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Showing posts from July, 2019

Metro Bank - regulation, reporting and market sentiment

Several things will need to happen before MetroBank is allowed to recover. I'll divide these into two categories: 1) regulatory and reporting 2) emotional 1) Regulatory and reporting.  Having done a bit of research it seems to me that the relevant regulatory authorities are The Bank, FCA and PRA. The Bank of England did a handy announcement on the day of the new share sale saying that Metro are profitable, have enough money and this new money is for growth. The Prudential Regulation Authority seem to judge the appropriateness of board members in banking and can ban people. Metro have 6 or their 9 board members who've been in position since the beginning in 2010 and are now nearing the end of their 9 year "maximum" term. These mates are seen as a bit too insider-ish it would seem. Usually people don't get banned per se, but withdraw their application for continued tenure and step aside gracefully. We'll probably see some new blood appearing on the BOD (an

Metro Bank Institutional support

The Metro Bank share price initially reacted well to their successful and over-subscribed large share placing on 16th May 2019. Since the initial euphoria the share price has been drifting lower. Perhaps it was weighed down by a large number of short positions at the time. More recently many of these have closed as per the graph on short tracker  shown below: There has been some interesting trading from major holders these past few weeks. I built up my initial position at 650p to 700p and paid just over £8 for some more. I'm glad to see Fidelity also saw great value at 694p. In fact Fidelity started out by selling more a third of their holding on 10th May at 533.5p according to this Guardian article . They clearly had sellers' remorse as by 22nd May the share price peaked at 813p. As the price drifed back, they took the opportunity to nearly double their holding from 5.37% to 9.53% on 5th June when the share price was 694p. They've since added some more to 9.56% o