Ackman is the majority investor in the GSEs commons. This is striking not only in that he has already poured $400.6 million into the GSEs common shares but that he is known for being an extremely fastidious researcher. He is thorough and complete. He also attempts to be dominating figure and can be pointed in his approach to business management and CEO competence. The latter points may be an issue as can be noted by the HerbalLife and JC Penny financial fiascos. At the moment, he, like us, have no shareholder rights and so his next moves will be interesting to say the least.
In any case, he is the main one in the corner for the commons.
Berkowitz, Richard Perry, John Paulson and The Carlyle Group/Claren Road Asset Management are the ones moving around slowly the preferred shares.
The one factor theories being aired about the drop in the common shares price is curious. Filling gaps, spinning top candles, shorting, mm walk downs for accumulation, hedge fund buddies trying to get in a lower prices, Corker's statement, hedge funds dumping, chart corrections, etc. are singular stabs in the dark at the elusive activities of the opaque inter-dealer run OTC marketplace serving manually and electronically that always invisible to the retail investor paid order flow and subscription services.
For example does anyone imagine that Ackman is sitting at computer terminal day trading? Is he the one who bought the 115 million GSE common shares noted in the trading record from Oct 7th to November 14th? If he is not doing it, who is buying and scaling up the prices? Is a market maker being used? An ECN. Is he buying from a dark pool?