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A 10am profit warning - what's all that about then? And they still can't convert the Kitbag sale. All eyes on Sports Direct I guess now.

LaFerrari - if you check again now you will find the short-tracker has been updated for last night's change in the FCA spreadsheet. Odey made a significant reduction in their short on 26th January, reducing from 1.81% to 1.46%. Hopefully the start of a trend! Renewed talk of M&A (FT/Telegraph comments on Ilead) plus trading update due on Tuesday could mean some interest in taking profits among the shorts...

Perhaps a change for the current financial year? The July statement was made for the AGM so they would probably want to keep that anyway but might have decided to drop the January one. But it could be something else completely...

shroder - football has a link on advfn. There's a reuters article quoting a citi note on European media

Perhaps no trading update because they've decided to take advantage of the removal of the requirement to produce Interim Management Statements?

I don't know. Looking at their share price woes, a transformative acquisition (as opposed to one which just tries to give them negotiation leverage over a retail outlet for their products) might be just the thing they think they need. The question is whether they think taking control of Findel with its distribution assets and know-how would be transformative for them.

Nice to see another institution above 5%. Where did the shares come from though? Are we still due a holdings notice from the seller?

FT is now quoting 1st December 2015 data for TD Direct and HL Stockbrokers which suggests (on the assumption these are nominee accounts and representative of more general private investor sentiment) that private investors may have been increasing their holdings through the 3 months to 1st December 2015: TD Direct 6.2% 1st December 2014 5.7% 2nd March 2015 4.9% 1st June 2015 4.9% 1st Sept 2015 5.1% 1st Dec 2015 Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers 5.2% 1st December 2014 5.2% 2nd March 2015 4.7% 1st June 2015 4.7% 1st Sept 2015 4.9% 1st Dec 2015 Incidentally, these 1st Dec 2015 figures are I think the same that Shroder was quoting in his 15th Dec post - so he must have better data access than me...

Quotes N+1 Singer analyst Matthew McEachran doing his best to help the Findel share price... “It is difficult to second guess Sports Direct but the most logical step might be a bid for Findel in order to acquire Express Gifts. It could bring a huge strategic step change. At the moment there is a lot of investor concern about growth at Sports Direct. It is falling short of its targets and it needs to make acquisitions. Findel looks like it could fit the bill,” he said.

Fascinating. Not just blame, but a suggestion that they've been let down (or perhaps even double-crossed) by Toscafund and Schroders. However, they don't make reference to threatening to walk away from negotiations on broader cooperation if Findel went ahead with the sale of Kitbag to someone else. I think Toscafund and Schroders could reasonably point to that (if it is true) as justification for changing their mind on the SDI director. The game's not over here IMO. Findel need their proposed buyer to get its financing sorted out and follow through on Kitbag purchase, otherwise the board is going to look rather silly to say the least. And Sports Direct don't seem to have given any clues as to what their next move will be - will this resentment at Toscafund and Schroders behaviour lead them to want to seek revenge by undermining the Findel share price, or do they see enough value in Findel to want to make an offer for the whole company?

Correction to table in earlier post: The last Barclays data in the FT markets sheet is still as of 1st June, not 1st September.

Shroder. Yes, I have printouts of old FT Markets shareholder summaries. For what I presume are nominee accounts the sequence data is: Barclays 7.3% 1st December 2014 7.0% 2nd March 2015 6.5% 1st June 2015 6.5% 1st Sept 2015 TD Direct 6.2% 1st December 2014 5.7% 2nd March 2015 4.9% 1st June 2015 4.9% 1st Sept 2015 Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers 5.2% 1st December 2014 5.2% 2nd March 2015 4.7% 1st June 2015 4.7% 1st Sept 2015 There has also been Hargreaves Lansdown Asset Management quoted at a fairly steady 2.9%/2.8%, but no data after 1st June and Hargreaves Lansdown Fund Managers quoted once for 1st June at 2.8% when HL Asset Management wasn't quoted (so I presume it was the same set of underlying PI accounts). Jarvis Investment Management has also appeared on the FT list more recently, but no trend data. The Halifax Share Dealing data (the 3.45%) was from the blinkx website, but that doesn't have a date associated with it and doesn't appear to have been updated since April. Looking at the data in aggregate it seems fairly clear to me that PI's were selling down in the first half of this year at least. The position seemed fairly stable though between 1st June and 1st September.

I suppose it is too much to hope that blinkx might put out a press release when this is paid and state that they have chosen to pay it in cash rather than stock because the board think the current share price significantly undervalues the company? Original press release: "an additional $5m in cash or stock at the Company’s option, payable on the first anniversary of the transaction" Annual Report: "Consideration was entirely for cash, totaling $20 million, of which $15 million was paid and $5 million is payable 12 months from the closing date of the transaction."

I doubt they'd believe they could get it for £2. If Toscafund and Schroders sold the initial stake to them for £2 then I think all 3 companies would expect a premium over that to be paid for control (absent a material change in the outlook for Findel). But the point was just that a £2.50 (for example) bid would look better if the share price were sub £2, than it would if it were at £2.30. The point of the sale (in the scenario where SDI were interested in control) would just be to make shareholders think about where the share price might go if SDI sold the rest of their holding.

If SDI have sold enough to take them through another % hurdle then there will be a holdings notice in due course. But it could just be that the market is reacting to news of their earlier sale and taking the bid premium out of the price. And if I were SDI and I were thinking of making a bid for the company, then selling some shares first so that the price loses its bid premium might be an appealing idea. i.e. If they sell a small % of their holding (which they have) the price might go back to what it was before they bought in (which it has), which would allow them to present any offer as being a bigger premium to the current price than if they hadn't sold.

Well that didn't take long. Here we are already at around the 200p level. Which for me begs the question of: If Sports Direct really wanted out, why did they start with such a relatively small sale, given the risk they must have foreseen on the share price, once the news broke? Wouldn't it have been better to wait until they could persuade an institution or another strategic buyer to take a bigger chunk at a higher price? So I still think this is a tactical move, not the end of the game.

I would guess this is meant just as a tactical negotiating ploy, but there must be a risk that this could ultimately lead to SDI's exit. Toscafund is known as an activist investor and my working assumption is that Toscafund was happy for SDI to come in because Toscafund saw either an opportunity to add value to Findel by getting SDI hooked into the business or it saw an opportunity for SDI to buy the business outright (or both). The implication from the advfn trade reporting and the holdings notices is that SDI bought their shares at 200p from Toscafund and Schroders on 25th September. There is no 1m share trade reported for 2nd December but some biggish trades went through at about 235p/236p. The question is what happens if SDI wants to exit? Given the prices reported for 2nd December it looks like they sold down at a healthy profit (and they have actually got rid of nearly 1.5m in total since their initial declaration of 16.4m). But if the price drops below the 200p presumed purchase price, would Toscafund and Schroders buy back in the absence of other buyers? I would assume they would do their best to get SDI to bid for the company and so might be unwilling to step in to buy back SDI's shares unless at a big discount - i.e. try to get SDI into the position it sees more downside from dumping shares at a loss than in just bidding for the company. SDI on the other hand may well be prepared to use the threat of driving down the share price through sustained selling in order to try to get what it wants from Findel. All set up for a game of chicken and it promises to be an interesting and perhaps bumpy ride. My speculation only. Please do your own research.

skindle - they declared at 29.2% (24.8m shares) on 1st July, but if you read their latest holdings notice (29th September) they declare the position immediately before the transaction ("Situation previous to the triggering transaction: Number of shares/number of voting rights") and you can see that it had risen to approx. 25.9m shares & voting rights. If you calculate the % of voting rights based on this declared position you get fractionally over 30% I think. The "other funds" is just the Toscafund declaration - they declare on behalf of 2 of their own funds plus Pegasus and Montlake Pegasus.

That is spooky looking at that site and thinking it's an independent company! RadiumOne has been around for some time - I used to use it as a comparator to Burst Media when looking at ComScore rankings. However, does anyone know when they started using the current RhythmOne-like branding? If you look at Michael Mulvey's Linkedin profile it describes him as Creative Director at RadiumOne, based in the San Francisco Bay area, and says that "In the summer of 2014, I lead the rebranding of our product suite as well as the rebranding of the company at large. This involved coordination...externally with our creative agency and other outside vendors." So what are the chances blinkx and RadiumOne were pitched by the same creatives when they were considering rebranding in 2014? Maybe RadiumOne would be a good candidate for the "merger of equals" given the head start the merged entity would have on branding issues...

I bought some more this morning - went through on ICAP though so apparently not showing on some trades listings. Looking back at Toscafund's 29th September holdings notice, it says they were at 25,941,727 shares & voting rights before the transaction. If I compare this with the total number of voting rights of 86,442,534 from the general meeting document ("voting rights"), I calculate Toscafund's voting rights before the transaction must have been 30.01%. Wouldn't this ordinarily have put them on the hook for a mandatory takeover? Or does the fact that they were buying for the Pegasus funds as well as Tosca funds exempt them in this case?