Ann: Change in substantial holding, page-164

Usually, how long after an underwrite would a broker likely to free up their capital? e.g within 3 months or offload everything next week - no matter what it does to the sp & their capital?

Like I said, they need to do it as soon as is practically possible. Meaning that they need to make the trade-off between how much they make on the transaction and freeing up capital.

Which is a function of how much stock they end up with, and how much daily liquidity there is in MSB's stock in coming days. Under the range of likely scenarios, it will almost certainly occur well within the 3 month time frame you reference, and my best guess is that they could get it done within 2 weeks without inflicting too much pain on the share price.

My guess - having seen these sorts of situations in the past - is that the Head of Bell Potter's trading desk will give the firm's prop. traders an initial selling limit of $1.34, which is the psychological limit above which the broker turns a profit on all the shares it handles as part of this transaction.

And that's if Bell Potter has to do it all on-market. There is, of course, a chance that they could place some blocks of the stock with institutional investors (I somehow doubt it though, because I'm guessing that two capital raisings within 5 months will have left institutional investors, who were interested in MSB, quite satiated.)

So don't worry, while there is likely to be some modest selling pressure which will cap the stock in the coming week or two (absent, any major positive announcements, of course), I don't think that Bell Potter is going to be leaning too heavily on the stock.

In fact, if anything, with this latest capital raising now done, and the share price likely to be artificially driven down by some forced selling, I actually think that the stock is now reaching a level when it becomes a good trading buy.

The market animal in me has taught me that when sentiment around stocks is very positive (such as in April this year, when we had so many posts on HotCopper fawning and gushing positivity, including numerous posts featuring YouTube videos and pictures of space rockets taking off, accompanied by phrases like "MESO-BLAST OFF!!!", "Go, the Blaster!", Vrroooooom!, and the like) then that is the time to keep the heck away from buying the stock.

But during times of disappointment and gloom, when these discussion boards are absent the kinds of certain cheerleaders that were championing the stock when the share price was more than double its current level... then that's the time to start buying.

When I hear holders start to say things like, "Dog's Breakfast" following of another botched capital raising exercise, then my instinctive BUY receptors start to twitch.

So I actually think that the stock is a buy now.

(I won't buy MSB myself, however, because I think the management of its finances is very poor, and my investment process precludes me from owning businesses whose managers do not manage the financial affairs of their businesses properly... but for those who don't care about those sort of things, I think the stock will be higher in coming months, if for no reasons other than the natural mindless shift of the sentiment pendulum, from very negative, to less negative, or possibly even positive.)