broker report

Afternoon all. The start of the new year is always busy so I've had to sit on the sidelines a bit this week.

Anyway, I thought it's about time we had another broker report for both CNP and CER just to see if we can work out what on earth is going on. Here goes:

I have picked a period from Monday 23/6 up to and including Monday 30/6 - i.e. 6 trading days. Data for Tuesday 1/7 onwards is 3 days lagged so I don't have anything firm yet.

CNP

Let me start off by saying that there has been a slight change in dynamic. I mentioned a while back that we had start to see the emergence of some trades through non-retail brokers.

The top broker for the period was (as you might expect) Comsec, turning over about 1/3 of the shares. Second place though, surprisingly, was Shaw Stockbroking who purchased a cool 3.5m CNP shares, presumably for one of their private clients. Next, again surprisingly, was Deutsche Bank who net-bought about 2.3m shares. In fourth place, even more surprisingly was a broker named Fimat Australia, owned by Societe General, who net purchased just over 2m shares. Then came a couple of the usual retail brokers, but after this two more of note: E.L.& C.Baillieu Stockbroking net-bought 670k and Goldman Sachs 560k.

As you can see, there are a number of names on the list who we have not seen in any volume recently. I have no idea why they appeared all of a sudden but we are starting to see the move away from CNP being a day-trader dominated stock.

CER

Well, CER is a funny old stock. It hasn't been day traded to any great degree for some time, in fact since the last huge drop when all the spooked retail investors bailed. IMO value investors are all over this stock now like a rash. Comsec and Westpac net-sold around 1m CER shares during the period to investors just waiting to snap them up.
You will have doubtless noticed that the gap between CNP and CER is now a significant one and I think this reflects the fact that CER is perceived to be a much lower risk with a big safety margin. The recent divvy helped this also.

Top of the list of CER buyers was E.L.& C.Baillieu - looks like they have taken a fancy to both Centro stocks. They net-bought just over 4m CER shares which represents around 10% of the total turnover. Next was Citi at 2.5m then Toll Noahurst with just over 1m, Goldman Sachs 810k, Macquarie 500k and so it goes on. In summary, retail investors selling into sophisticated brokers.

I also pulled data for the full month of June and found Deutsche topped the list with 4.5m CER shares bought - I suspect this is for Orbis who are doubtless topping up their already substantial holding.


Hope this all helps. It's good to see some other interest in CNP for a change, perhaps this is a reflection on some positive sentiment slowly returning. CER is where the smart money has been for some time now and I have no doubt this will continue.