Obviously there are many reasons why some person or people might have been motivated to buy shares at almost twice yesterday’s closing price. My guess is that rumors of good things to come, and the fact that the company seems to be able to raise money to continue, has caused some modest enthusiasm. (It’s a good day for TMMi, relatively speaking, but it's still only a few thousand dollars worth of shares traded).
Your speculation tends to be somewhat morbid though, and assumes nefarious things for which there is no proof --- like undisclosed poison pill clauses, etc. All that can be said is that for some reason, some person or some people thought that Tmm was a good buy at around 4 cents. Presumably, these buyers would have preferred to buy for less but could not find sellers at lower prices. This represents a change in sentiment!
Calling it a dead cat bounce doesn’t say much, since it doesn’t explain why investors would suddenly decide to get in on a stock that tends to trade thinly. My understand of the concept is that a dead cat bounces, with gravity temporarily suspended, when investor sentiment sees that a stock has dropped precipitously and assumes fallaciously from that fact alone that it will probably regress to its mean. I don’t see why that concept is applicable here given the trend to date.
As to insider trading --- well, obviously it’s possible that some are more informed than the public based on confidential information (which naturally you assume must be mistaken), and have decided to try to unlawfully profit. But I think you and I may have a different definition of what constitutes an ‘insider’, and I’m certainly not as prone as you are to see illegality as the explanation for everything. It also seems to me that actual insiders in this company own quite a bit of stock and options to buy stock. Why would they risk their sizeable positions by slightly increasing them by trading on insider information?
