Liquidity & Technical
Liquidity & Technical
Convatec is a roughly £4.6B FTSE 250 medical-device name with normal daily turnover of about £17M — institutionally tradable for funds up to roughly £340M building a 5% position over five days, but capacity-constrained beyond that. The tape says wait: price has been below the 200-day moving average since the August 2025 death cross, just printed a 52-week low at 209.8p on 30 April, and 30-day realized volatility has pushed past the stressed-regime band — the single +7.6% bar on 4 May is a bounce off oversold levels on negligible volume, not a regime change.
1. Portfolio implementation verdict
5-day capacity (£M, 20% ADV)
Largest 5d position (% mcap)
Fund AUM for 5% pos (£M)
ADV 20d / Mcap (%)
Technical stance (-3 to +3)
Liquidity is fine. Tape is not. Convatec absorbs institutional size at any reasonable fund weight below roughly £500M AUM at 5% positions; the binding constraint here is the trend, not the order book. A sub-200-day downtrend confirmed by an active death cross, distribution-style volume on the way down, and stressed realized volatility argues for waiting on a clean reclaim of 235p before adding, or stepping aside if 210p breaks decisively.
The "Illiquid / specialist only" flag carried in the underlying manifest is a rounding artifact (the largest 5-day-tradeable position rounds to under 1% of market cap, tripping a discrete threshold). The underlying numbers — £17M ADV, 102% annual turnover, 1.04% median daily range, 100% volume coverage over the last 60 sessions — describe a normal mid-cap UK index name, not an illiquid specialist stock.
2. Price snapshot
Last close (pence)
YTD return (%)
1-year return (%)
52-week position (%)
Beta (peer-group proxy)
Latest close 226p, 52-week range 209.8p – 295.6p, all-time high 344.3p (March 2017). The 18.9% 52-week percentile says price is sitting in the bottom fifth of its trailing year; the negative 1-year and YTD prints confirm a name that has spent the last twelve months giving back the 2025 rally. Beta is shown as a peer-group proxy because no benchmark beta was computed in the run.
3. Price regime — full history with 50/200 SMAs
Most recent death cross: 27 August 2025. The 50d crossed below the 200d, the 200d itself rolled over in October 2025, and price is currently 3.6% below the 200d. Two prior death crosses (July 2024, October 2023) were both followed by sideways or lower trade for several months before any reclaim.
Price is below the 200-day. A decade of history shows three regimes: the 2017 IPO collapse (£3.40 → £1.40 in fourteen months), a five-year £1.40 – £2.65 range, and the early-2025 breakout to a £2.96 high that has now fully retraced. Today's print sits below the post-IPO mid-range — this is a downtrend, not consolidation.
4. Relative path — 3-year rebased
No FTSE-250 or sector-ETF series was returned for this run, so a true relative-strength comparison is not available; the chart shows the company's own three-year path. Across the window the stock printed a +37% peak in May 2025 and has since given back almost all of it, ending the period at +6.7%.
The shape that matters: a clean uptrend from October 2024 to May 2025 (+36% in seven months), a sharp July 2025 break (-19% in one month), and a choppy lower-high pattern through the latest data. The current move is the third lower swing low in nine months — a sequence that historically reverses only after a base forms.
5. Momentum — RSI(14) and MACD histogram
RSI bounced from 35 (oversold) on 30 April to 51 on the 4 May print — a single-bar rebound to neutral, not a momentum reset. MACD line is at -3.55 against a -2.29 signal; the histogram has improved from -2.35 to -1.25 over four sessions, hinting at a near-term tactical bounce, but neither line nor histogram is positive yet. Near-term: tactical bounce in progress; intermediate-term momentum still bearish.
6. Volume, conviction, and volatility regime
The two largest down-volume sessions of the last six weeks are 21 April (16.99M shares, -2.2% close) and 24 April (16.27M shares, -2.1%) — that is distribution, not capitulation. The 4 May +7.6% bar prints on 7,500 shares, an obvious data artifact rather than a real institutional bid; do not weight it. The most recent unusual-volume spike, 21 November 2025 at 6.79× the 50-day average, sits inside the 10-month trading update window, and the price closed -0.85% — sellers met the news.
The 10-year regime bands sit at p20 = 19.4%, p50 = 25.5%, and p80 = 31.8%. Current realized volatility of 39.6% sits above the stressed band, near the highest non-tail readings of the past five years (excluding the November 2024 spike). The market is repricing risk on this name — the trend is being confirmed by a wider risk premium, not absorbed by calmer trade.
7. Institutional liquidity panel
ADV 20d (M shares)
ADV 20d (£M)
ADV 60d (M shares)
ADV / Mcap (%)
Annual turnover (%)
A 102% annual turnover ratio (full float traded once per year), 0.37% ADV-to-market-cap, and 100% volume coverage over the last 60 sessions place this name comfortably within "institutionally tradable" parameters for any UK mid-cap mandate. The £4.6B market cap is calculated from 2.034B shares × 226p.
Fund-capacity scenarios
At normal 20% ADV participation, a fund building over five trading days gets £16.9M of stock — sufficient for a 5% position in roughly £340M of AUM, or a 2% position in roughly £845M of AUM. At a more conservative 10% ADV participation those numbers halve to £170M / £420M respectively. Funds materially above £1B AUM running 5%+ positions need to plan multi-week phased entries rather than five-day blocks.
Liquidation runway — issuer-level positions
A 0.5% issuer-level holding (£23M) clears in seven trading days at 20% ADV — the cleanest exit profile. A 1% holding takes about three weeks, and a 2% holding takes more than a month at the same participation rate. Anything above 1% becomes a meaningful disclosure event in itself (DTR-5 reporting at 3% in the UK) and should be modelled with patient block execution, not market participation.
Execution friction
The 60-day median daily range is 1.04% — within the comfort zone for institutional execution and well under the 2% threshold that would flag elevated impact cost. Combined with zero zero-volume sessions in the last 60 days, intraday slippage on normal-sized orders should be modest.
The largest size that clears the 5-day threshold at 20% ADV is roughly 0.37% of market cap (£17M); at a more conservative 10% ADV that drops to 0.18% (£8.5M).
8. Technical scorecard and 3–6 month stance
Sum of rows is -4, capped at -3 on the headline scale — bearish, with momentum and relative strength as the only non-negative components.
Stance — 3 to 6 months: bearish
The price action is telling a different story than the recent CMD optimism: a name that ran hard into May 2025 and has since lost the entire breakout, traded below the 200d for over eight months, and just made a fresh 52-week low on heavy distribution-style volume. Momentum is bouncing off oversold but the tactical bounce sits inside an unresolved downtrend. The two levels that matter:
- Bullish invalidation: 235p. A daily close above the 200d (currently 234p) plus a clear move through the 235p shelf would flip the trend label and require taking the long side seriously again.
- Bearish confirmation: 210p. A daily close below the 209.8p 52-week low opens the next zone of support around 195p (2024 trough) and ultimately the 175p area visited in late 2021.
Liquidity is not the constraint. A fund inside roughly £500M AUM building a 5% position over five days at 20% ADV faces no order-book bottleneck; the constraint is the trend, not the tape mechanics. Recommended action: watchlist only. Do not initiate ahead of a 235p reclaim or a clean retest of 210p that holds on diminishing volume; if 210p breaks decisively, step aside and reassess from below.