloadname=mv200507.exe&view.x=37&view.y=3