France Télécom Out of the block

Another block trade, another nail-baiting day for the banks on risk. Five banks are trying to offload E3.5bn to E4.5bn of France Télécom shares on behalf of the French Treasury. They are marketing the shares in a price range of E22.50 to E22.85. At the bottom of the range, that’s a discount of only 1.7% to Friday’s closing price. That doesn’t look very generous. This is a lot of stock for the market to digest, representing almost 30 days’ average trading volume. The offering also seems to have t...