Of Bulls & Bears

Friday 4th August 2000

Notices shine light on Sun portfolio

Substantial securityholder notices are designed to inform sharemarket investors about what major investors are buying and selling. They are a handy foil to corporate raiders, who used to be able to buy up large chunks of a company under a raft of nominees before revealing their hand. This week, however, the notices have proven a useful way of finding out what a typical institutional investor's portfolio looks like. Guardian Trust Funds Management has filed 11 notices as part of tidying up its acquisition of Royal & Sun Alliance Asset Management. For the record, Royal & Sun's portfolio was made up of 5% stakes or more in each of the following companies: Otter Gold, Property Leaders Australia & New Zealand, Property Leaders Australia, Property Leaders New Zealand, Wilson & Horton Holdings, Tourism Holdings, Guinness Peat Group, Kiwi Development Trust, Mainfreight, Metlifecare and Nuplex Industries.

BIL test sends wrong message

Talking of substantial securityholder notices, market watchers were treated to a very unusual one from Brierley Investments on Wednesday. It looked and read normally until the section relating to the holder of the shares. This was listed as "Me, myself and I, a wholly owned subsidiary of my ego." Under the subheading "description" there is a stream of meaningless tosh. "My plan here is to babble on until I get some kind of overflow and this will tell me what the processing is here. Yes folks, 75 chars per line is what you get, and a good thing too. But keep typing and we'll see what goes out to the world when I send this," it says. Whether intentionally or not, the author of the notice did send it out to the world in electronic form to the Stock Exchange, which passed it on to stockbrokers and their clients. Seven minutes after the notice was filed, BIL put out a bulletin saying: "Please disregard previous SSH notice, error caused by system testing."

Depreciation wipes out equipment

Heritage Gold's annual report, just out, has the usual complicated descriptions and maps of exploration tenements and their prospects. However, it also devotes some space to its new business, developing and listing e-commerce companies. It has already helped E-cademy list on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, for which it received a fee of $400,000, and is working on doing the same for the Insight Data Group. "Although the principal business of the company remains minerals exploration and mining, currently directed to gold in New Zealand and cobalt in Australia, a proposal to expand its range of business activities will be put to shareholders for consideration at the annual general meeting on 28 August 2000," it says. It looks as if the company thinks shareholders will support e-commerce over prospecting judging by the value of its "field equipment." At March 31, Heritage's equipment, after accumulated depreciation, is valued in the report at just $331 from an original investment of $7,449.

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