Bankia day one

After having lowered its minimum expectations about 25 per cent to make sure the deal went through (at the worst moment since early 2009 to stage a bank IPO), Bankia made its long awaited debut at the Bolsa de Madrid at 12 o'clock this morning. As the Yahoo! chart shows, BKIA immediately fell off a 6 percent cliff, recovered quickly to around 3.67 euros and proceeded to meander its way upward for the next 4 hours to close unchanged from the 3.75 issue price.




Below, courtesy of Expansión, is a rundown of the brokerages involved in the first hour and twenty minutes of trading.

In the right column, the houses representing sellers - lots of retail customers dumping what their Caja Madrid manager had cajolled them into buying. And who did the buying? J.P. Morgan almost exclusively. Being one of the deal's bookrunners, we wouldn't be a bit surprised if JPM, not wanting to let a touch of retail panic ruin an already bad situation, were buying for their own account. As we said last week... 'Readers could expect banks (even if it turns out to be the book runners themselves) to fill whatever breach there might be.'

Most interesting were the 26 million shares that crossed at 3.72 euros at 15:36.

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