I spoke to a friend of mine last night who I would describe as a...

I spoke to a friend of mine last night who I would describe as a hobby investor.

He told me that from tomorrow, Macquarie Securities are changing the LVR on a large number of securities of which CER and CNP are included.

You may remember a couple of years ago (before everyone thought the world was ending) margin lenders were prepared to have the like of CER, CNP, VPG et al on their acceptable securities list and allow you to borrow against them.

During 2008, a large number of companies were removed from the list as margin lenders were simply not prepared to take the risk of lending against such volatile securities.

This is now swinging back again.

I'm not exactly sure of all the Macquarie products involved so it may be worth some research. He is a Macquarie Prime retail customer and IS benefiting from the change. Apparently the margin rates are dropping from 100% to 55% on both CER and CNP but I haven't seen this information first-hand so it's worth doing your own checking.

I see this as a very positive sign for the Centro securities. It signals that Macquarie view the company as an acceptable risk to lend money against and in time, competition between margin lenders would suggest that others will follow suit.

Finally, for the record I am not advocating the use of leverage to buy Centro shares, either through margin lending, credit card borrowing or any other means. Please realise that both companies are already highly leveraged so adding leverage of your own to this could result in substantial loss.

In a nutshell, be careful.