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I have finally bought a few on the open market, but missed the bottom and paid 255. Still cheaper than the 270 placing price though. Let's hope that the bottom has been breached. Love to see this going up to £3 or higher by Xmas. Good luck all.
I suppose a bit of choppiness after a lot of share movement and confusion on the new NAV/share and strategy.
I maintain this will settle around 2.70 for a while and then, in fits and starts, drift up to 2/3rds of nav by year end results.
Notice the keyword "a few"....
Why are you back in? Yesterday you forecast a fall to £2.10?
It was quite obvious this will drop below 270p, have seen it many times before with other shares.
Just got the final reminder from PrimaryBid. GROW's offer will be closed at 3:00pm this afternoon. We can buy the old shares @250 on the open market. Will anyone still pay 270 to apply for the new ones? No, not me, lol.
Bought a few back at 251p...thank you sellers
Why do we need the cash badly if we have just accessed £38m from the credit facility?
They said £20m was going to be enough earlier this year.
What was a clear picture of value at a discount now looks a lot more messy.
According to press release most of forward portfolio has either a 18 month plus runaway or are near or already profitable with unlimited runway.
Maybe GROW simply wanted more cash to invest in the existing 20% of profile who need it and “buried the news” with this merger. If fundraising at near NAV/share no real dilution. We loose a % of our holding but gain a % of the new investable cash.
Raising cash at 2.70 when NAV/share is 7.40 is an admission that we need the money badly and are willing to dilute in order to have a strong cash position coming out of the downturn when “buyer in the sector is king” and we can recover the discount with favorable investments that mature nicely. All possible but annoying we are in that strapped cash position in the first place. Would have been better to be buying our own shares at this discount.
Don’t be silly, Directors bought 10000 shares Sang not £10k the new chair bought 18k shares. The extra shares issued for the purchase was
It seems to me much of the £55m raised will be going towards the Forward portfolio.
Molten just drew down £38m from the credit facility, which would have been more than enough for funding the existing portfolio in addition to cash and other realisations.
What if BlackRock had wanted to invest in the existing portfolio and had had to buy on the open market?
Also a couple of £10k buys from the directors is not exactly a show of confidence is it?
So for 3% of the gross portfolio we will now have over 20% more shares on the market
Crikey Koru kids worth ~0.1% of the gross portfolio, Forward cost ~3% of the gross portfolio . I’m sorry I really can’t get too excited about this.
Molten had BlackRock as an investor up until recently when they dumped a lot of stock.
One thing I liked about MV was the exposure to European companies like Iceye, Ledger, Isar, Aircall, HiveMQ, M-Files and others in the Earlybird funds.
I feel this acquisition turns us away from Europe and into the UK.
Koru Kids has already been exposed in the media for ties to Akshata Murthy and with the latest involvement of the British Business Bank it smells like there are potential influences in play pushing towards a more domestic focus - maybe influenced by the hope that pension funds will invest more in venture capital opportunities.
So in summary this has become too high risk for you personally Sang?
Honestly squealing over the tiny investment that is Koru kids, which had fair value cut in Forwards interims anyway and having an institutional investor like blackrock onboard is myopic at best
The cash will be used to prop up loss making companies while they grow as that is what VC does and my concern is too many of them will be in the Forward portfolio.
Seed stage companies are still seen by some to have unrealistic valuations as they didn't get hit as hard as later stage ones.
Forward would be heading for closure and wind down if it wasn't for Molten
Also I think there will be a bias toward new investments in the Forward portfolio given the involvement of BlackRock and the British Business Bank.
The shares that have been issued have bought Forward’s assets at a deep discount to NAV(is that really dilution!) and the cash raised through equity issue is being used to further invest into existing assets and further new opportunities.
Some of the comments here read like the cash raised is being used to prop up a failing business which really is not the case.
It's a dilution of the companies I wanted to hold through Molten like Iceye and Isar Aerospace by ones I don't want to hold like Koru Kids
In theory the dilution to obtain the portfolio in Forward is not a dilution at all. We just own a smaller percentage of a larger set of companies. It is just the cash raising part of 55m that is. I’d prefer not raising cash in this market for us but we are where we are. Ideally we should be buying our own shares in this market not selling but we invested too much of the 2001 and 2002 windfall to do so.
The overall dilution is well over 20% because on top of the issue from the placing they have to issue new shares to buy Forward
“Forward Partners’ top 15 core holdings had cash runway of at least 18 months, or were anticipated to reach break-even without further fundraising or were already profitable, Molten said.”
A bigger better funded trust -albeit at a 13% dilution- is at least a wash maybe a gain for us. Are we 13% bigger (including available cash to invest) to compensate for the 13% dilution. Seems so.
I’d me more nervous about a more substantial dilution. This seems strategic -albeit an acknowledgment we over invested in 2022 and should have retained more cash for a rainy day -that actually came fast and hard. SO the same cash (55m) is quite a bit more expensive to get than it should have been by retention in 2022. Lesson learned I hope.
Hindsight 20:20 though. Good share with good stock picking within an up and coming sector. Should outperform sector that itself should do very well indeed from these valuations onwards.
I’m happy with today’s news - bought assets that they’ve had visibility over for some time at a large discount to NAV.
Raised cash to INVEST into assets new and existing opportunities. For me dilution is a problem where the funds aren’t being used to invest but rather to keep a business going - which isn’t the case here.