My pleasure. It's all good."BNP Paribas is one that seems to...

My pleasure. It's all good.

"BNP Paribas is one that seems to appear multiple times on many lists, as does Citicorp although they do seem to give brief additional identifiers when placed multiple times."

Wrt BNP (and others) sometimes appearing multiple times with brief additonal identifiers, that's because (in those cases) BNP is reporting for different groups of clients that it acts as custodian nominee for. Basically BNP has a large international custodian business for a variety of different brokerage and bourse clients. For example, last time I checked they were the custodian nominee for Interactive Brokers ('IB') Australia's client group. You may have seen BNP in a Top 20 list with 'IB AU' or similar (from memory) as the additional identifier. As I understand it, that specific line item would relate to only IB Australia's client group that BNP is holding for. Same logic applies for any other client groups that BNP holds on behalf of (i.e. reported and listed separately).

In the not-too-distant past I held a stock in which BNP appeared, from memory, no less than 4-5 times in the Top 20 list (Registered holders version) - albeit with a slightly different identifier for each line item (i.e. representing a different international client group for each listing). There was a point in time in which the aggregate of all those individual BNP line items easily totaled 5-10% of this particular listed company. One particular prolific-posting HC member (a bit of a loon, to put it kindly) would bang on and on about why oh why the relevant substantial holder disclosure had not been forthcoming and was allegedly long (i.e. many months, running into a couple of years) overdue. Multiple attempts were made to explain that no such disclosure was required because BNP was holding as custodian on behalf of different clients (beneficial owners) within each client group AND also across multiple client groups -- as indicated by the additional identifiers. This fell on deaf ears and the complaining would continue ad nauseam... until said member presumably got tired of it and moved onto other things to rail against. Needless to say the disclosures never came... for reasons described above.

Cheers.

PS. It's nice to know who the beneficial holders might be, but as I think you alluded to, it's not necessarily going to mean you can make money out of it. Just one small piece in a giant, complex, ever-changing puzzle that we call investing.