Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
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Afternoon, I skimmed through the RNS from this morning and thought that CV19 is coming home to roost in Soho - it was somewhat inevitable there would be a negative impact on SHB. However, London will always be London - if some folks leave the next lot move in to make their way in life, and Soho will always be "the party place".
Always nice to read we have a pot of funds to invest as other sellers become distressed..... I also noted a switch to monthly rent payments in advance. Will be more palatable to the tenants of the future rather than quarterly.
Gambling shares - one of my long term holdings from the turn of the century was GVC about two names changes ago - the dividend used to be a date where you knew you could sell, and buy the underlying holding back at half the price within a week. I chucked in a lump of endowment mortgage compensation into it and sat back and relaxed. It used to be consistently my biggest or second top holding until my first and very possibly last gold investment became a darling of AIM. It remains in the top 3 and becomes a possible candidate for any future investments now we appear to have given up trying to go below a fiver.
Strudel, thank you for your kind comments. Actually I have a pretty diversified portfolio, but having spent over 40 years at the coal-face in commercial property in the UK, Europe & North America, this is the one business in which I feel really qualified to venture opinions.
You should do well with your housebuilder. The market & the press seem to delight in jumping to negative conclusions over housebuilders, but my attitude is simple; People always need somewhere to live. Incidents like the Brexit Referendum are utterly irrelevant. I loaded up on Persimmon & Berkeley in July of '16, because I liked the managements, & almost doubled my money over the next couple of years. I knew something about both companies having studied them since about 2010 & was awaiting an opportunity when the market mispriced them. it duly happened. In I dived.
The housing market has to come back. Viz. My step-daughter has had a second child. Their accommodation in London is too small. Her man is an experienced accountant and she has years in the film industry, so neither will become unemployed & they need a larger home. Brexit, Covid, Armageddon & the possible second-coming of JC (That's Christ, not Corbyn) doesn't alter their circumstances. They're in the market to buy, at around seven figures, just as soon as the current Covid crisis calms down. And there are hundreds of thousands like her, which means that well-run house builders will go back to making good money. Although this time it might take 3 to 5 years to see top of the market SP's, depending on how Covid turns out long-term.
That's apart from "Sin". My Dad taught me that you'll never go broke with sin, provided whoever is selling the sinners booze, fags & the ability to gamble, is a reasonably competent business manager. Consequently, I opened positions in Flutter, GVC and William Hill last summer because my knowledge of the US suggested that the legalising of online & betting-shop-style gambling, would result in a massive new market over 3 to 5 years, which has hitherto been very profitably run by organised crime. And none of this was priced into the plc's because most people here have no idea how much the Yanks like to gamble on the NFL & NBA. It's possible that that their US operations might one day outweigh their UK businesses.
This punt is also a great example of things coming out of left-field to upset apple-carts. (I love mixing metaphors) No sooner had they all, very quietly, declared great results in February, than Covid trashed the share prices. Now I have no idea which of these three will prove the most successful, because I don't know the nuts & bolts of gambling. But I am prepared to believe that one of the three will hit the jackpot. Meantime Flutter is up 50% and the other two are washing their faces, having been 25% to 33% profitable before CV19. I think there's still an opportunity taking a 5 year view. But, and it's a big BUT, I have been wrong many tim
GeW...A
How well analysed. The after hours RNS, I missed cos I had an appointment with a cooling reservoir after a very hot day trapped indoors at the work's laptop, was the icing on the cake. Hearing the below market sell price was the entire jar of preserved cherries stuck on top.
I have just joined your fan club - unluckily your posting history would imply you are largely interested in commercial property..... This is my only property holding other than one domestic house builder. Both seemingly now LTHs ( that's code for "below my buy price") as, unlike others, I don't need the cash to bail my goolies out from the jaws of the mangle.....
This weekend Samuel Tak Lee has sold his 26% of SHB to Capital & Counties for just £5.40 per share, so providing business schools with a perfect illustration of how to be so keen, as a buyer, on getting a cheap bargain that you end up screwing yourself royally.
This is brilliant company, usually trading at a premium to NAV, with a lock on Carnaby Street and the areas around Chinatown, specialising in restaurants and fast-fashion. with 15 acres of holdings in London W1. It's a one-off. There's nothing else quite like it on the LSE, so control is going to cost anyone a pretty penny and, probably, a substantial premium.
It's not a business that should be too affected by online shopping, but Covid will hit restaurants hard, particularly while they're closed and transitioning back to open, via safe-distancing rules. But will those restaurants ever come back? My bet is that over the next two to three years, they will recover and so will SHB. The West End locations are simply too good to go cold forever.
Meanwhile ST Lee has presumably got his goolies in the mangle with the bankers back in Hong Kong, thanks to his hometown shopping centres being shuttered and rioting locals fighting the heavy-handed Emperor Xi. He has been forced to sell at a 90p discount to the SP. Which is all rather sad, when you think that he could have sold, at a good profit, at over £10 a share in early 2018, and at over £9.50 anytime between mid-17 and mid-18, plus from October '19 to early January this year.
Instead he faffed around with ****eyed tender offers to buy stock at a discount to market prices, niggly little legal actions against the BOD and a stubborn refusal to pay the price required to win control.
Hubris has once again met Nemesis. Bye-bye Mr. Lee, leaving us with the question - Will CapCo now mount an offer for the remaining 74%? Do they have the fire-power now they've sold the Earl's Court site after 40 years of failure to develop it? Are the PI's and institutions willing to sell substantial quantities of stock for less than £10 a share? I remain a long-term holder. This will be very interesting.