top 20 update, page-25

123enen...

It would make sense the the US shares to be registerd (ie, listed), on the US boards.

Looks to me like 750,000 shares were possibly added and 30,000 reduced (transferred back into our market?).


Alternatively, they only registered 720,000 shares to the sheets and perhaps left the other 30k here on the ASX?

As I understand it, the "control account" is simply a secondary trading derivative of our register...stock is bought or sold between the US players (just like here)...however oveer there the sponsoring broker from time to time acts as market maker; offering stock for sale, or offers to buy, in order to enhance liquidity...and of course, take advantage of arbitrage situations.

When the sponsor buys, if there are no other buyers for him to offload to, after a period he will typically sell down on our market, resulting in a reduction of the number of shares in the control account.

Conversely, if there is a buying surge in the US, he might sell stock stock into it, (in effect selling short stock he does not have), to feed the market additional liqudity. If he cannot buy the stock back from the US market, he must buy stock on our market in order to settle. In this case, the control account position can be expected to increase.

Of course, he is always cognisent of the prevailing prices on each exchange, so typically will only step in if a decent arbitrage margin exists.

It is also possible however for straight transfer of securities from the US control account onto our exchage...as we saw in the lead up to the options entilement.

I guess if we see significant interest in the states, to the extent net buying results in little or no free float, we can probably expect to see comparitive buying on our exchange.

Interestingly, virtually every buy on our market of this nature will generally result in the permanent removal of stock from the float.

Same influence applies from Germany by the way.

Unfortunately, to date the volumes trading on these secondary listings has not been large, as such any impact on our exchange has been minimal.

The ASX can be expected to dictate in this regard...at least for the immediate future, although we may see subtle evidence of big nights OS from time to time.

Cheers!