A trading floor in Toronto.FRED LUM/The Globe and Mail
A weight that's been sitting on shares of Lumenpulse Inc. has been lifted.
Lumenpulse's initial public offering earlier this year was hot, but its latest offering was not. Investors shunned Lumenpulse's bankers when they tried to sell stock for $19.50 a share last month.
That left the financiers sitting on a lot of unsold shares, and a weight on Lumenpulse's share price. The stock has consistently traded below the $19.50 a share offering price, with investors well aware that the unsold stock was out there and that the banks would eventually have to unload it at a discount.
That's what happened Thursday morning, as the syndicate of bankers did what is known as a "clean up" of the unsold stock. A block of 100,900 shares changed hands before the market opened, at a price of $17.25. Canaccord Genuity, one of the joint lead bookrunners on the stock sale, was the broker on the block trade. (National Bank Financial was the other lead.)
The offering was not to raise money for Lumenpulse, but for some if its biggest shareholders. As in all "bought deals," the selling shareholders get their money. It's the banks that buy the stock and agree to resell it to investors that take the hit.
In this case, the math suggests that the banks will take a hit of about $200,000 on that final block, which will eat into their profits from the transaction.
The banks were paid a fee of $2.6-million, according to offering documents.