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11% position for Sand Grove, by CFD! "The firm employs a traditional, European focused event driven strategy"

And it was Sand Grove who bought them. That is interesting.

Thanks exdividend, that sounds right now I think about it. So would they come back with a better offer in 6 months time? Everything else being equal, I think they probably would, but of course everything else won't be equal in 6 months time (notably we will be past 31st October), so I think those arb players who might be driving the price today are likely to be factoring in a "failure" value (i.e. no counter-bid and CBRE offer gets rejected) which is where they think the shareprice would go to in the very near-term following rejection.

terrace - I'm going to keep pushing back on your assertion about the market assessment of counter-bid. The "market" has to factor in 2 probabilities, that of the bid succeeding if there is no counter-bid and that of a counterbid.
Easier with a worked example, so suppose the probabilities are as follows:
25% chance of counterbid, fair value shareprice if that happens 400p
50% chance of bid succeeding without counterbid, fair value 350p
25% chance of bid failing without counterbid, fair value 300p

The overall fair value is 350p with those probabilities and outcomes, yet the market would be assigning a 25% probability to counter-bid. You cannot make statements (IMO) about how the market is valuing the likelihood of a counterbid unless you are factoring in credible downside as well as upside outcomes.

sain, having declared their bid as "final", CBRE cannot increase it (this time round) unless a counter-bid comes in. They would have to wait until they are free under the takeover code to make a new offer (1 year?).

"where the statement concerned includes reference to the fact that the terms of the possible offer “will not be increased” or are “final” or uses a similar expression, the potential offeror will not be allowed subsequently to make an offer on better terms."

Terrace - if your question was aimed at me, my central case remains that the deal goes through with CBRE on the terms published. I sold around 1/3 of my TEF holding and reinvested the proceeds in Crest on that basis. But I think there are small but still meaningful alternative possibilities: on the upside that a counter-bid comes in and maybe even results in a bidding war/auction; and on the downside that shareholders reject the CBRE offer and because it was "final" CBRE has to walk (and the shareprice falls back).
A sale by Octopus could be a gamechanger. If it turns out that (the apparent sale yesterday) was just an internal transfer between Octopus legal entities then it will probably be of no significance. But if it was to a third party then things get interesting. There appear to have been balancing transactions at the same price yesterday (one of 80,000 shares and the other for the balance of Octopus' holding less the 80,000). If the bigger transaction was to a single company then we should see the dealing declaration by 3:30pm today. Is it a company wanting to promote (or even make) a competing offer, or is it a company wanting just to frustrate the CBRE offer?

But have apparently traded the rest today.

Rapper - if you were going to facilitate a bid for the company by letting your 10% stake go, you would want more than a 1p premium to the existing bid price wouldn't you? I suppose it's possible they're putting it into some sort of Newco that will then bid, so that they will retain at least some of the ownership, but I don't see why they would potentially tip their hand that way.

So it could just be for tax or other reasons they want to get the stake into a different legal entity before the deal goes through.

Or it could perhaps be that they're selling to someone who doesn't want the bid to go through, but doesn't have a counterbidder lined up i.e. someone who wants to see the bid fail and Tef retain its independence and is going to vote the shares against the deal. In that scenario, you perhaps wouldn't expect Octopus to get the chunky premium that it would demand if it were going to facilitate a counterbid that it wouldn't then benefit from.

But all speculation, obviously.

Daily dealing disclosure to show that that is the Octopus number. 7,450,653 held as of Friday.

7,450,653 share trade gone through (and another one at the same price for 7.4m, presumably the other side). Octopus' last declared position was 7,456,274 shares as far as I can see.
So Octopus moving the holding internally, or have they sold? And if so, who's buying 10% of the company and why?

And in terms of who bought the 1.4m sold by Bank of Montreal at £3.55, or the 1.0m they sold at £3.54 or the 0.5m at £3.53, perhaps they were just split between arbitrage players who each held below 1% after the purchase and so were not obliged to make a dealing declaration. Not the most exciting explanation for long-term shareholders, but difficult to see what else it might have been given the lack of dealing declaration covering such purchases.

Three more Monday's before the vote on 6th August. And the last one is just the day before, which feels like it might be leaving it a bit late. So if we're going to get a counter-offer feels to me like tomorrow or a week tomorrow might be the most likely days.

On the declarations, interesting to see the declarations of Tavira Securities, Samson Rock Capital and Sand Grove Capital Management. Sand Grove took a 1m share (via CFD) long position at 350p, Samson Rock 600k shares (also via CFD) at 350p and Tavira 185k shares (CFD) at around 350p. So we now have around 6% of the shares held between Cigogne, Tavira, Sand Grove and Samson Rock. These companies look to me as though they are buying for the arbitrage, reckoning that 350p is too low for the risked fair value, given the possibility of counter-bid. That doesn't mean they would vote against the CBRE offer though if it is the only one on the table on 6th August.

In theory I think we should have all the opening position declarations by now, although I haven't noticed one from CBRE (presume they would have a nil declaration) or Thames River.
My tally is around 40% (plus some shares in share schemes on the Telford OPD that I haven't tried to add up).

Still not really any wiser as to who was buying the big chunks sold by Bank of Montreal, Schroders and Wise Funds, other than perhaps Cicogne buying most of the 4th July Schroders sale. Possibly Tavira, who went over the 1% threshold yesterday by increasing a CFD long, might have picked some up earlier.

But no sign of someone aggressively building a material position, so just have to wait and hope for an announcement by a potential counter-bidder sometime before 6th August.

Am I happy with 350p?

If that gets it into play and leads to a counterbid and an auction I will be very happy!

If 350p is the winning bid then I am less happy - it does feel a very low premium given the situation.

But I see Tef in my portfolio as a bit of diversification (away from Crest) and would probably reinvest the proceeds in Crest or another housebuilder. In fact I had already unwound a partial swap out of Crest into Tef (put on after the Tef profit warning) before the offer arrived. So I wouldn't see it as being cashed out at a relatively low point, but as a bit of a windfall allowing me to get more of another housebuilder than I might have expected.

And if Tef going at 350p puts a bit of an M&A premium into Crest then that also will be welcome.

So I would be tempted to vote for the deal (or sell in the market just ahead of the vote) rather than risk a "no" vote without a counter offer.

terrace - the fact that it is a tiny fraction above 350p can equally well be explained by the symmetrical distribution though. i.e. the chance of it crashing to 250p if shareholders reject the bid without a counter-offer might be balancing the chance of it soaring to 450p if we get an auction for the company.
In terms of the stockbroker, well I guess everyone's got an opinion and the stockbroker's may well be correct. I'm just suggesting why your assessment of the market pricing a counter-bid at 33/1 might not necessarily be correct...

So we got the Tef OPD today, CBRE's still to come, presumably tomorrow. With the Wisemans, the Trims and Robert Stokes we're up to around 34% declared by my calculations (plus a bit more for the other PDMRs' various holdings), which still feels to me like a surprisingly low % at this stage of the game.

And still no sign of who has been mopping up the big sells to keep the shareprice above the offer price.

terrace, how do you get to 33/1 for a counter-bid?

Personally I think you could reasonably argue for a fairly symmetrical distribution around a most likely case of the bid going through, with the alternatives being (A) counter-bid or (B) shareholders voting the CBRE deal down with upside shareprice expectation on A and downside shareprice expectation on B being broadly equal relative to the 350p offer. Now whether the market is valuing A and B as 25% possibilities or 1% possibilities I don't know, but it doesn't matter in the sense that fair value comes out at around the offer price.

The "offer period" commenced at 07:00 on 3rd July. Opening Position Declarations (OPDs) have to be made no later than 3:30pm on the 10th business day following the commencement of the offer period.
So OPDs by 3:30pm tomorrow (if 3rd July counts as the 1st business day) or the day after (if 4th July is the 1st business day).
OPDs are still due, I think, from Telford, CBRE and anyone holding more than 1% of TEF who hasn't yet declared.

Dealing disclosures are supposed to be in by 3:30pm on the day after the dealing (for 1%+ holders), but sometimes a whole lot of dealing disclosures for a holder arrive with the OPD.

In any event, we're not far away from the deadline now, under any reasonable interpretation, I think.

Perhaps just to finish the train of thought, who might the target be if they really were trying to provoke a bid from another party by using CBRE as a stalking horse?

I would have thought the most obvious candidates were current strategic BTR partners who might not take kindly to CBRE muscling in.

Is that credible?

The other point to make here, I think, is that as we are now getting well through the 10 business day period for declaring opening positions, 27% is a very low percentage of shares to have been declared, when there appears to be only Thames River of the previously identified significant shareholders still to declare.

How are Telford's advisers going to make a call on whether the 75% threshold will be achieved if such a large proportion of shares remains in the hands of undeclared shareholders? I presume they are going to have to get hold of the register and start ringing round at the sub-1% holding level. And what do they do if their analysis indicates they are unlikely to reach the passmark, given that CBRE has declared its offer "final"?

Is there still a chance the board accepted CBRE's offer and agreed to the "final" qualification in the expectation of it being simply a stalking horse for a better offer, that wouldn't emerge unless they first got the CBRE firm offer on the table? If you really wanted to entertain "conspiracy" theories you could even hypothesise that the luke-warm recommendation ("represents fair value") and failure to get even a letter of intent from any institutional shareholder was designed to give a good chance of rejection of the offer, should the counter-bid not emerge.