It works like this:
- As at August 3rd (2q17 MD&A) SAND has 184.514m shares out.
- Today SAND announced that it had so far bought back 3.3m shares in its current buyback program.
- As per the latest filing, Van Eck (among other things the GDX and GDXJ people via Market Vectors) owned 16.0m shares, representing 8.7% of shares out.
- As of last Friday Market Vectors announced it was raising the weighting of SAND in the GXDJ from 1.07% to 1.28%. It’s going to depend on the final price they pay, but where we are today means Van Eck are going to buy around 1.85m shares on Friday.
In other words the float is shrinking by a number that can be calculated by arithmetic. Meanwhile, for more thoughts on SAND and its share buyback program there’s always last week’s post on exactly that subject.