Ann: PSD Acquisition and Entitlement Offer - Presentation, page-110

Are you sure about this? I don't know what bank(s) you're with, but NAB says:

"If you make a BPAY payment before the specified cut-off time on a business day, the biller will treat your payment as being received that same day."

They do also say that you would have needed to pay by 6.30pm on Friday for the biller to recieve funds on Monday. It's pretty ambiguous, but I *think* there's a distinction between receipt of cleared cash and receipt of uncleared cash. If you posted them a cheque and they received it on Monday, then they would still have to wait for you cheque to clear too, wouldn't they? So I don't know if this helps, but it could be an avenue worth investigating if you don't want to miss out.

The entitlement offer is designed to be as fair for everyone as can be reasonably anticipated. As 6186mark explained, you will get compensated for any difference between the bookbuild price and the offer price (assuming the bookbuild price is higher than the offer price). This is essentially a return of capital to you in proportion to the dilution that your shares experience. Consider the following examples:

1) Suppose the SP is higher than the offer price at the time of the bookbuild. As a rough guide, the few bookbuilds that I've recently observed go for a small discount to the SP at the time. For the sake of argument, let's say it's a 5c discount. If this was to happen and if you were to use your capital return to buy more shares at the market price, you'd effectively only be paying 5c more than in the entitlement offer. Compared to those who took up the offer, you could wait for the SP to come down and buy in at a discount, but you risk this never happening.

2) Suppose the SP is lower than the offer price at the time of bookbuild. Then you are unlikely to get anything. But compare yourself to those who took up the offer - their supposedly "cheap" shares aren't looking so cheap any more. You could now spend less to get the same number of shares as the offer.

3) Suppose the SP is higher than the offer price at the time of the bookbuild, but the bookbuild price ends up being much less than the SP. Then you get screwed because you don't get much capital return, and it's expensive to purchase shares on the market. You obviously don't want this scenario to play out. It's most likely to happen if there's a lack of interest from retail investors resulting in a huge number of shares to sell off at the bookbuild (and/or institutional investors don't want much at the bookbuild). Institutional investors, on the other hand, might benefit quite nicely from this scenario. Suppose they were able to scare off flighty retail investors by pusing a few extra shares into the market when the deadline is approaching, thereby pusing the SP lower. They could then buy back into the retail bookbuild at an even lower price again! This is a scenario all retail investors should be quite wary of.