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Uksteveg - when funds like Vaneck make an in-advance notification of their need to purchase shares in illiquid markets then they are simply making it easy for the market makers to spike the price up. The Vaneck shareholders get taken for a ride. Vaneck then lends out those shares to shorters, who make a killing on the way back down to the original equilibrium. Vaneck gets paid a fee by the shorters for the loan of the shares and then AFTER TAKING A LENDERS FEE they put the money back into the fund. I'm not sure Vaneck fundholders are getting a good deal, with their securities being bought high, then sold low, and then being handed a measly 1.6% for their trouble.

Enough on the subject of Vaneck for now. As Pdub says we should get back to talking about what an incredible year it has been for Bushveld Minerals.

Let's start in January 2019:-

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vametco-mine-visit-407

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vametco-processing-plant-visit-408

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/eskom-battery-site-visit-410

systematic INability to run the fund correctly

well indeed gkb47 - very dumb and that might also explain how their fund has managed to do quite so incredibly badly over the last 5 years (down 75%). Basically fundholders are getting rinsed in favour of those that are borrowing and shorting the shares that Vaneck tends to go out and buy at a premium.

Rinse and repeat. Can continue as long as foolish investors continue running to Vaneck waving their dollar bills desperate to invest in the sexy-hot strategic metals sector without bothering to do a blind bit of research into the sector or the performance of the Vaneck funds.

Some may be looking at the fund performance and thinking, gosh it must REALLY be ready to bounce back now. However the continual exponential declining performance of the fund might actually simply be a reflection of a systematic ability to run the fund correctly or of the strategic mistake in lending out shares for shorting of stocks held on illiquid markets. Fund share prices do not behave in the same way that company share prices do - the latter can have an underlying strategic plan and simply have its SP manipulated down by market trading (where have we seen that ?) but a fund that has a large number of holdings spread across multiple companies and markets should not experience from those sorts of short term troughs and their associated bouncebacks.

Uksteveg - yes that is possible. Back in July though Vaneck explicitly took BMN out of their MVREMXTR inde - on this occasion that has not happened. Maybe it will happen later but if so then that is quite strange as last time the Index change happened before the change in holding.

was the excess of Buys vs Sells yesterday.

gkb47 - yes as you may recall when the TPEP short position was published in the summer it coincided with the point that Vaneck removed BMN from their MVREMXTR index so should have sold all their BMN holdings. However they did not do so and maintained C 4-5M from July to October, because it would be fair to surmise those shares had been loaned out.

Of course the Vaneck MVREMXTR index still has BMN as having a weighting of 2.43% (as of 20th Dec).

The 3.1M BMN shares that Vaneck REMX currently has left only amounts to 0.42% of their Fund's NAV - hence unless they revise their index again it would seem that they need to acquire 14.8M more BMN shares just to get back to the right level.

After messing up so badly on their last acquisition spree (perhaps exacerbated by lending out those shares to shorters) perhaps they are looking to get the next lot over a more extended period of time. If they do not wish to undermine their fundholders holdings I would suggest perhaps NOT loaning their holdings on illiquid markets out to those who would simply try and destroy the value of those holdings.

This strategy may be behind the reduction in large numbers of their other holdings - eg China Molybdenum sold down by 4.9% , Largo sold down by almost 10% in the last week or so - they need to have enough spare cash to buy back BMN at this low level. I must say it doesn't strike one as a well run vehicle.

I know that this Vaneck thing is a sideshow and we should get back to talking about BMN - but their current behaviour is having a short term effect on the share price and the Vaneck dividend only comes up once a year so lets try and bring this discussion to a conclusion.

According to SeekingAlpha on the 27th November Vaneck declared a yearly dividend of $0.22, on a unit value of close to $13 (1.7%) there are c. 13.8M shares outstanding so this values their fund at around $179M. In order to pay the dividend they needed a tad over $3M cash.

The (entirely coincidentally) 13.8M BMN shares they sold since last Tuesday would have netted them around £3M - so it seems there is little need for them to sell down any further. They bought the bulk of those in the last 10 days of October at around 27p and have now just sold them at around 20p so effectively they have managed to lose about 1/3rd of their entire dividend payment in a single, effectively forced, sale.

Investing genius of the highest order, clearly.

Interestingly the BMN share price was 24p on the 27th of November and has been under almost continuous downward pressure since then so I wonder if BMN shares were targetted as one of the most liquid ones in the Vaneck portfolio, and one, which curiously, if liquidated would cover the christmas dividend for the (one would hope) dwindling band of Vaneck ETF fundholders.

YTSS that short position only had to be disclosed because it went above the FCA public reporting threshold - slightly smaller sized short positions can stay below this level.

Now it is 2,678,812 more Buys than Sells

also I wonder how significant the "fees payable to the lending agent" are .......

I notice their section on 'Securities Lending'

VanEck Vectors Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) may lend securities to generate additional income which may help reduce expenses. All net proceeds earned by VanEck Vectors ETFs in the securities lending process are allocated to the applicable ETF after subtracting fees payable to the lending agent.

Securities lending is an established practice that involves the lending of securities from a lender (“Fund”) to a third-party (“Borrower”). In return, the Borrower posts collateral — typically cash or U.S. Government securities — in an amount equal to at least 102% of the value of the borrowed securities. Over the course of the loan term, the Fund will receive any interest or dividends on the securities loaned. Moreover, the Borrower will pay a fee, as well as any interest earned on the investment of the cash collateral.

The primary risk in securities lending is that a Borrower may default on its commitment to return securities that are on loan. If this occurs and the value of the liquidated collateral does not exceed the cost of repurchasing the securities, the Fund may suffer a loss with respect to the shortfall. This risk and others are described in more detail in the statutory prospectus, under "Lending Portfolio Securities".

It would appear to me that the risk that the borrower of shares lent out for shorting operations won't return them is not the only risk that is presented to a fundholder. How about having your shares "used to systematically undermine the value of your shareholding via repeated rinse-and-repeat shorting operations" being considered as a risk to fund holders ?

They have a distribution to pay out at the end of this week so are having to do their best to scrabble enough cash together

Now it is 2,387,552 more Buys than Sells

JD1972 - normally they can fall back on the weasel "we're only making a market" excuse - but this time there is sufficient evidence to pick apart that excuse.

That's what you get when you have two years of non-stop trade analysis, virtually every single day.

There may be some that may have concluded that just because I don't bother to publish it on the Bushveld Perspective every single day that it is still not being done. This statement can be verified by numerous posters here and elsewhere.

Such a mistaken belief might lead them to conclude that they can continue with their normal behaviour without sanction. We shall see.

UKsteveg - actually it is delayed BUYS that have just appeared. This brings the excess of Buys today to 2,198,053

Now the imbalance of trades is 2,084,159 more Buys than Sells

Now it is 1,862,212 more Buys than Sells

now it is 1,620,836 more Buys than Sells.

Harts - maybe maybe not, but they can't keep dipping into their bag of shares forever. Eventually they run out.