Thank you for laying this out -- the exact process wasn't clear to me, but from what you'd hear on this board, people act like IBM bought a stake in Yippy because they actually examined the company and liked what they saw.
In reality, it occurred because of the Vivisimo rights Yippy had bought and needed to pay for. Not being a company that generates significant revenue, one of the ways they can finance such a deal is to pay through the use of shares, which is what occurred, as you said. Thus, they own shares in Yippy that were the result of this payment.
On one hand, it surprises me that IBM continues to hold a position in the company, given the fact that it has suffered significant losses related to acquisitions (Macte Labs, etc.) that were made but did not generate business success; most people on this board seem to concede that Yippy is no longer a consumer-oriented filtered-search company, and instead is trying to market themselves as a "big data" company or market their technologies for enterprise search instead.
On the other hand, if you look at how this stock has almost no volume (in the low tens of thousands of shares traded in the last day or so), it's clear that IBM couldn't unload their stock in this company even if they wanted to on the open market.
Can you imagine trying to sell a fraction of this company on the order of 2,500,000 shares, when maybe 1% of that amount trades per day? It would move the entire market. JP was trying to figure out who sold 20 or 30 thousand shares the other day that moved the price significantly -- how can anyone move 2.5 million shares without completely distorting the market for the stock?
There simply aren't enough people to sell stock to, so I imagine IBM holds its position. Make sense?
