As promised, the broker report for both CNP and CER.All data is...

As promised, the broker report for both CNP and CER.

All data is for the period 1/8/08 to 25/8/08 inclusive.

CNP

It's difficult to describe CNP as being anything other than heavily dominated by retail brokers, which to me signals extensive short-term (probably day) trading. 102m shares changed hands, about 62m of which went through Westpac, eTrade, ComSec or NAB. Notable exceptions though were ABN who bought 2.4m net and Deutsche who bought 1.3m. On the net seller side, we saw some big players moving out: UBS sold 6.4m, Pattersons 3.2m, Goldmans 2.2m.

Fortis, who run one of the CNP bots, bought and sold 11.8m shares. They made a slight profit on the way and got around 23k shares 'free' in the process. Don't you wish you didn't have to pay high retail brokerage fees?

I really don't see any evidence that CNP is being accumulated to any degree. As has been the case for numerous months, it's being traded heavily. Interestingly though, the short sell list does not indicate any mass 'official' short selling. The risk/reward for a big short on CNP is reducing and with so many other opportunities to make money from shorts (e.g. BNB, Macquarie, ABS, etc.) I suspect the big players have moved on.


CER

The data indicates that UBS, Deutsche and ABN have returned to the stock and are buying, buying, buying. Of the 47m shares traded, they have bought between 11m and 20m between them. It is difficult to tell exactly because of the XT activity in the stock. It's unclear as to whether Orbis are back in after their substantial accumulation.

On the sell side, JP Morgan (3.7m) and Macquarie (2.6m) are the two largest. Next, the three retail brokers (Com, Etrade, Westpac) net sold 4.5m between them.

Firstly, I was surprised that JP Morgan, who currently have a 'buy' on the stock are net-sellers. Although to be fair, the numbers aren't huge. Secondly, it feels to me that as retail clients have bailed from CNP, they have also done so with CER.

I had a hypothesis previously that there are less and less CER shares available in the market due to the big accumulators. This caused the increase in SP which we saw recently. I still believe this holds BUT I think we have witnessed those retail clients who were holding onto their stock exit in the past couple of weeks. If anything, as a result of the recent activity there may be even less CER shares available than there were previously.

Again, the short sell data does not indicate any mass shorting of the CER stock. Where CER shares have been sold by retail clients, they appear to have simply been bought by the big three buyers.


So, in summary CNP is being short term traded. CER is moving from spooked retail sellers to the usual suspects. Neither appear to be shorted to any substantial degree.