broker report

Morning all.

For this post I just want to focus on Monday, which is the most recent data available given the 3 day lag. We actually re-ran the report a second time this morning as I was convinced the first run was incorrect. It wasn't.

You may remember on Monday, we had a little rally. CNP opened at 29, had a low of 28 and closed at 31.5

Well, retail clients obviously took the opportunity to lock in some profits because between the three major retail brokers, we saw net sales (yes sales) of 3.6 million CNP shares. The other big seller was Merrill Lynch who offloaded 1.2m.

The interesting part is who was buying:

ABN Amro, who I have said before are active in CNP, bought 2.5 million shares, UBS 1.5 million, Norris Smith stockbroking (who we haven't seen before) 1 million shares and another unknown Montagu Stockbrokers 500k.

ABN Amro remain the dark horse in CNP. In July so far, they have bought 5.7 million CNP shares or about 0.7% of the company. I would say there were the buyer who kept reappearing during the day.

On the CER side, there was nothing major to report for Monday. Macquarie bought 750k, Deutsche continued their acquisition (in an ever decreasing market) and picked up another 1.5m or so. The big sellers were JP Morgan (just over 1m) and Morgan Stanley (580k)

For both stocks, the short sell list continues to be very low. Yesterday CNP was sitting at 6.65m short sold (0.78% of the company) and CER just over 7m (0.30% of the company). For CNP this is down on the trend for the last 4 weeks. CER is the lowest it has been (apart from 1 day in May) since we started keeping data in April. This indicates to me a (sensible) reluctance to take a short position in either stock with asset sale news due any time soon.