Insititutional interest in Quindell is gathering pace.

LT

their shorts were placed in February, if I recall correctly. So their selling activity hasn't impacted the price since then.

Interesting to see the reaction to the secrecy of Tiger. But presumably the institutions holding Quindell were more than happy to boost their fee income by lending their customers' shares to unidentifiable third parties.

Seems Tiger Global has been driving the price down shorting with $millions at a time. See news from QPP Google & short video from FT.
Lightningtiger

Had to laugh when I saw who the biggest Quindell shareholder was...couldnt happent oa finer fellow.
I'd go as far as to suggest that Dobell needs "Adult supervision" :)

You reap what you have sown, and Dobell's done plenty of that over the last 18 months plus

Disclosure: - GKP holder.

How much of the ramping, with aggressive shut down of objectors is due to people looking for a steady stream of greater fools to off load onto...

I would say that the original post is a good list of Funds to NOT invest in - if they can't spot something obviously wonky, then are they a safe pair of hands? We all make mistakes, but I doubt there was any proper DD done by the many funds listed above. If they had an even basic red flag list, they wouldn't have gone near this share.

PP.

Well, nobody can say they weren't warned extensively about the enormous red flags at Quindell - e.g. I warned readers here about it no less than 36 times from Dec 2012, in my morning SCVRs, until I was silenced by aggressive bulls threatening to cancel their subscriptions to this site - shameful behaviour!

What I don't understand, is why so many punters, and even a few fund managers, chose to completely ignore all the obvious red flags at Quindell? Possible explanations?

1. Maybe some investors have a presumption that everything companies & brokers tell them must be true? Whereas in reality, I always work on the assumption that companies and brokers will be at best misleading me, and at worst lying through their teeth about the facts & figures. It's our job as investors to find where the bodies are buried, and separate the good companies from the copious amounts of trash, especially on AIM.

2. Some investors want to believe a story that is fed to them, rather than deeply analysing the figures, to see if they make sense. QPP's figures obviously don't make sense, it's blindingly obvious to me - profit margins are unrealistically high, the profit is artificial because it comes from accruing income, debtors have exploded in size, and it constantly burns cash. The narrative to results was confusing & rampy. The founder had form for making disastrous strings of acquisitions, and unnecessarily complicated derivative deals - the only purpose of which could have been to obscure the truth.

3. If people are making money on a share going up, they suspend disbelief, and put aside their misgivings. Once they've made a LOT of money on the shares, they think they are right, even though the fundamentals might be inevitably destined to collapse. What they have actually done is bought into a speculation, doomed to collapse.

4. Bulls and bears became highly polarised, but I noted that the bulls were generally inexperienced investors, and traders, who became very abusive if you questioned them, or disagreed with them. Whereas the bears were generally more experienced, and shrewd. In such a situation, it's nearly always the bears who turn out to be right in the long run, as has happened in this case, as the wheels are now clearly coming off.

On a personal level, I feel very sorry for people who were sucked into this disastrous share, but we're all grown-ups, and people shouldn't be playing the market at all if they don't know what they're doing.

I don't suppose the bulls would have shown the slightest sympathy for me, if my bear position here had turned out to be loss-making! Although I've generally traded this share, mostly being short, but occasionally (after large falls) reversing that into a long position to catch a spike upwards. Then banking the profit there, and going short again once the spike up ran out of steam. It's been an easy share to trade, and of the 60 trades I've made in this company (mostly shorts) in 2014, 58 have been profitable.

The big lessons here are surely that a leopard doesn't change his spots - so management track record is vitally important to research. Also, if a share is teeming with red flags, then for goodness sake don't ignore them!

Regards, Paul.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/markets/article-2839617/Quindell-exit-feels-familiar-ousted-boss-Deja-vu-decade-Terry-forced-out.html

From £2m up to between £1m and £2m down depending on if/when he sold; that has to be a painful loss for anyone. I hope he manged to get at least what's left of his money out ahead of Rob Terry and learnt from the experience.

I'm sure we've all had big losses where we've been misled by the management of companies or had oversized positions where we wish we hadn't - I know I have. It is definitely an area where it is better to fail early in your investment career - losing a few k rather than a few million. (Assuming of course that you learn from the experience.) A good reminder why I run a diversified portfolio no matter how well I think I know a company.

Tiswas - I don't think it's wise to generalise that institutional best ideas don't have alpha from the specific case of Quindell above. It's also not necessarily particularly wise for me to comment on the specific case of Quindell from generalised research results ! I was merely trying to illustrate that some institutions were strongly backing the story.

Cheap stocks tend to beat expensive stocks - that doesn't mean that ALL cheap stocks will beat expensive stocks... quite the contrary. There's masses of idiosyncratic volatility in individual stock names. It's the same with cloning institutional ideas.

The Quindell story of course is yet to fully play out, so the institutions could be very wrong or very right still. I personally have always given this one a very wide berth - it's not had the fundamentals that would attract me and there's a very big red flag on the stock report regarding earnings quality.

The FT seems to have taken an interest in Quindell having tried to visit their NY office & discovered nobody had heard of it.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/36827086-cc49-11e3-bd33-00144feabdc0.html#axzz30AVgf51X

But Quindell had a explanation for the office that wasn't, so that's all OK then...........

Disc: No current or past position - far too exciting for me.

Well the response was comprehensive, but nothing new, in my view, came out

So what will next week bring, its ment to be the USA roadshow

here is a link to an article from todays telegraph, for intrested investors

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/insurance/10790021/The-day-Gotham-Citys-tweet-cost-Quindell-1bn.html

It will be interesting to see qpp response
For me I tend to think that given all the red flags that have existed that the deals that have been signed recently would have had a lot of due diligence.
It's not like blnx where it's probably one part of your business stream. With qpp they become integral so you would do a lot of due diligence.
As a holder I hope it gets sorted soon

No position in QPP currently. However, what sort of research group calls itself Gotham City? Also their website appears to be a WordPress blog with no contact info such as tel, address etc. Yet, the site has the power to halve the mkt cap of a £2Billion company in half an hour.

This appears to be reason for thedrop.

http://gothamcityresearch.com/2014/04/22/quindell-plc-a-country-club-built-on-quicksand/

Looking forward to updated comments from bulls and bears alike!

Good work on the £2m steamy.

Buying into a company because Institutions have been buying, is one of the weakest reasons you can come up with, as many are followers. If you think Instis do detailed research and have real insights, then you're living in cloud cuckoo land. They're mostly closet trackers, and are more concerned about not deviating too far from the benchmark Index.

In general that's true, but there is a lot of alpha in tracking  a few key things in institutional buying.  1.  Big Bets by conviction funds.  2. Increasing institutional herding. 

Looking at Quindell there have been lots of flags across both.   e.g. It's been the highest risk adjusted conviction bet across a lot of funds - like the Premier Ethical fund and quite a few Investec funds. 

This is part of the key drive for the Smart Money add-on to Stockopedia.  Bring some visibility to these kinds of debates.   We are very delayed in the launch due to data issues, but you'll be able to read up on our ideas very soon when we publish the ebook.   See here https://leanpub.com/smartmoney

The one thing I know is that if I had made £2m I wouldn't be pissing my life away on here.

Institutional buying is another box tick - if I recall, Paul was moaning a few months back there was very little institutional holding, which was of course a huge red flag to him.

Hi,

Buying into a company because Institutions have been buying, is one of the weakest reasons you can come up with, as many are followers. If you think Instis do detailed research and have real insights, then you're living in cloud cuckoo land. They're mostly closet trackers, and are more concerned about not deviating too far from the benchmark Index.

My view, is that Quindell is a thinly disguised fraud. It's all about fake whiplash claims, that's where a lot of their profit comes from. Even Cannacord admit that in their research. If you want to invest in something so weak, then go ahead, but accept the consequences.

This will not end well, in my view. The profits are not real, and they will need continuous injections of cash until the Instis realise they've been sold a pup.

Caveat emptor! You have been warned.

Regards, Paul.

Interesting to see no mention of the Prudential having any holdings at all! Seems strange to me. Maybe they need a nudge, another few million purchases could push the price up a bit more perhaps. Although I have increased my holdings in QPP it is not by millions like these guys can.
This must explain why such a high volume of shares in QPP are traded daily, or is it from the likes of us as investors as well having a good slice of the shares?
Anyway I am waiting for the share price to go above 45p and then it should start to motor upwards to try and catch up with my Plus 500.
Cheers from Lightningtiger

Thanks Steamy,

that's a handy resource.

Steamy,

I'm not as proficient as you at finding this stuff. Presumably it's on the internet, have you got a couple of links you could post up to show where you get the numbers on say, Lloyds TSB and Jupiter, which I gather have been buying heavily recently.

Thanks
Ship

Updated full shareholder listing for Funds and Institutional investors inQuindell (LON:QPP)

Blackrock - LifePath Idx Retirmt CF 30,122
Blackrock - LifePath Index 2015 CF 30,973
State Street Global Advisors France SA 36,240
Eagle Asset Management, Inc. 42,445
Blackrock - LifePath Index 2050 45,610
Blackrock - LifePath Index 2035 CF 66,514
Blackrock - LifePath Index 2025 CF 71,547
Blackrock- LifePath Index 2020 CF 89,823
Blackrock - LifePath Index 2040 CF 99,964
iShares Core MSCI Total Intl Stk 112,864
Blackrock - LifePath Index 2030 CF 116,557
Russell Investments Canada Limited 116,700
Russell Investments Japan Co., Ltd. 143,600
iShares MSCI United Kingdom Small-Cap 313639
Jyske Invest Fund Management A/S 342645
Vanguard Investments Australia Ltd 388,993
iShares Core MSCI EAFE 432,379
Principal Diversified Intl 1 506,899
Jyske Bank A/S ADR 812,266
ClearBridge International Small Cap A / Legg Mason Partners Fund Advisor 884,500
Russell Investments Limited 1,059,227
Dorval Finance 1,376,600
Friends Provident Plc 1,463,250
AXA Investment Managers Paris 1,600,000
Principal Diversified Intl SP 1,843,010
Techinvest Limited 1,895,000
Global Investment Selection 1,940,000
Bellevue Asset Management AG 2,000,000
Kames Capital PLC 2,462,754
Allianz Nederland Asset Management B.V. 2500000
RAM Active Investments SA 2,713,299
HBOS Investment Fund Managers Limited 2,741,950
Frankfurt Trust 3,000,000
RBC Regent Fund Managers Limited 3,146,498
Smith & Williamson Inv Mgmt Ltd 3,198,275
Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss 3,203,120
Principal Diversified Intl R2 3,236,112
GLG Partners UK Limited 3,249,456
Reyl Asset Management 3,407,228
Market Vectors Russia Small-Cap ETF 3,414,336
Van Eck Associates Corporation 3,414,336
Charles Stanley 5,035,769 Prudential investments 5,329,389
AEGON Ireland 5,763,100
Sanlam Investment Management Global 6,170,000
FPPE LLP 6,198,275
Slater Investments Limited 6,205,000
3G Capital Management LLC (ex NARS) 6,359,100
Algebris Investments (uk) LLP 7,000,000
Ignis Investment Services Ltd 7,730,608
J.P. Morgan Asset Management (UK) Ltd. 7,823,574
Marlborough Fund Managers Limited 9,168,000
Aegon Asset Management Services Inc 9,376,684
Miton Asset Management Limited 10,460,000
TIAA-CREF Investment Management LLC 11,188,641
River and Mercantile Asset Management 11,870,800
Octopus Investments Nominees 17,781,816
Front Street Capital 18,561,234
Insight Investment Mgmt (Global) Ltd 19,083,886
Principal Life Insurance Co 21,871,431
Premier Fund Managers Limited 24,053,330
Hargreave Hale Limited 26,544,000
F&C Asset Management PLC 27,439,420
Jupiter Unit Trust Managers Ltd. 29,090,000 <---------------------------------increasing
FOUR Capital Partners Limited 32,664,220 <---------------------------------increasing
Lloyds TSB Investments Limited 34689333 <---------------------------------increasing
Artemis Investment Management LLP 39,330,000
STANDARD LIFE INVESTMENTS 43,144,000
Miton Capital Partners Limited 59,286,964
AXA Isle of Man Limited 95,000,000 <---------------------------------increasing
AXA Life Europe 126,657,516 <---------------------------------increasing
Merrill Lynch International 195,324,528
Investec Asset Management 265,735,742
Fidelity Management & Research 299,709,184
M&G Investments 437,500,000


Total held 1,993,194,275 and increasing.

There's no evidence in the information that you posted to support the statement that institutional interest is gathering pace. Had you shown us the holdings 1 year ago, 6 months ago and now we could see how much more interest was being shown.

I'm interested, would you invest in a company just because lots of funds were holding stakes ?

I'm surprised some of this positions are publicly available.

No, just personal effort to research using various sources, RNS, Quindell website, digital look and Morningstar to name a few.

Steamy

are you in charge of the share register at Quindell?