Company News

Alpha Pyrenees Trust

Two years Alpha Pyrenees Trust Ltd, a property company registered in Guernsey but listed on the London Stock Exchange, appeared to be an attractive investment. It seemed a good opportunity to invest in a European commercial property company that could take advantage of the commercial property sector upturn within Europe. The company has a portfolio of industrial properties mainly in France and with a small percentage being located in Spain. In December 2012 the share price was 16p and the Net Asset ...

Optimal Payments, Quindell and equity loans

A major controversy has arisen over the use by directors of loans from companies such as Equities First Holdings (EFH) which are secured against their equity stakes. The latest company to be affected is Optimal Payments (OPAY) who presented at a recent ShareSoc seminar. The share price fell substantially after comments from a well known blogger, and declined as much as 22% on the 14th November after the comments were widely circulated on bulletin boards. A number of other public company directors ...

Legal Action on Lloyds-TSB and HBOS merger

Attention all former Lloyds-TSB shareholders. As former Lloyds-TSB shareholders are no doubt well aware, the merger of Lloyds-TSB with HBOS in January 2009 to form the Lloyds Banking Group was a disaster for shareholders in Lloyds-TSB. Lloyds-TSB was a financially strong bank who historically had paid a high dividend. HBOS was obviously in financial difficulties at the time and needed bailing out. Indeed information that subsequently became public suggest it was in reality about to go bust because of its large exposure ...

Glaxo Q3 results – in need of more treatment

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) issued its 3rd Quarter Results today (22 Oct 2014). It's one of those large FTSE-100 stocks that it's difficult to avoid holding if you are a UK stock market investor. It's such a large constituent of the index that all those index funds, and indeed almost all generalist unit or investment trusts, are likely to have a big stake in them. It's also one of those stocks that many people hold directly (as does this writer) simply as a ...

The Vote at Electra Private Equity

Electra Private Equity have fought off an attack from Sherborne Investors Management. The latter wanted a change of directors and for the company to conduct a strategic review, but resolutions to remove three directors were defeated with over 61% of the votes cast against them. The interesting aspect of this event was that over 81% of the votes in issue were actually voted. There was considerable debate last week at the meeting ShareSoc held on shareholder rights about the difficulty of getting ...

A Tale of Two Trusts – SLS and BRWM

Yesterday Blackrock World Mining (BRWM) announced they were writing off their investment in London Mining. This was one of their largest holdings and cut the trust's net asset value by almost 8%. The share price promptly fell by 8% on the day and fell further today. Who are London Mining you may ask? This is a small iron ore mining company based in Sierra Leone which has been badly affected by the slump in iron ore prices and the Ebola crisis ...

Tesco and why ShareSoc members should not have been surprised

After we published some previous comments on Tesco, Warren Buffett publicly admitted that his investment was a "huge mistake". He currently has about a 4% stake in the company, and may have lost over $800 million at the current share price after first buying it in 2007. It's perhaps worth reminding ShareSoc members and others of the fact they could have read a report on the Tesco 2013 Annual General Meeting in June 2013 which spelled out some of the problems the ...

Sainsbury and Tesco (do they need a pressure group?)

Following on from the debacle at Tesco, Sainsbury produced some quite awful trading figures yesterday (1/10/2014). Here's a review of some of the news on those and other retailers. Tesco The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) are undertaking an investigation into Tesco's "overstatement of expected profit". Making misleading statements to the market is potentially a criminal offence. How long that will take to reach any conclusions is anyone's guess. The result of such investigations are often reported to investors so late in the day ...

Globo Interims and evaluating software companies

Globo issued some Interim Results this morning (29/9/2014). The announcement created quite a debate on some bulletin boards because of varying interpretation of the results. It only merits some comments from me because ShareSoc has published articles on this company before, particularly after it came under attack from shorters who primarily questioned the poor cash flow, capitalisation of development costs and several other aspects of the company's operations (see our November 2013 newsletter). That caused the share price to collapse from ...

The Tesco Board – fit for purpose?

There was a very good article in the Financial Times today by Luke Johnson. It covers the problems at Tesco and suggests that "the stewardship at Tesco has been woeful".  A particular focus is on the experience of board members, of which only one is executive (recently appointed Dave Lewis). It says "Like every single other director on the main board, he has no executive experience as a retailer whatsoever". Luke suggests they might have a wide and impressive set of ...

Barclays, Tesco and MoPowered

Barclays, Tesco and MoPowered - two big companies and one a typical new AIM company which has yet to show it can make a profit - but all three are under the weather in the last couple of days. Barclays have today (23/9/2014) been fined £38m by the Financial Conduct Authority for failing to ensure that clients money in the investment bank was kept separate from the banks own assets. When I joked in my local Barclays Bank this morning that I ...

The dangers of share tips – Naibu (NBU) and Monitise (MONI)

Well respected stock picker Simon Thompson had to admit defeat with Naibu in the Investors Chronicle on Friday (19/9/2014). This Chinese maker of sportswear has, on an earnings basis, been ridiculously cheap for a long time, but some investors liked the high dividend yield. Simon picked the company for his share pick of 2014 in the Investors Chronicle - he tipped it at 58p in February with these words: "It's not often you have the chance to buy shares in a ...