Can't explain it all @neke86_ , but I can give you some jigsaw pieces - see if they fit anywhere.

First - there's this: https://www.shortman.com.au/stock?q=acl

Next piece:

Note that 3 of those notices are for the same position - CBA, KKR/Comet and Superannuation HoldCo/Colonial First State. Similarly if you see notices for First Sentier Investors, they are owned my Mitsubishi UFJ Group, (MUFG), so you'll see mirror notices for those two also quite often, depending on whether the underlying holding is held by the smaller subsidiary or not. In the case of the CBA/KKR/Colonial tie-up, I think that might have to do with this:

https://www.afr.com/street-talk/ethical-partners-to-close-its-doors-massive-blocks-in-acl-noble-oak-20240718-p5juw3 [AFR, July 18th, 2024]

Street Talk

Ethical Partners to close, sells massive big blocks in ACL, NobleOak

Sarah Thompson, Kanika Sood and Emma Rapaport

Jul 18, 2024 – 10.04pm

Funds management house Ethical Partners, co-founded by ex Perpetual deputy head of equities Nathan Parkin six years ago, will close its doors and return nearly $2 billion to investors in a move that spells big changes for the ownership of Australian Clinical Labs and insurer NobleOak.

Street Talk can reveal Ethical Partners was the seller behind a 10 per cent slice of ACL and just under 15 per cent of NobleOak traded by E&P Financial and Barrenjoey respectively on Thursday. Sources said Ethical Partners sold the stock – among other, smaller names – after receiving redemption requests from a handful of institutional clients.

Ethical Partners co-founders Nathan Parkin (left) and Matt Nacard are shutting up shop after six years.  [image: Karl Schwerdtfeger]

“We have made the decision to hand all money back to clients. We are in the process of telling clients and we appreciate their support over the past six years … We are proud of the leadership in ESG and careful stewardship of client funds,” Parkin said when contacted by Street Talk.

Parkin was Perpetual’s well-regarded deputy head of equities until 2018, when he branched out to set up his own shop. In six years, the firm came to oversee about $2 billion in funds under management.

Ethical Partners’ decision to close comes as active managers battle a tougher institutional market, where superannuation mergers and in-housing of investment capabilities have dried up long-term investment mandates. Value investors – of which Ethical Partners was one – lost their sheen to growth managers during lower interest rate periods.

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I reckon that fund ("Ethical Partners") selling 10% of ACL in July coincides with a big unwind in the short position and is likely why Allan Gray and Yarra AM have increased their stake - buying blocks of ACL stock from Ethical Partners through those brokers.

The prime brokers (JP Morgan, Citi, UBS) are always trading in and out of companies as demand for stock waxes and wanes, particularly from shorters who use those prime brokers to borrow stock from. A lot of ACL stock would have been returned to those prime brokers as the shorts unwound in July.

Hope that helps a bit.

Mate this is fucking great; I really appreciate you taking the time to write this up. I have 2 kids under four, a 6am to 8pm job with 70 staff at a major listed US tech company, and so for me, investing is the hobby of my hobby. I mean, it gets the leftover time within the hobby category, and sometimes I just do not have time to open two dozen sub notices when I already used my daily allotment shit-posting FraudCos on Reddit.

Thank you again, genuinely.

You're welcome @neke86_ - glad it helped. We never know the full picture but I enjoy trying to find the jigsaw pieces and put together as much as I can. Our kids are older, one is 21 with her own daughter now (our first grandchild) and our son turns 18 in September, so I'm certainly in a different stage of life to you. Also, I was forced out of my full-time job due to bad osteoarthritis that has already caused me to have both my hips replaced and my knees would have been next if I stayed there. The main issue was probably that I've got arthritis in my hands too now, so I can't even type for too long, but the sort of repetitive work I was doing in the hommus and dips factory wasn't helping with the OA at all - so I quit that job, took early retirement (I'm 58) and I've found that my hobby has become my full-time job now.

I don't spend my time searching for good entry points as much as trying to work out what to avoid buying at all, and what companies I want to own, and over what time frame. I have other interests, but company research is one of my favourite ways to spend a few quiet hours - when I get some quiet hours to spend. I got interested in TA a few years ago and then found that relying on that got me smashed when a new datapoint came out of leftfield and threw it all out the window. My opinion is that TA usually only works if the status quo is maintained, and it doesn't (and can't) take into account external forces that can change the outlook for a company instantly, so I choose not to spend my time looking at TA or TA analysis - I'm not judgemental on it - each to his own - everyone has to find what works for them and good luck to all of us - but it's not for me - it clouds my thinking and takes away from what actually matters in my opinion - which is each company's longer term future.

The interesting thing now however is that I have a variety of investment timeframes because I'm no longer working - so what I've got is what I've got - similarly to that $100K you get here on SM - I've got a set amount of money which I have to live on and try to make more money with at the same time, so some of the companies I invest in are with a 5 to 10 year or longer timeframe (such as Audinate) and others are about shorter term capital preservation - like avoiding MinRes and FMG for the timebeing despite having bullish views on them longer term.

That's something I'm spending a fair amount of time on lately - coming up with viable plans to make both short-term profits and longer-term capital gains while reducing the shorter-term risk of losing capital. Like they say, Investing ain't easy. It can be, if you invest in really good companies and then don't do much, as long as you have a long-term investing horizon, but if you're trying to make money to live on now as well, it does get a bit more tricky.

But I believe I have the skills and the temperament (stomach) to do it - but you have to work out a viable strategy and then stick to it, even when the market tries to tell you that you're dead wrong. Of course I change my mind when the facts change, but not just because of a shift in market sentiment.

Which is all to say that I don't mind having a sort of shallow dive into the odd company that doesn't interest me personally because it all broadens my own knowledge - and I want to learn more every day. We are all trying to do the best we can with the time we have and the knowledge we have, and we could all do with substantially more of both, but it is what it is, eh!