I am interested you say that. I don't go to all these...

I am interested you say that. I don't go to all these shareholder information meetings and live in South Australia. Those two things suggest I go to the larger meetings and as such they tend to be retired people and relatively well above the poverty line or so it seems.

However in another part of my life I tend to get involved with people who don't have all their ducks lined up and have challenges. The challenge being they are now in the last decade of being able to work and don't own a home and are mostly divorced.

Why the preamble - easy - for these people the cost of living has become far too high and I don't see it coming down. So accommodation. is a huge cost and its growing with food costs. Essentially in the inflationary past those that retired feared running out of money during retirement - now some will run out of money before retirement.

So to SOL and its role in this:

A Lot of the shares in SOL -Retail would have come from old MLT shareholders who in 2019 had a share price of around $4.90 and received a fully franked dividend of 21c on normal earnings of 21c. so including franking around 6%. They then got the offer of the century and this would have allowed them to get into based upon the fixed price of $31 locked for SOL $0.1863shares or $5.77 plus a special fully franked dividend of 37c. In fact as SOL was trading way above this those that sold could in fact have had the best entry exit ever.
Effectively the 0.1863 shares however and taking the dividends of say 90c they would still be lagging the 21c as the equation is 16.78c if you work it out.

The reality as I see it ,for retirees, is that cash is king. Plus you have the SMSF rules and something paying 90c on a value of $31 is in fact including franking only getting 4.14%. You can only pay out 4% up to 65 then its 5%. So if you look for a portfolio that allows to to try to keep your holdings intact SOL wont do it for you. Of the many SMSF holders I have met most want to try and protect the capital and don't want to have to take decisions to sell unless its on performance grounds.

It's one of the reasons that Banks are loved: Even CBA @ $121 is paying a fully franked dividend of $4.60 or $6.57 inc. franking and that is over 5% or 5.4% to be exact.

You can ignore all of this and say there are other natural holders. There are but at those meetings I see well heeled elderly people. Not that many young executives.

So as we head to the year end I think there are sellers who sell things to be able to meet the 5% withdrawal or even higher if they are older. We should also remember that if you sell then you do not always switch that asset to your private portfolio.

I think that SOL could easily address this but in so doing it just pushes the problem back up. It theoretically they wanted to up the dividend including franking to 5% they would have to up it to around $1.12 assuming a $32 share price. They could easily do that but it would push the price up and round and round you go.

I cannot find any other reason for a weakness in a stock that has had superior performance for a number of years. I looked for some reason for an overhang