I think I, and most other people would just feel a lot better if Ken would set his Asks and then walk away. The .00005 increment plan was working quite well. People could see that buying now was advantageous as the price was going to be higher tomorrow.
By trading like a schizophrenic off his meds, he's only hurting interest and in turn his own ability to raise funds.
Ken, do us all a favor. Set your Asks at the increment of your choosing and walk away.
I agree.
The situation right now is kind of unfortunate. If he keeps the pricing like it is right now there is a lower incentive to buy for new investors and people will accuse him of price fixing. But if he dumps new shares on the market at 0.0005 the people who bought in higher will get mad. I don't real see a way where he doesn't come of as the bad guy.
Well that's what happens when you fuck around with a non-transparent selling policy and price manipulation to try to sell more shares in the short-term. You attract short-term sales at the price of long-term credibility/sales. I've seen it plenty of times and it's never ended up working well for the issuer.
The problem many issuers face is that they try to sell more shares than there's actually demand for. The policy of early-bird shares followed by a sharp price rise hits problems as soon as the sharp price-rsie occurs - as the initial investors then get to profit-take, undermining further sales. And why wouldn't they do that - as there'll surely be more IPOs along shortly where they can make a 50%+ profit in a few weeks by flipping early-bird shares rather than holding on long-term with much greater risk for a massively lower APR.
Where AML varies from other ones burned by messing with this stupid sales policy (e.g. BitPride, ZigGap, BTCQuick on Bitfunder) is that it didn't even manage to sell all the early-bird shares. The three listed sold all those - but then ran into undercutters cashing out profit when trying to sell the rest at much higher prices. Guess every IPO has to learn the same lessons the hard way - specifically :
1. Fucking with your own share price to raise it will only attract short-term speculative investment - a higher price will NOT attract new long-term investment that wouldn't invest at the lower price.
2. If you sell some shares cheap then other identical shares at a higher price EXPECT a lot of of the ones who bought cheap to undercut you.
The exception to this is when a rise in price follows ACTUAL decent profits (see S.DICE - where higher priced tiers did sell out after months of steady real, not projected, profit). That's profits that have been made - not fantasy projected ones based on being able to add hashpower (that has't even been built) to the network without changing the network's hashpower and without anyone else buying/building/deploying any ASICs at all.
From having seen plenty of other attempts at the same thing I'd expect the price to move around for a bit then slowly fall back towards the initial price as people who bought thinking they could cash out at the next price tier realise it isn't actually going to get there any time soon. The drop can be delayed - but made sharper when it happens - by continued attempts to manipulate market prices. The price CAN be kept high if sufficient capital is used to maintain bid-walls - but quite possibly at the cost of actual sold shares dropping and the retained capital/share falling as it gets thrown away buying back shares at a price higher than they were sold at.
Disclosure : I regularly buy/sell during IPOs - there's generally more profit (and much less risk) flipping during IPOs than holding the shares for any length of time. I currently hold 0 AMC but HAVE bought and sold a small amount (profitably) for my fund.
