Company News

Lakehouse – All Still a Puzzle

I attended a presentation by Lakehouse (LAKE) last night at Mello. I was keen to learn more about this company, and why a requisition to remove directors had been made recently which is a somewhat unusual event. The public announcements and national media comments on it left a lot of questions unanswered which I hoped might be supplied. Here are some notes on the meeting. First some background. Lakehouse is an asset and energy support services group that constructs, improves, maintains and ...

Stanley Gibbons Fund Raising

Stanley Gibbons (SGI) issued a profit warning in late February indicated likely losses for the year, and immediately said they were considering a number of fund raising alternatives. More...

Company Results – Alliance Trust, LSE and Whitbread

This morning Alliance Trust announced their results for the year ending December 2015. This company has been the subject of a campaign by ShareSoc (see https://www.sharesoc.org/alliance.html ) and Elliott Advisors were also aggressive in demanding changes before Alliance's last Annual General Meeting but then committed to a truce for one year. Subsequently the Chairman Karin Forseke and Chief Executive Katherine Garrett-Cox have departed and the board has otherwise been restructured. This followed some years of underperformance which resulted in a wide ...

Fundsmith Annual Meeting – Another Good Performance

Last night was the latest annual meeting for investors in the Fundsmith Equity Fund. It was another good performance by Terry Smith on the night, and of course a good performance by the Fund itself was reported. It achieved a return of 15.7% last year (year ending December 2015) which was way ahead of any global fund index you care to choose. A lot of stock picking investors did well last year, but how many also have achieved 4.7% in the ...

London Stock Exchange – Deutsche Börse Merger, and Brexit

More details were announced this morning of the proposed merger between the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Deutsche Börse. Is this really a "merger of equals", as it is being promoted, because such things are very rare in practice? Deutsche Börse has a larger market capitalisation and their shareholders will end up with 54.4% of the combined group. We now learn the group will be domiciled in London but will have headquarters in both London and Frankfurt with listings on both the ...

Earthport Hit By Apparent Fraud

I covered the position of Earthport (EPO) in the last ShareSoc Informer Newsletter in an article under the headline "Can these real dogs recover?". The article covered several companies where profits had been negligible over the years resulting in investors becoming disillusioned but there were some signs of improvement. I said in concluding about Earthport (Monitise and Tungsten were the other companies) that "it's fair to say that investors are losing confidence in Mr Uberoi (CEO) and are concerned about the ...

Dunedin Enterprise (DNE) to Wind Up

Back in August 2015, I commented on the high discount at which Dunedin Enterprise Investment Trust traded - about 38% at that time. I subsequently wrote to the Chairman suggesting some action be taken. Well they have finally decided to do something about it. Namely after the disposal of one of their large investments they plan to wind up the company (subject to shareholder approval of course). This has caused the discount to narrow to 35% at the time of writing (according ...

Garrett-Cox leaves Alliance Trust

It was announced this morning that Katherine Garrett-Cox is to leave Alliance Trust. She had previously been demoted to be Chief Executive of its subsidiary, Alliance Trust Investments, but now she is departing altogether in one month’s time. Despite the eulogies in the announcement on her contribution to the Trust over the past nine years it seems unlikely that many shareholders will regret her departure. Those 9 years have not been great ones for the Trust in terms of investment performance, leading ...

Words of Wisdom from Nick Train at the Finsbury Trust AGM

Here's a very brief report on the AGM of Finsbury Growth and Income Trust (FGT) held yesterday (4/2/2016) - there is a much longer one here. This very successful, and hence popular, investment trust is managed by Nick Train and colleagues and has been for many years. I'll skip over the concerns about this trust such as the Chairman having too many jobs and there are way too many directors who have been on the board too long, and focus on Mr ...

Sainsbury and Home Retail – A Done Deal?

As I commented on the proposed acquisition of Home Retail by Sainsbury in previous blog posts (as a shareholder in the latter) here's some on this mornings announcement. In essence a deal has been agreed, with an offer equivalent to 161.3p in the hands of Home Retail shareholders. But that includes a capital return by Home Retail to their shareholders from the sale of Homebase which Sainsbury probably did not want anyway. The key justification for the deal is given later in ...

Placings and Open Offers and How to Do Them – St Ives and Tritax

One of the things that annoys private investors is when a company does a placing of shares. This can be for a number of reasons such as the company needing funds for an acquisition, or simply because the company is fast running out of cash and wishes to stave off financial distress. Because of the EU mandated Prospectus Directive, a full Rights Issue where all shareholders can participate in the share issuance and hence avoid dilution of their stake, does require an ...

More Bad News for Banks and their Investors

If there are any private investors still invested in major UK listed banks, last week (w/e 30/1/2016) was yet another for disillusionment. In the Financial Times, Lex hit the nail on the head when he said "The one-offs keep on coming. If one did not know better, one might suspect them of being two-, three-, or more-offs". He was referring to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), but other banks likewise posted bad news during the week. Let's take them in turn: RBS ...