Memories of AMP, or wrong decimal point?
By Rebecca Urban and Helen Westerman
The Age July 8, 2005
FULL DISCLOSURE
An early bid for 7500 Tattersall's shares at $40 each - a staggering 12,800 per cent higher than the original price offered to retail investors - brought back memories from the AMP listing debacle seven years earlier.
Early buyers incurred huge losses on the insurer's first day of trading, thanks to a swag of brokers who bid ridiculously high to ensure a slice of the action.
It's a strategy that professional buyers often employ. However, because opening prices are determined by the weighted average of bids sitting in the pipeline, the ploy can backfire when everybody decides to do the same.
And that's what happened with AMP, where some paid up to $45 for shares - almost twice as high as the average price that day - for a stock that closed at $23.
In Tattersall's case, the $40-a-share bidder appeared to be a lone eager beaver or, as some brokers suggested, the victim of a wrongly placed decimal point. Shares opened at a very reasonable $3.50 and closed at $3.46 on a record day in which $4.2 billion of stock was traded.
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