I believe the 5 cent bump was indeed designed just to buy BHP more time.  They were probably not the slightest bit nonplussed by Wyloo's 70 cent bid.  However, they were probably more-than-annoyed about the five day window.

This will not be over by mid-November, as I've stated in the past.  Patience.

Other thoughts, purely IMO:

- Wyloo has enough shares already locked up that they can "afford" a high per-share price slightly more than BHP can.

- Oh wait, BHP has a huge treasure chest, so that may not matter.

- As much as they dislike each other, they may eventually be forced to work together to get this deal done.  But that won't become an option until the SP is above $1.50, and they start getting really annoyed with each other.

- I believe that any foreign takeover has to be communicated to the federal government, but those under a certain dollar amount are basically after-the-fact info only, not subject to review (especially for an Australian company).  I believe the key number that lawyers will be paying attention to is $1.565 billion.  Since Noront is a non-cultural asset and non State-owned enterprise, and since both companies trying to take over Noront are headquartered in countries (Australia) with which we have trade agreements, $1.565 billion should be the ceiling, below which no significant review needs to take place.

- Based on the above, I believe that all parties involved will really want to keep the final successful offer price under $2.79 CAD.

- I still think that they'll start to see a lot of shares being tendered once they get to $1.50 CAD.  Unfortunately.