Member Info for alex1621

You have no sympathy FTSE12 ... why are you even here?

I don't see the short interest disappearing anytime soon, to be honest. Even if the next update is positive, you need a few of them to bring in buyers and get them moving on to the next mark. I think people are setting themselves up for disappointment, as short interest doesn't disappear overnight.

I suppose we won’t know how silly it is until 2024. But by then many using the board today will no longer be posters.

To me the PLT deal is irrelevant. A more relevant question is whether the current market valuation reflects intrinsic value? I don’t. Others have a different view. So you can either buy, hold, sell, go short … up to you. There is no finishing line in this race, the SP today is irrelevant to anyone who expects to hold their shares to 2024 and beyond. Your result, win or lose, is determined on the day you sell.

Sure. No one is shorting the share. That’s a desperate post.

Reardon. Perhaps you should just sell, as you seem to be killing yourself over this SP? I’m not selling a share, I don’t see any reason to. Been here before, same nonsense, different share. Perhaps you should stick to index funds, you will always get a market return.

And another …

Looks like we have the full team on board now. One goes and another appears.

Reardon … over an investment lifetime you have to expect periods like this. The danger is if you’ve inadvertently invested in a company that is on the edge of bankruptcy, like Carillion. Or you have been unlucky and bought a Patisserie Valerie, that turns out to be a fraud. But in financial markets if you buy shares in a company that has issued a profit warning, the SP is going to spend a period in the doldrums. Worse, if it is subjected to large scale shorting it gets trashed. Berkshire Hathaway is as solid a company as I can think of, but several times in its life it’s been down 40% and more. That’s investing, I’m afraid.

Prove it Smartie.

Of course you would … if any of us knew where the SP would go, we could wait and buy at the bottom, then sell at the top. The only problem with that plan is that no one knows that. I have rarely bought at the bottom. And my best results have came from shares that fell much further than I expected. What kept me holding was an objective value of the business and a judgement as to whether the issues that caused the fall would be resolved.

Smartie … your words on here don’t match your claims. Why would anybody buy if they believe that they can soon buy at 50p. You can make any claim you like … how about presenting some proof? I’m happy to apologise, on receipt of proof?

Reardon … what would due diligence have told you? That BooHoo’s intrinsic value is 90p? As you stated yesterday, the last time the market capitalisation was at this level the company sales was £300m. Sales are now £1.8 billion and growing. How would your due diligence have reconciled those two numbers?

An objective valuation of BooHoo is irrelevant when a share is being subjected to a large and coordinated shorting attack. No one bought a share price … they bought a part ownership in a business.

Of course you did Smartie. I won’t hold my breath for proof.

Smartie … another price anchorer. Sowing fear and doubt with made up stories.

What’s your position Smartie? Are you short? Or are you neutral, neither short nor long, but for altruistic reasons you want to warn those poor shareholders?

Beware of “price anchoring” … some time back an analyst gave the objective value of 888 as 14p, it was around 30p at the time and had fallen heavily. Within 2 years it was 170p. I know, because I lived through that period.

If a group of hedge funds work together, they can build up a significant amount of loan stock, staying under the radar of the reporting limit … and short the death out of a share. If institutions were selling you’d see a continual stream of updates via RNS. THG is being gamed. And a wide range of actors are participating … including the press. There is a bear case for THG, for example Ingenuity over hyped … but the rest of the business, excluding Ingenuity, is objectively worth a great deal more than the market cap. Keynes said that markets can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent … 80 years later not much has changed, except the tools to engineer this are a bit more sophisticated.

Made up stories designed to induce fear.

Banks don't lend to established businesses without debt? When you are incentivised to hit a SP 50% beyond your all time high, dilution is not an attractive option.

Hedge funds feed lazy journalists stories, and if the FCA had any teeth it would investigate the relationships between media outlets and these camps. Marshall Wace executive is a well documented backer of Brexit, as is the Telegraph. I was reading what looked like at a hit piece on online retail, in the Sunday Times. The journalist was Sam Chambers. A quick look at his background … he worked for Bloomberg, but his first job was an account manager selling Bloomberg terminals to hedge funds and asset managers. The article went through the usual short talking points, with very little counter balance. I did wonder who his undisclosed sources were? You see these articles just prior to deep falls in the SP. Without proof you can’t accuse people of anything, and I’m not doing that. But I do think these matters are worthy of investigation by the FCA, and on financial matters journalists should be compelled to reveal sources and communications. It might just be coincidental, but there seems to be quite a lot of them.

Moulding was heavily criticised when he went public. I’m not a fan, but I don’t think he was wrong either.