General News

CentralNic, Photo-Me and Nationalisations

Firstly, lets talk about a couple of companies in which I hold no shares. CentralNic (CNIC) published interim results this morning. This company sells internet domain names and web...

Buy Backs Bad – and done at wrong time!

The following article reports on a JP Morgan prediction for this year of over $800 billion in stock buybacks. According to this article in CFO.com, S&P 500 firms repurchased $166.3 billion worth of...

A Bad Day in the Market, but Good News from Unilever and BEIS

It was a bad day in the market yesterday, with the FTSE All-Share falling over 1%. This seems to have been driven by a sell off in bonds. Equity prices are usually linked to bond prices simply because as bond yields rise from a fall in bond prices, it becomes more attractive to hold bonds relative to equities. That particularly applies to shares that are “bond proxies”, i.e. ones bought because of their high yields for income seeking investors. These changes have ...

The Impact on Investors of Labour’s Plans

I commented briefly yesterday on the plans by John McDonnell of the Labour Party to give employees shares and possible future nationalisations – see: https://roliscon.blog/2018/09/24/labours-plans-for-confiscation-of-shares-and-rail-system-renationalisation/ More information is now available on the share scheme and the more one studies it the more one realises that whoever devised it does not understand much about business and the stock market. In other words they were typical politicians with no experience of the real world I would guess. The scheme would apparently operate by companies with ...

Lehman Collapse, Labour’s Employment Plans, Audit Reform Ideas and Oxford Biomedica

There was a highly amusing article in the FT recently by their journalist John Gapper explaining how he caused the financial crisis in 2008 by encouraging Hank Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, to resist the temptation to rescue Lehman Brothers. So now we know the culprit. Even more amusing was the report on the previous day that the administrators (PWC) of the UK subsidiary of Lehman expect to be left with a surplus of £5 billion. All the creditors are being paid ...

Brexit, Abcam, Victoria and the Beaufort Case

Another bad day for my portfolio yesterday after a week of bad days last week when I was on holiday. Some of the problems relate to the rise in the pound based on suggestions by Michel Barnier that there might actually be a settlement of Brexit along the lines proposed by Theresa May. This has hit all the companies with lots of exports and investment trusts with big holdings in dollar investments that comprise much of my portfolio. But a really ...

Book Review: Debtonator by Andrew McNally

Now here’s a book well worth reading on your summer holidays. It’s called Debtonator by Andrew McNally. Indeed if you are taking a long-haul flight to your holiday destination, you might be able to read it in one sitting. Like all good books it is short at only 98 pages excluding notes and index, and the format is small as well. But there is an enormous amount of information embodied in there. It covers the problems caused by excessive debt in the ...

Amati AIM VCT AGM and Retailers

Amati AIM VCT is one of those peculiar beasts – a Venture Capital Trust. Yesterday I attended their annual general meeting and here are some general comments on the company and the meeting: Amati AIM VCT (AMAT) is the result a merger of the two Amati VCTs. They had very similar portfolios so this made a lot of sense, and the result is a large VCT with total assets of £147 million. This figure was also boosted by excellent performance last year ...

Shorting Shares: Radio 4 programme

Mark Northway and Cliff Weight were interviewed as part of this programme which highlighted some of the benefits and issues surrounding short selling. Members may wish to listen to the programme which can be downloaded here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7fj3g#play "Falling Short - Fake News and Financial Markets File on 4 If fake news is poisoning public debate, then what is it doing to the financial markets? Short-sellers - investors who bet on a company's shares falling, not rising- have a mixed reputation. For some they play a vital ...

LoopUp, Audioboom, Social Media Abuse and a VCT AGM

LoopUp (LOOP), a small AIM listed company that provides audio conferencing and in which I have a small holding, have announced a proposed acquisition of a company in the same business – MeetingZone Group. This will more than double the size of LoopUp so it constitutes a reverse takeover. As they are paying cash for MeetingZone it will be financed by a term loan and a large placing. The placing will be at 400p per share, when the share price last ...

New Year Angel Competition

In light of the popularity of our Fat Santa and Scrooge competitions at Christmas time, we thought we would redress the balance and celebrate the beginning of a whole new year...

A Christmas Parable and Productivity

No this is not an examination of how Santa Claus gets around the whole world in one night. But as my last post before Christmas, let me explain how I have automated the sending of Christmas cards over the last thirty years. I am by nature a lazy person, so handwriting and addressing the family’s Christmas cards was a task I chose to tackle with some automation many years ago. The first step was to put friends, family and business contacts ...