Member Info for Alas_Smith

Another set of results with a boost to dividend. Mr Market is lifting his hat in recognition.

Lending, my first share purchase was also Shell, though in 1979. Last of these were sold about 18 months ago.

I reached the conclusion that the current administration despite a decade in opposition in preparation for office are utterly clueless led by imbeciles some months ago. I've also reached the conclusion that the opposition party of influence is Reform. Conservatives are lost and struggling for some sort of reason to be returned to power and the Liberals or whatever thay are called these days are struggling to be in the picture.

My hope is that I won't peg out in the next few years, but I am preparing to turn my back on the UK and move to a country, (well any country) that does not penalise thrift. Oh, and to probably broad approval, I will not comment further on this board.

As I see it, growth for LGEN is to increase exposure to private markets investments thus diversifying portfolio and perhaps improve returns for shareholders and annuitants.

Percypipe59 - first, I very rarely comment on this equity - and secondly, the valuation of the company is not determined by retail investors.

Now, I am going to lay my cards on the table, my hunch is that you are a small time trader who has made a few correct calls. I on the other hand have never been a high earner but I have made a myriad of mistakes over the last 50 or so years in picking winners. The difference is that I can count on 2 hands the companies where I have lost everything and the losses incurred there have been eclipsed many times by the few investments that have rewarded me as thousand baggers.

My remaining shares in NVIDIA for instance that I purchased for $500 are worth $94,000 - but at the time it was a bit of a punt - a punt that has bought a very decent stake in Broadcom, Microsoft, Amazon, BAE Systems, ASML, Google, Qualcomm, Eli Lilly plus a few duffers such as United Healthcare and Synthoma.

I am expecting that AFC will do the same. Look, investors have a very different psyche to traders - the future we invest for needs patience and calm measured thought - traders, I suspect seek arbitrage and worry about minutiae to shave a little here and a little there for their profit. Far too much risk in such an approach.

So, your bald comment that the company is overvalued might be appropriate to a speculator but laughable to an investor. Our measure is decades, perhaps even a timescale for succession planning. I am not going to justify why I have rather too many shares in AFC to you or anyone else, but I will argue as an investor with a timescale of decades that puts cash into any equity does so with the ambition that the company survive, prosper and is rewarded with a return on their capital commensurate with the timescale of that support

Might be worth considering the broad reason for having shares in LGEN, trimuph1. For starters, it is not a growth equity as it pays out a much larger dividend relative to the average for the FTSE 100 and in doing so helps to keep the yield above 3%. Next, the sector that it is in has its focus not on the short 3 - 5 year yerm, instead it deals in decades. For me, of course, it is a defensive holding but rather than buy now while my portfolio is structured for growth and a total overal return, once I can see growth having plateaued and falling, then I will add to my holding here.

In the past, I have given a clue of the sort of price that I want to buy at (whichis quite a bit hiugher than at present). It is not that the price now is not attractive, it is that I don't feel that the appetite for growth equities has changed. Yes, I might dribble £1,000 here and there into buying a few shares at these prices, but only at the times when I rebalance my portfolio.

Right now, I am not intending to make any changes until the New Year. By then the budget will be in place with some immediate changes but more probably be effective in April. That gives me a few months to consider impact on me and put in place appropriate mitigation before the end of March IF NECESSARY.

I am not sure that there will be a correction or at least not in the short term. As the infrastructure is being built, then spending on hardware is necessary. Where it can all go wrong IMO is firstly through shortage of power - data centres take a huge draw - and secondly that the data that is being drawn upon for the training of AI is either not true, not verified, false or misleading.

Whereas I am a fan of automation and robotics, I cannot see a future in my lifetime (probably another 30 years at most) of Artificial General Intelligence. Difficult enough or people to reason with each other and so the chance of machines being able to reason with people is slender unless humans have the good sense to somtimes turn a machine off and always can over-ride the machine

Markets are not static where corrections and crashes are inevitable. Investors are generally optimistic, though not always for the same reasons. Markets tend therefore to have long periods of general rises with some short, sharp and often alarming corrections. And the longer and steeper the sustained rise is developed the faster and more severe the correction tends to be.

I'm staying fully invested, as, aside from the effort to sell everything and convert into cash, I have no idea when a crash will happen, how long it would last and the point to buy shares again. Corrections in recent times include Trump tariffs this year, cost of living crisis coupled with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, Covid 19 that saw entire coutries close their doors for their citizens. And these are just in the last 5 years. What happenned? Well, markets plunged suddenly and then recovered.

Suppose the "impending" correction that media are warning of doesn't happen. What then? And supposing it does happen? Yes, and....? If the correction is not actually a collapse of companies involved in AI, then the obvious contender for a collapse is Crypto* But who on earth places a value on a mathematical solution to an intangible?

I'll sweat out the falls in the knowledge that markets have always recovered and remain as fully invested as I can, though, for what it is worth, I have scheduled a call to my broker to discuss whether I should stick to 100% equities or whether I perhaps should add some long dated inflation linked gilts into the mix to reduce equity exposure to say 90%-95%. I'm selling our primary residence next year to move into our other house so can swell exposure on completion (if there is a market for residential property left at all).

Voters kick out tired and clapped out Governments - there does seem to be the yo-yo of politics renmiscent of the Wilson / Heath era and all in the wake of we've never had it so good from the 1950's and 1960's.

If referring to me,no problem. Alas, not Alan.

Good fortune to all.

I understand enthusiasm when a snippet of news causes the MktCapto rise, but, whetheryou like it or not, this company is in dangerous territory. The chart plotting the decline in MktCap shows that perhaps now is the point to invest some hard earned cash as a retail investor.

Enhusiasm does not cause the SP to rise. Trust in the managers, cashflow and orders grow the SP. Ignore the bear case t your peril. Bears, particularly those slling short are usually thoough in their research

MAST is not a holding which I would have in my portfolio these days really because the MktCap is too small which makes raiing capital difficult. Growth has to be organic for MAST and the danger is to grow too fast. So while it is an exciting stock, this old investor pays greater hed to the bear case than the enthusiatic case which can be made.

Most companies that go bust through poor cashflow, especially those with a full order book. Best advice I can offer is to pay attention to the bear argument

SMIF is the epic for an investment trust with a relatively stable share price with minimal little deviation. It pays out dividends each month from a portfolio of credit securities and more can be found here https://www.lse.co.uk/SharePrice.html?shareprice=SMIF&share=Twentyfour-Sel

As ever, please do your own research when considering making any investment as I'm not qualified to give advice and have no knowledge of your or anyone elses circumstance, attitude to risk, timescale or depth of pocket when it comes to losses.

It is not a holding in my portfolio but is one that I have picked for both my elder and younger sons in their ISA or SIPP account. For elder son, a disposal was made today of his holding in Temple Bar and proceeds invested in Mast Energy which is a company that I hope will prosper with the eye watering amounts being invested in data centres to take advantage of AI which seems to have a voracious appetite for power.

The question mark over dividends has, surely been debated ad nauseum for this company.

If you are investing purely on the basic of yield, this is (IMO) an extremely risky strategy and far higher than I as a minority in retirement that intends to maintain higher risk strategy in retirement with around 98% invested in equities and 2% in cash. Total overall portfolio return is my preferred route but this year, I've not beaten the market - the first time for many decades.

Anyway, back to a high yield / dividend based approach. Less risky but high yielding holdings would generally be REIT's, Infrastructure bonds and oddly enough short term bonds. SMIF might be worth looking at in case you prefer receiving monthly dividends of roughly 9% rather than semi annually

Have bunged a few shekels into this company for elder son in his ISA. Time will determine the wisdom or folly of this punt.

Divi-Collector - thank you for your kind words.

Despite 13 years in opposition, presumably preparing for government, it is not that this administration have made a complete horlicks of things, but it is the speed with which they have done so. There is no point in worring needlessly or speculating as to what the budget will or might contain as it rather seems that the media are being used as sounding boards for whatever daft notion that is dreamt up by Torsten Bell or whichever highly educated idiot is flavour of the month.

The tax burden is too great and the broad middle class are feeling the sting in their wallets from rising prices, disappointment that they cannot find a dentist to treat them, a doctor to monitor their health, vastly expanding public service costs, lack of accountability in the public sector, tiers of local government employees ticking boxes with little productivity etc etc etc

Those with the broadest shoulders are considering their options and this investor is preparing to leave UK shores

It seems sensible to me that you are choosing to consider buying an annuity with a proportion of your pension pot. Hopefully you are in excellent health and live many years beyond the actuarial benefit calculates for you. A comfortable retirement I hope is the ambition for all.

Don't forget that LGEN has a current yield of 9% and is buying its own shares - 8% still gives margin of 1% but we are playing with numbers.

FWIW, this current administration spent years in opposition (presumably) planning for power. It is not that they are out of their depth in mis-reading the mood of the country and how to fix a problem but it is the speed that they have tied themselves to the rack that they are adding weights on the one plane and stretching on the adjacent plane.

The UK has a habit of kicking defective governments out of office and ignoring the consequence of its replacement

Finlay1 - sorry that you don't like technology companies - they are not going away and spend ing to take advantage of ML (machine learning) is going to increase substantially. Nvidia has been my best investment by a huge margin. In the same way that I don't like tobacco companies, it does not mean that they are not a good investment. Right now, I don't have any tobacco companies in my portfolio but I have in the past. Same can be said of oil (sold the last of my Shell shares roughly 4 years ago having held for over 40 years).

History has shown (this investor) that rewards from the S&P have out weighed those from other markets over most 20 year periods. Sure, this year the S&P has put in a dismal performance compared with Hang Seng, FTSE, DAX etc.

If it is of any consolation, in the same way that you do not see any value in being long at the moment, well I see no reason to sell short (ever) and certainly no reason to trade more frequently than executing a dozen or so transactions each year. That all aside, well, I am delighted that you have fared well this year; I've under-performed the market by several points. It has had a minor effect on long term performance, but no point in dwelling on either the past or present. The next point when I will review my portfolio is in January as I attempt to forecast which geographies and sectors are going to best align with my target for portfolio growth.

Sorry if I don't subscribe to the various theorems - MM manipulation, market correction, share price tanks when CEO announces share buy back, market not interested, traders are shaking the tree yadda yadda yadda - bottom line is that the SP is going sideways and has been for weeks.

For me, I like to buy with some certainty and tend to execute between 15 and 20 bargains each year. My portfolio is mature and although my appetite for higher risk remains, I am sensible enough to want a reduction in volatility and a gradual shift from capital growth to income and eventually I'm keeping a close watch on LGEN with the intention of increasing my approximately 0.85% wealth exposure to 3%, probably in a couple of tranches. Once reasonable certainty that the range bound share price over the last 5 years has begun to lift, then I will start buying and hope that either a higher range is made or preferably a return to growth in the share price.

Let's face it, an old Government is kicked out which is what happened when the Conservative outfit had lurched between disasters. While this present administration has shown only that they intend to tax their way out of a problem, until spending is reined in, it simply will not happen. Not at all sure that Badenoch is up to much and were Mr Farage be installed in high office, it would be a disaster.

Basically the UK is stuffed until there is sufficient support to slash spending. It can start with natural wastage among Civil Servants, then eliminate the eye watering contribution that is made on top of generous salaries. I've no problem with a simpler system for pensions so it might as well target as wide an audience as possible with a limit to contribution set at £50,000 and relief at 25%.

If tax is the only option, then make the UK an attractive place for companies with the immediate scrapping of Stamp Duty altogether INCLUDING shares as this should stem those wishing to list on foreign exchanges and might get the housing market restarted. Align CGT on all capital assets such as property to limit the inflationary effect of house prices. Flat rate of CGT at 20% and raise the starting bar to £10,000.

Not popular but easier to implement should not cause too much of a ripple in the middle ground for that is where the balance of power usually resides

Finley1 - Uber are more advanced on the autonymous driving caper - plus that company throws off a HUGE amount of cash.

Mr Musk has been banging on for decades on how his cars are going to be self driving so that they generate revenue while the owner is asleep yada yada yada . Give me a big diesel that pulls a horsebox, is surefooted on wet grass has a range of 500 miles or more any day over an electric vehicle. Electric cars are great in cities, but here in the sticks where the closest set of traffic lights is 22 miles and nearest roundabout 15 miles and dual carriageway an hour (and then only 300 m long), well as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.