Thursday, October 27, 2005

Insider trading



I came out the Nation Centre building at lunch time today and almost bumped into Mr. Okomo Okello, the Chairman of Serena Hotels (and Barclays Bank). I was tempted to ask him when the proposed restructuring of Serena that the board had told us about at the April AGM would ever take place (they had said in a few months) – but divulding such information to me would be insider trading, and would he even talk to stranger?

Still I was reminded that I wish had bought more Serena shares after that AGM instead of East African Breweries. Serena shares have gone from 52 shillings to a high of 90, and today closed up 4.5 shillings at 85.5 (almost 6% in one day).

5 comments:

Unknown said...

sorry for the forgone opportunity on Serena.I can empathise with you in that I had a chance to buy mumias shares when they were valued at sh4 i opted to do something else with my money and the stock went up to sh.22 three months later.
We allmake mistakes and hopefully we learn from them but then again some things are difficult to see/predict

Anonymous said...

The trigger for buying TPS was, I suspect, the announcement by Kingdom Holdings of the purchase of the old Lornrho portfolio.

bankelele said...

Tomas: Not just Mumias, there are people who cashed out of KQ at 40 and 60, feeling that this was teh best they would get.

Aly-Khan Satchu: I disagree. TPS was well up in the 70's long before the Kingdom announcement, and I don't see how the two companies are related.

Anonymous said...

I beg to differ because I remember dashing to my broker on the announcement and my first buy was at 54.00 Please refer to the chart
http://www.firstglobalselect.com/scripts/cgiip.wsc/globalone/htm/quote_and_news.r?pisharetype-id=6820

And the reason they are connected is that there is no similar 4/5 star brand with such an impressive footprint and the Kingdom purchase put a floor under its valuation which remains far too low even now. Its less than 50,000,000 dollars, which on any metric is ridiculous.


By the way, it is a very good site.

bankelele said...

Aly-Khan Satchu: I still maintain that there is no link between Serena shares and the kingdom acquisition of the Lonrho. Serena is a publicly traded company, and valued by the market. Prince Al-Waleed & Kingdom have a history of scopping "under-valued" assets, but the investment have not always paid off in recent years.

PS: Firstglobalselect is a great site

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