Alpha Group International Share Price (ALPH)

On average ftse 250 companies have about 6-7 brokers covering the stock and some have 10 or more. Alpha still has 2 but that should be expected to change soon. I suspect the new broker notes and ftse 250 tracker funds mandatory buying will take these beyond the previous high of £23 in the next 6 weeks

One relatively minor piece of info that I wanted from the prospectus was confirmation on PDMR holdings of the director of FXRM who sold some 11,495 shares after the last set of results. Helpfully it is stated that he owns 232,547 shares, so that sale was less than 5% of his total holding. Notable that Howorth & Marsh (director of institutional) hold a little of 1% of share capital between them.

An interesting little exercise I just did was the following;

Shares in issue at IPO 32,761,979

Shares issued in October 2018 placing 3,218,602

Shares issued in April 2020 placing 2,941,177

Less share buybacks to date of 602,127, gives a sub total before accounting for employee share options of 38,319,621 shares

The current issued share capital is 42,919,313, meaning that 4,599,682 shares have been issued to employees since 2017.

The relevance of this is that if we add the list of II, director & PI shareholdings of >1% at 29/03/24, the total comes to ~38m shares...

If we assume that most of the 4.5m employee shares have gone to senior management like the two PDMR's referenced in the prospectus, then it's possible / likely that the majority of those shares are still held tightly.

If Alpha keep buying back at their current rate then sooner or later shares are simply going to dry up at this level. It's happened to a degree today with the sudden jump from £20.70 to £21.40

Ps. I fully expect the buyback to be extended in the next few weeks, given the contents of the AGM agenda contain a special resolution to extend their buyback authority beyond 5m shares...

Management normally set targets that can be ‘comfortably achieved’ in order to reward and incentivise/motivate staff (rather than demoralise staff with unachievable targets). Hence I believe the internal/board targets will be significantly higher than these and the award targets are the minimum expected.

Interesting to look at the targets for the new share scheme. I didn't study it carefully but looks like employees get a payout if revenue growth is over 20% for 24-26 and 15% 27-28. In short, the aim is to more than double revenue in the next 5 years. Seems about right.

Thanks. I will bow to your superior wisdom in these matters. I can see that the share buy back is as good as or better than cancelling if the share options & bonuses would have been paid out at the same level anyway. Guess I'm too used to greedy AIM boards just using it as an excuse to give themselves even bigger payoffs.