Mr. Market was unimpressed with St. Paul Travelers plan to sell its stake of Nuveen Investments to the public. Shares in the Chicago-based fund firm and asset manager fell 7.7 percent on Monday, the first day of stock trading after the insurer announced its plans on Friday.

The Wall Street Journal speculates that the stock fell in part because investors were expecting the announcement of a secondary offering or sale and had already bid the shares up. A sale to a third party would possibly have driven the stock higher than a secondary offering.

St. Paul Travelers plans may therefore have been a disappointment to some speculators. The stock may also have fallen because traded are concerned about the greater float in the fund firm's shares once the three-stage offering is completed.

Nuveen shares fell $2.92 to $35.08 in price on volume of 1,258,300. That is roughly ten times the average daily volume of 111,000 Nuveen shares traded.

"I think the reason the shares are down is because the market was expecting someone to buy them out," John Leonard, a research analyst at SNL Financial in Charlottesville, Virginia, told the Journal.  

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