At 3.40pm the next day, Thursday, McCrae started buying the July options through Shaw Stockbroking. He bought more on Friday, ending up with 729,500 options, accounting for 10 per cent of the July options.
The options were so far out of the money McCrae bought them for less than half a cent, most of them from day traders at CommSec. "For a punt, I'm prepared to risk another $3000," he later told the AFR. He said AMI's drilling contractor put in an order for 2 million options before changing his mind.
But McCrae wasn't the only one buying on June 1.
At 11.29 on the Thursday morning, even before McCrae had put his first order in, someone began buying large slabs of the July options through E*Trade. In six days, E*trade bought 1.6 million options.
It's not known how many shares the McCrae family controls. While Wayne has 11 million shares and options, other family members own at least another 1 million shares. This mystery punter, whoever it was, stood to make up to $15 million profit.
McCrae family members were also trading. The annual report shows that by September, McCrae's son Cameron had sold at least 141,000 of the shares he held a year before.
Cameron McCrae was distracted by his own burgeoning commercial activities. On the day of the May 29 board meeting, when the directors awarded themselves the options, Cameron registered a $200,000 loan he had taken out two weeks earlier from the National Australia Bank for his newly established C3 Trading Trust. Yesterday, Cudeco said Cameron was overseas and could not be contacted.
On June 7, AMI reported more upbeat news and again eight days later. Trading was minuscule, but the AMI share price ratcheted steadily up. On June 19, it rocketed from 97? to touch $1.41 before easing back. The July $1 options were now in the money.
In the closing trades, a day trader known in investor chat rooms as Trade4profit picked up 26,000 of the July options for 16?. Within days, these options would be worth more than $200,000.
Trade4profit had announced his arrival on the Cudeco share register two hours earlier on the HotCopper forum. He said he had been in and out of the stock for about a week. But Trade4profit was no ordinary investor.
The best window on the anonymous world of the day traders comes from the two big online forums: Share Scene, run out of Adelaide, and the somewhat wilder HotCopper, which is controlled by EBet chairman Michael Hale, who owns 43 per cent of the holding company ahead of parties associated with Brent Potts of Southern Cross Equities with 29 per cent and former Pancontinental chief Tony Grey with 14.9 per cent.
Potts would certainly understand the appeal of anonymity: he has maintained a Swiss share-trading account for close to two decades.
Joining HotCopper only requires an email address and a nickname. Members can operate multiple accounts simultaneously (known as "multi-nics"), which means that in theory not only can members talk up stocks endlessly without revealing their identity or their sources, it is also possible to fabricate entire exchanges or "threads" between different personas that they control.
HotCopper has tightened up on multi-nics and regularly suspends members, but warns that while some comments posted may be aimed at manipulating investors, "it is not possible for management to moderate posts, so many misleading and inaccurate posts may still appear on these forums".
A HotCopper exchange can be a brutal affair. With virtually everyone on the thread holding shares in a particular company, there are no words strong enough to refer to a poster who suggests that the share price might go down.
In four years of regular posting, Trade4profit has attracted a devoted following on HotCopper and elsewhere. He describes himself as Melbourne based. He has a distinctive writing style - one that several other regular posters seem to share.
One of these posters who shares similar IP addresses with Trade4profit is linked to a holiday home in eastern Victoria and uses "exbanker" as part of an email address.
While Trade4profit stresses that he has no geological background, he often posts analyses of mining reserves from which he draws extremely bullish predictions. Results have been mixed. He was a big supporter of Cazaly Resources last year before it lost its bid for a mining lease and recently led a disastrous plunge into Jupiter Energy options.
Trade4profit is a quick study. Four days after he began posting on AMI, he posted a detailed forecast that AMI's Cloncurry prospect had indicated reserves of 61 million tonnes of copper and concluded the shares were worth at least $10.
He would later boast that this was remarkably close to the 59 million tonnes of indicated reserves that AMI announced six days later. It also echoed the bullish optimism that would mark the Market Place Securities report.
Trade4profit followed this up with a stream of detailed charts and overlays with likely drilling plans and projections of the deposit. He had obtained them he said "through detailed investigative research".
He told the AFR yesterday that all his information came from public sources: "Absolutely none was obtained from the company or anyone related to the company."
In later postings, he referred to "a few chats" with McCrae as part of his due diligence.
At a time when press coverage had turned bad "behind closed doors in private briefings, a different story was being told!", he said. "I know . . . because I was privy to at least one of them!"
He advised simple tactics to defeat automated trading systems, which would help push up the price.
Most of all he warned investors that a big mining company, the "Accumulator", was secretly building a stake in the company.
This was shown both on the days when the share price rose from the secret buying and on the days when it fell - clear proof, he wrote, that the Accumulator was "down-ramping" in order to buy the stock cheaply. This was even more reason for day traders to buy, a point Trade4profit pushed relentlessly in post after post as the dominant figure on the thread.
As the price rose, HotCopper members who had bought on his advice were gushingly grateful. "You are indeed a stock god t4p," wrote one supporter. "I for one want to grovel at your feet."
Trade4profit told the AFR in an email he saw Cudeco as a classic case of a company being outside the control of the "suits", nameless figures who "have done everything in their power to bring it all undone".
This ranged from "the media misinformation campaign, to the bringing of pressure on the ASX and finally to some of the most manipulative trading practices I have ever seen in the days leading up to and immediately preceding the suspension and reinstatement of the stock to the boards".
While the share records show no sign of a secret accumulator, some trading was unusual. On June 16, Melbourne broker Opes Prime bought 49,950 AMI shares and sold the same number.
Over nine days, its buying matched its selling almost exactly on six days.
State One Securities in Perth matched its buying to its selling on nine days out of 11, culminating in June 29 when it bought and sold 346,111 shares while Opes bought and sold 111,214 shares.
The effect was that on a day when AMI had announced a huge extension of its indicated reserves to 59 million tonnes, up to 40 per cent of the trading was State One and Opes churning over stock.
There are many legitimate reasons for such trading, but it gave the inaccurate impression that the booming turnover in Cudeco shares reflected growing interest from investors.
This was accentuated because, for the past year, the ASX has blocked identification of brokers buying or selling shares on the SEATS trading schemes - everyone except ASX regulators are in the dark when stock starts to move.
As a result there was no reason to doubt that the booming turnover in AMI reflected growing interest from investors.
Day traders didn't know who they were talking to on investor forums, where the information they received came from, or who was doing the buying or selling. They saw only the price going up and wanted a piece of it.
In total, Opes bought and sold 2.24 million shares for $9 million and ended up losing $98,000. State One Securities cleared $272,000 after selling a net 272,000 shares in $7 million turnover.
IMC Pacific had begun trading options for its clients, selling AMI ordinary shares for $3.9 million while buying an equivalent amount of options that could be converted into ordinary shares to fulfil the selling order.
Allowing for conversion costs of the options, AIM ended up with a profit of $83,000 even after the shares collapsed.
It appears that Aequs hoped to do the same thing, taking advantage of the gyrating share price to buy options to cover shares it was selling. In the three days to Monday July 3, when AMI closed at $2.93, Aequs bought a net 82,000 shares at an average price of $2.40.
Aequs managing director Drew Metcalfe declined to comment on trading by clients or whether Aequs had received the Martin Place report, but said Aequs had not bought or sold any shares on its own account.
A copy of the Martin Place draft report had reached The Australian. The newspaper's story the next day quoted an unnamed broker referring to AMI's find as "one of the most important mineral discoveries of the past 20 years", valued at up to $US17.5 billion, with a $25 price target for the shares.
The story electrified the market. Aequs set the tone by taking 19 per cent of the opening trade on the Tuesday morning.
Buying at the opening bell took out many of the sellers, signalling intense interest in the stock while leaving reduced liquidity. As the share price passed $5, Aequs began selling heavily.