Member Info for CarpeDiem1

Anyone else unable to access Lloyds sharedealing or online banking?
Just blank pages for me.
Is this a cyber attack?

C'mon Lloyds. Lending is easy money, why are we languishing at these levels? What is Osorio doing for his £6.5 million in wages and options, come to think of it all the other highly paid mummers and bumfluffers. Give us some results, or next year we will vote in a Pastel de nata as CEO.

Phoenix have said they are in for the long term. My guess is they will give it 3 years and if no sign of turnaround then offload to the next sucker. There has been no information from the company in the form of interim updates so we are left guessing how well the company is doing. They have installed a new Head of Auction Department and auctions seems to be quite an active area, however my guess is that retail is taking a battering, especially as the latest news from the 'high street' is not good. SG were making handsome profits in the past from investments, until like a Ponzi scheme it collapsed. Trying to make money from legitimate retail when overheads are still huge is going to be very hard. To get to 20p a share the co has to be worth 100 million. That is just fantasy. Collectors are dying out in many countries, market prices are slipping for most material except the very rare items and SG is severely hampered by the excesses of recent years. I think the very best SG can hope for is to make a very modest profit to keep Phoenix interested and survive into the 2030's.

Have not posted here for a while but have always held a smallish stake. Recently I doubled my holding here. I prefer to focus on the progress the company is making rather than the politics over which one has no influence at all.

when it hits 3p I will buy again ;) ................................................. You might want to wait until the next update. General lack of interest in this stock in a very bouyant market speaks volumes. Might be time to cash in those property shares though!

They have gone from owning circa 25% of the company to around 10% and have therefore lost any say in how things are run. Perhaps it is this lack of control that has prompted them to sell. Or maybe they have seen the latest figures. The �5m cash injection has allowed SG to hire some staff, buy some new stock and produce some glossy brochures. but behind the scenes things are still a mess I hear and 5 million will not last long.

Actually it is rising, the trouble is there are 58% more shares than there were a month ago. The Mcap is now at �19m. Trouble is that shareholders are not seeing their investment rise, merely diluted.

Babis can delay matters for a few more years, EMH will probably be bust by then and Babis can award contracts to his favoured companies in return for piles of cash. I can see where this is going. What can we do? not much except be wary of how much one has invested here.

Not entirely sure tbh. Nav has steadily improved but over the last 12 months the share price has fallen away. Nav is now nearly 99p, dividends 8.6%. It is true that leasing has dipped recently, but the fall in sp has been excessive in my view. I am hesitant to say buy more at this stage but the share price at 83p does look reasonable.

Tophat Thank you for your input. Not only have Aviva destroyed value of their own preference shares but also of every other preference share of banks and building societies with capital value down 20-40% across the board. There are a lot of angry fixed income investors out there, with momentum building for a class action against Aviva if they do cancel the shares. Another lengthy court case is in the offing and a boycott of Aviva products by all those who have seen thousands wiped off their fixed income investments. I hope that many of those who have seen their capital destroyed in the last few days will write en mass to Aviva. Cheers Dd

Guys, any idea why the preference shares have collapsed? AV.B down 19%

Pearls, your statement as follows "However, what is surely obvious is that if �19.45m = 58.09% of SGI, then 100% = �33m" is misleading. You know perfectly well that much of the �19.45m is a loan, so SGI cannot be worth anything like �33m you claim. In any company winding up situation the loans will be paid back before any shareholder receive anything. Your insistance that SG is worth that figure is getting annoying. I will leave here for a bit and come back to see how you have done in a few months. Good luck all.

Every time I buy at a low, it drops even more. This share is dogshite at the moment. Be careful not to step in it.

Okay. The deal is rather opaque, but what is clear is that SGI are proposing to refinance with Phoenix in order to provide liquidity. Phoenix are seeking a return on the loan and profit in the majority stake they will own. However the difficult trading conditions are continuing and I say again there will be further reductions in SG stock value. The 17MILLION in loans are still there, albeit to different lenders and the 10million loan at 5 percent is still gonna cost half a million a year to service. This company will continue to struggle. I look to the april update with interest, but its not going to be good.

The RNS clearly states that Phoenix are buying 58% of the shares for �6.2 million. That values the whole company at �10 million. The rest of the deal is just debt swaps. Sadly the �5 million working capital that this gives SG is really throwing sand into the wind. It is enough to keep SG afloat for a while, but the main SG stock is in GB stamps and over the last few months GB values are on the way down. Recent auction results (which I follow in detail) have shown a big mark down this year and recent sales have been quite poor and we will see more write down's of SG stock in the coming months.

Looks like a large cash injection but at massive dilution cost. Phoenix buying hundreds of millions of shares at 2�p. Still,, SG have done what is necessary to survive and got �5m in liquidity for stock buying. Can they make a profit with it? I have my doubts.

I originally thought the lease ran out in 2019 but was informed by some SG staff it was 2020. They could be wrong. I could be wrong. I probably am wrong. I would suspect they would do away with the shop and just have offices, either nearby or somewhere West End, I cannot see how the shop pays for itself, so my view would be dispense with it. It was only ever a 'front door'. Pentire is correct in that the block is being redeveloped. Grosvenor Auctions on the second and third floor have to move also. The days of the stamp trade in the Strand are almost over, a far cry from when I started my career there in the 1970's.

Was at Stampex and the show was moderate for most dealers, comparable to last year anyway according to the anecdotal conversations I had with various dealers. A busy first day then steady. There was not a consensus view on SGI however. Some thought they would go out of business soon, others were surprised they were still going and a third group thought they would struggle on. Take your pick!. I can confirm the the SG lease is up in 2020. I thought it was next year but apparently 2020 and the staff were unsure whether SG would have a store after that. As far as the shares are concerned, currently not holding having sold out at 5p again, but certainly would buy again sub 4p. Dd

HGM has been a good performer over the last few years especially nice dividend, not sure why the steep selloff, although Randgold also down more than 10%. In theory gold should perform well when stocks go down. Any ideas folks?

Pearls "Conditional on the restructuring of the existing debt" is the line that confuses me. It is deliberately ambiguous. The banks are not restructuring the existing debt so what does this mean? Perhaps additional equity which will be dilutative before the 5m extra is given. Furthermore this was arranged prior to liquidation of guernsey and 6.5m in losses for SGI. To my mind there is no way, no way at all, that existing large shareholders will buy into the plan at the moment. The best SGI can do is to sell stock and slash costs (which they have done) and hope they can turn a profit even a small one by 2019.