Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Effect of major shareholders selling stock?

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I was hoping someone could explain why a major shareholder would suddenly sell 11million shares of a stock on one day.

Today Lazard Asset Management announced that they had reduced their stake in Metcash from 8.13 to 6.08%. This is about 14 million shares.

They produced a 22 page report listing the days they had bought and sold stock over a 12 month period. Most of these are smallish parcels, of between 25,000 shares a day. Some days may have multiples of these.

Then on the 20th July, they offloaded over 11 million shares in the one day.

Are they deliberately trying to force the price down? All of a sudden there is a lot of sellers while till the 20th, there were more buyers. Are they trying to start a cascade effect so they can buy in again at the bottom?

There hasn't been any announcement from the company of bad news.

The only other fundamental thing I can tie it to was that perhaps they were hoping that Coles would be broken up?

The price till the 20th was staying high despite XAO's dips and during this time some major shareholders were selling. It didn't go down till after they had announced what they had done.

I suppose what I am really trying to find out is can major shareholders manipulate market price to their advantage (either up or down)?
 
It could be possibly the most basic of all reasons (among other things): they - Lazard - need cash for something else?
 
Thanks for replying Tayser. I can see that the reason might be simply that. I was querying more the method, knowing that dumping a lot of shares at once increases the likelihood of the share's price nose-diving.
 
Probably something to do with their strategy. Ex-date was the 26 june as well, so that might be related.
 
A bit annoying hey. The price took a dive on 5/6 with very high volume. It looked to have bottomed out, price even went up on 26/6.
 
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