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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% on 12th June. Here's a look at the share price performance over the last month.




The Spruce House Partnership also increased its holding from 5.06% to 6.77% on 5th June when sp was 694p. RNS

With Q2 results to be published on 24th July Metro Bank should be able to draw a line under this episode. They will undoubtedly make a large loss for the quarter but the figures are likely to show quite how carried away the market has been selling the shares.

As such, it's good to see the major shareholders have held firm, apart from a little wobble by Fidelity for which they paid the price. I expect they'll be laughing this time next year given the huge discount to net asset value. At 538p Metro Bank are valued at £928m but at the end of March had total assets of £22,569m and total liabilities of £20,788m. (I added in the extra £375m of capital raised mid May) More detail in this article

As you can see the gap is more than £928m it's actually £1,781m

How much do we think they're going to lose in Q2? £10m? £20m? Let's be ridiculous and call it £100m for the quarter. As such the gap between assets and liabilities (otherwise known as the Net Asset Value) is now £1,681m and you can buy that for 55 pence in the pound.

Or to put it another way (and assuming they don't lose £100m in Q2), the NAV is 1033p currently and you can buy that for about 53p in the pound. To put this into context, CYBG who own Virgin Money trade at 54% over their NAV (share price 197p to NAV of 128p). Lloyds Bank trade at 8% over their 53p NAV.

Here are some of the institutional holders profiled by the FT here. I've added some more information to the right as there have been RNS announcements in the last couple of weeks.



This is not investment advice, please do your own research. I own shares in Metro Bank.

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