Blackrock’s massive Friday afternoon dump…
As we monitored filings on Friday afternoon, we wondered why EDGAR seemed unusually sluggish. But it wasn’t until late Friday that we realized why: Blackrock (BLK) had done a massive document dump on Friday afternoon of 13G filings related to its acquisition of Barclay’s Global Investors.
We counted over 1,800 13Gs that Blackrock dumped on Friday, which explains why EDGAR might have been a tad bit pokey. The stream started at just after 2 p.m. est and didn’t let up until just after 4:30, when the last one, which reported a 6.5% stake in Vodafone came in. For those less familiar with the 13G, since we don’t often write about these filings, it’s a requirement when ownership exceeds 5% of the outstanding shares. With few rare exceptions, these filings represented new positions for Blackrock since we only counted 11 amended 13Gs, which in itself seems very surprising, given the long list of stocks.
Though it’s hard to tell from the SEC’s EDGAR database the names of those 1,800-plus companies without clicking on each filing (and who has time to click on 1,800 of them?), it’s a bit easier in 10KWizard (now known as Morningstar Document Research). And, indeed, there’s a lot of household names on the list including some big names in tech like Apple (AAPL), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) — several of which Dow Jones picked up on on Friday afternoon. But there’s a lot more names on the list too, including United Technologies (UTX), Toll Brothers (TOL), and even footnoted frequent flyer Martha Stewart Omnimedia (MSO) where Blackrock disclosed a stake of just over 7%.
Actually, a far more interesting project might be trying to figure out who wasn’t on the list since with 1,800-plus filings, just about any company over even a relatively modest market cap — Martha Stewart’s is currently around $240 million — seems to have made the cut.
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Posted in Tags: 13Gs, Friday filings |
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February 3rd, 2010 at 12:32 pm
its not just US shares they are buying they are all over the UK stock markets and even Europe like a rash as well – whats going on?
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:33 pm
they really are snapping up any old trash the sort of fundamentals i wouldnt hesitate to short and massively overvalued to boot
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:38 pm
UPDATE: It has been noted that they closed the acquisition of Barclay’s Global Investors and this dump is a consequence of the update of that transaction. Ok, well and good, but the point remains – they’ve got a book that is now trading against free cash of less than 1% of these disclosures alone. Indeed, it’s even worse – their total trading book, according to some sources, is approaching $4 trillion dollars, yet the firm has a market cap of $40 billion and less than $4 billion in actual cash.
The underlying question remains – if and when something goes wrong, what does Blackrock have available to them to deal with it when they’re managing an asset base larger than that of The Federal Reserve?
Perhaps they have learnt the secret of getting their own printing press
February 4th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
These are the holdings of the iShares ETFs which have been managed by Barclays Global Investors and which now have been transferred to BlackRock.
February 7th, 2010 at 2:19 am
My question is who controls and is the primary owner/investor in Blackrock?
That is what we should all know.
If it’s the old Carlyle Cronies (Saudis/Bushs/Paulsons) then we need to know who is taking financial control of the world.
It’s no joke.
Monopolies no longer just occur within single industries. Concentrations of wealth have gotten so high monopolies can and do extend across companies to segments of the world.
We first saw cross corporate ownership monopolies when it was revealed that oil companies through investment funds controlled auto manufacturers and forced them to build gas guzzlers so they could sell more oil (they made more profits on oil than they lost from the automakers selling gas guzzling cars so they owned the auto manufacture stock not to get returns from that stock but to ensure higher returns from the oil stock.)
We also saw it as carlyle used the oil revenues to spin off riverstone and buy up most of the ethanol corn supplies and now wind power makers again owning their own competition.
The world is getting so small that it is possible for concentrations of wealth controlled by a very few through veiled management funds under different names to control nearly everything all under different names.
The world citizenry needs to develop veil piercing ownership disclosure laws and world wide anti trust laws or we will all be serfs on the kings land once again with no other country excluded.
vivzizi
February 11th, 2010 at 3:11 am
The funds most likely came from China, here’s the fact pattern:
http://prof77.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/did-china-accumulate-5-plus-positions-in-1800-us-companies-through-blackrock/