Friday 4 May 2007

Sold my Qantas shares prior to Offer Close

The Qantas takeover offer by APA closed a little while ago (7pm AEST). The offer price was $5.45 cash per share, but I chose to sell my shares on market this morning for $5.39, even though this also meant having to pay $128.95 brokerage (1.1%). My reasoning is that there is a risk that the offer will lapse, as it requires 70% to succeed, and at least 50% by 7pm tonight in order to be able to extend the offer period a further 2 weeks. As of this morning APA reported having 35% of Qantas. They might make their target (they'll announce the final figure during this weekend), but, if they fail there's no guarantee that a higher offer would be forthcoming. If that happened the share price could easily drop back to under $4. As I was happy to take the offer price, I prefer a bird in the hand to a bird plus 12c that might get away...

Sell QAN QANTAS Airways 09/05/2007 2,175 $5.39 -$11,594.30

Enough Wealth

3 comments:

mOOm said...

Why did you have to pay such a high brokerage fee? CommSec only charge me 0.12% (which is bad enough by US standards).

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

History and laziness (I refuse to admit to stupidity)...

I originally started buying shares via this broker back in the early 80's. I later transferred the stocks into a margin loan account with leveraged equities, and this broker was the one linked to my margin loan account with LE, so I could buy stocks via Tolhurst and get the trades settled by LE margin loan...

Later on comsec etc. started up and I now have a margin loan with comsec and can direct trade with comsec on that account. But I still have some old stock holdings with LE. I think I did add comsec as a second broker that can be used with my LE account, but I'd have to phone trade with comsec to access my LE margin loan stocks.

I could probably have sold the QAN shares via comsec, but I didn't want to experiment with it today. In the event I sold the stock for $5.39 and it dropped to $5.36 later in the day. The brokerage only cost the equivalent of 6c per share, so if I'd sold it later in the day via Comsec, what I saved in brokerage I might have lost in market price anyhow.

Eventually I'll have sold off all the stocks in my LE margin loan account and moved the funds into my Self-managed Super Fund, which trades stocks via E*Trade, so it won't be an issue.

Meanwhile, next time I want to sell one of the stocks I hold on my LE account, I'll have a go of trading via Comsec and see if it works.

mOOm said...

I had an LE account and when CommSec took over TD Waterhouse Australia they wanted to charge outrageous fees to trade on it. I quickly switched to a CommSec margin loan account. It was annoying though (especially to do from here in the US).