Cettire on fire
Guess who bought Cat Rock's Cettire shares? Plus, the race to lead Air New Zealand.
On Tuesday, Barrenjoey's ECM desk executed a trade of 20 million Cettire shares, or 5.3 per cent of the controversial luxury e-tailer. As the market learned on Wednesday, the seller was Cat Rock, until then Cettire's second-largest institutional shareholder (after Phil King's Regal Funds Management).
What the market wasn't told, but I've since learned, is that the buyer of most of those shares was Opal Capital Management, which was closing out part of its large short position to comply with some client mandates. Opal has sat very quietly on a big Cettire short as the stock sank from almost $5 last year. It was buying from Cat Rock at 42¢.
What's funny about that is that Opal's founder and chief investment officer, Omkar Joshi, is a former portfolio manager at Regal. He left in 2018, two years before Regal bought into Cettire's IPO.
As I've outlined previously, Regal's Cettire stake in March 2024 was worth $250 million. It then bought a further $14 million of shares. At the closing bell on Friday, Regal's 15 per cent stake was worth just $15 million. The losses for Regal's fund clients would be unrivalled if not for King's other recent catastrophic investment: in insolvent biotech Opthea.
Joe Aston
Joe Aston