Hi, I just spoke to someone at Contact and in the end, spoke to...

Hi, I just spoke to someone at Contact and in the end, spoke to one of the managers. Really I understand what they say in that - size at this end of town is key but really I don't think that is so after say $300 million. A low MER is indicative of the amount of money you have to invest in people to manage the portfolio- they are correct in that Contact has a mandate from a number of companies so the cost is spread or maybe even considered to be a cost for having a partnership style. However, If you are investing in a vanilla portfolio I don't think you should be paying brokers to raise money and at a discount to NTA as that dilutes existing shareholders. So Existing shareholders pay for the drop in share price and the sharing of the excess NTA over the new shares ...

Having spoken to a few people I trust I believe that the trend is for the raising fees to be absorbed by the managers these days but that cannot be done on 0.17% and that is the issue.

I phoned because I really don't want to ride out the bad times in URB only for them to go out there and issue a bundle of shares to outsiders who then get to buy in at a discount and thereby dilute the NTA for all the long-term holders who have backed the team.

The conversation did not make me want to go out there and get BKI but its larger impact is that I will stop buying URB as well - I wont sell but I don't see that I want to keep investing with this risk. I have looked at BKI I don't see the reason to go outside shareholders for funds.

At 30 June 2014, there were 524 million shares in issue.
in March 2018 not quite 4 years later there are 622 million. So between that period, there has been another 100 million shares issued and they are now almost adding another 100 million by this CR.

Don't think that is is the interest of a shareholder.
Add to that you should look to the performance against the benchmarks in my opinion BKI have not done well.