Morgan Stanley’s money managers, entrusted with navigating the world’s financial markets with all kinds of sophisticated strategies, evidently have a little problem with long division.

On Thursday the big Wall Street bank announced that its investment management division snapped up a bigger stake in Brookfield Infrastructure Partners (BIP) than intended. Nearly twice as much.

Morgan received shares of BIP during the January spin-off by Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management and then bought additional shares in the market. 

Yet what in March was reported to be a 12.6 percent stake in the infrastructure firm was, in reality, a 23.3 percent stake, according to a press release Thursday. That pushes it over the 20 percent threshold for regulatory disclosure requirements. Morgan Stanley blamed the mistake on bad data.

“The foregoing calculation was based on third party market data sources, which stated the issuer had approximately 39.2 million units outstanding,” Morgan said in the statement. Only recently, the firm said, did it learn BIP only had just 23.3 million units.

As a result, Morgan said it will now sell some of its 5.2 million BIP units to get below 20 percent. Using rough numbers, Reuters estimates Morgan needs to sell 530,000 units.  BIP units fell 2 percent on early NYSE trading.

Next time, maybe the firm will look at Brookfield’s financial reports. Or pick up the phone. Morgan Stanley declined to comment beyond its statement.

(Reuters photo)