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Value I think you misunderstand the Fitch reference you offer. First Fitch are a credit rating agency and their job is to rate businesses for the credit rating that should be applied to their borrowings, the article you quote which is from DEC 2020 is entirely positive , it raises OCDO's credit rating,(which effectively lowers the interest rate at which they can borrow)and implies they will need no further cash until 2023 and further suggests that the credit markets will be entirely happy to provide that cash .

Value .. I hesitate to disagree with you as I know you are a long-termer here.....BUT I think you seriously underestimate OCDO's cash position, at the last AR they were cash positive (cash assets £1.4bill, liabilities £1.3bill) and their finance costs were £35 mill per annum. even after the recent sharp SP falls the company is valued at 4X liabilities and I have little doubt that if they needed to they could, even in a rising interest rate environment, raise funds at a reasonable rate. I do not expect a cash call on investors in the foreseeable future.
Only last September OCDO issued £500 mill(oversubscribed) notes due 2026 with a coupon of 3.875% and IMO that would be the source , if needed, of further funding.

However stupid it is - and it is astonishingly so, a windfall tax of some sort is coming as we have governments which respond to the MSM rather than to logic. On that basis I have (reluctantly ) taken a substantial part of my profit here, remember shell was trading at below 1400p for much of 2020 and 1100 for months that year. I am happy to have more than doubled my stake and (fairly) confident that I can put the money to use elsewhere. I don't see an SP collapse for Shel but perhaps a short-term fallback and a slower climb than of late . Holders here will still do well, and I retain a position.

Erratum... not "over 65 for ever " but "over 6% for ever" - sorry!

So the answer is LLPC .Never heard of it ? it's a Non-cumulative irredeemable preference share with a coupon(ie interest payment ) of........9.25% BUT as the current price of each nominal £1 share is about £1.44 the effective rate of interests is a tad over 6.4%.and at that rate I have been adding to my already substantial holding.
Whats the snag....well as interest rates rise the capital value of bonds(and roughly this is a bond to all intents and purposes)falls so its quite possible, indeed probable that the capital value will fall further if tho' you are like me and never intend to sell them and in my case pass them on to the grandkids that doesn't matter . And if also like me you believe that wherever interest rates go in the future an investment that will pay me over 65 forever and which has a duration of about 16 years, (ie in sixteen years you've got all your money back and forever thereafter you are making a guaranteed income)then this is a good deal.As ever this is NOT investment advice, is NOT for the Spread betters and short -term gamblers who frequent this board. But to go back to my original point those of you with chunks of cash lying effectively idle in premium bonds it may wake you up to better alternatives. Gotta go but will answer any questions or seek to address any concerns either later this pm or tomoz.
Buenos tardes.

Stuff premium bonds.......Lloyds offer an investment deal which currently offers an interest rate of 6.4%, paid semi-annually fixed forever. Does anyone know what it is ?
I'll be back in a couple of hours with the answer.....

OCDO have bought out Myrmex who are developing a sytem for loading goods
see
https://www.fxempire.com/news/article/britains-ocado-to-buy-robotics-start-up-myrmex-for-10-2-million-1009941

Boyo... should you care to delve, (and it is complex, deliberately so??) executive remuneration is detailed on pps 166 et seq. of the last annual report. See
https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/qwlchfvz/ocado-group-annual-report-2021-full.pdf
As far as I can tell the baseline is an SP of £19.60 uprated by 10% pa(X2) which gives £23.28.for this year and subsequent years . Given the dramatic fall in SP that sets a high bar for any significant returns, tho' once that bar is met management incentives are exceptionally generous. Any incentive also depends on a series of malleable criteria and some more easily measured eg EBITDA, OSP capacity.....
IMV the hysteria is ill-founded, only a massive reset in the SP would generate the numbers bandied about in the press and as shareholders........?

In the short term I have no idea, BUT in the longer term I expect the OCDO SP to be higher than today , longer might mean one month, one year or more , I am patient and expect to make good returns on my investment today.My limit buy was hit at just sub £7. The SP may well fall from here as the markets tremble , but I expect OCDO to be comfortably ebitda positive by this FY end . I have said before that I think the JV with MKS is worth ~£2bill and at the present SP UK and international solutions are valued at a little over £3bill.That seems to undervalue their potential and growth rate , as is often the case , driven by quartely deadlines investment managers and hence markets, over react. I am willing to wait patiently for the value here to re- emerge.

SUFC why don't you get in touch with JTT, if you breed your parrot with his cat you'll get carrots and make a fortune!

To tidy up its capital structure. Todays RNS Announces the redemption of $1 bill of callable FI notes with a coupon of 1.326 %.While it may not seem that important it adds to the already redeeemed $2/3 bill of debt announced so far this year . Those wondering about increased divis should note where (sensibly IMV)the cash is actually being deployed in a rising interest rate environment. Patience in holding here will be rewarded.

Noggers you do realise that your posts are visible ?like this one on 25 April when the SP was 147.8 , A price which it has NOT EXCEEDED SINCE!!
"Didn't really expect to be going down today, nearly pressed the sell button first thing this morning but held off."
yet now
"I sold all my holdings at 152 it is just to much of a risk to keep waiting in the hope of maybe getting 160 or 170 made a nice profit of 10k on my holdings"
At least one of those posts is untrue
I make it a hobby of mine to call out people whose posts show little connection with reality!
You are today's Porky champion - congratulations!

It should not have escaped your notice that the current SP is BELOW the last reported bid by Sycamore. Does that mean that Sycamore have not raised their bid and nor has anyone beaten it, or that the Sycamore bid remains the highest and is liley to be agreed? if the latter the SP will settle here, the few pence difference being the bid price less the relatively small risk of the bid failing for some , as yet unknown reason.
Whatever, I am buying a few again . My logic is that if the bid succeeds I at least break even , or maybe benefit from a higher price( tho' only by 10-20%), if it fails I suffer the sharp drop which will follow but in that case I will hold and add as part of a folio of UK consumer which IMV will recover slowly over maybe the next 12-18 months.

Only had a few minutes to look at it but superficially they seem to have done a better job of "massaging" the results than BT. The $4bill for the Russia exit takes "free cash " back to the same level as last quarter. I don't know why volumes are much smaller than previous quarter (is that also Russia?) but overall there looks to be less to cause a furore than I had expected. Is a relatively poor set of figures good news? . Quarterly divi up by 1 cent to 25. I neve know what market reaction will be but I would guesss down this am.I'm still a long term holder.

I have held here twice in the past, once exiting at almost the ATH with a significant profit(more luck than good judgement!) and once a while later on the downslope with a small loss.I am convinced that there is a profitable businesss and a good investment here ,and am on the brink of investing again .
Here are my reasons why:
Todays AGM and the furore about executive pay while a hot topic, will pass, and as a(potential) shareholder if the CEO makes £ 100 mill over the next five years it will be because the SP rises to £30 , I can live with that.
The company's real problem is speed , its service is super slick tech but it isn't a mobile phone or a streamed film , each component (a CFC )takes months to establish and longer to ramp up, so patience is needed.
The company despite other views here won't need cash for a few years , assets total about £1.5 bill , current losses are abut £180 mill per annum , so they've got a few years worth of rollout funded. They have significant liabilites but can comfortably meet coupon payments and have demonstrated that there are commercial lenders willing to provide cash.
I am not really interested in the MKS JV , it is or soon will be, profitable(the MKS figs imply about £100 mill pa) and it should be valued at something of the order of £1.5-£2bill( in extremis I could imagine OCDO selling off all or part of the JV to MKS), leaving the rest of OCDO valued at around £5bill , pretty high for a non-proftable venture, but that value is predicated on the current rapid rollout of cfcs around the world .
My estimates for UK solutions have an EBITDA of ~£220 mill by 2023 and international solutions revenues of £150m by 2023(though that might still be loss-making as the cash will probaly be ploughed in to growth.
OCDO is still, despite a 70% SP fall!!.highly valued by any metric other than future projections but there will be a bottom , I don't see the company failing or even needing a cash call and tho' it might fall further from here my investment (if/when i make it) will be based on the expectation of amuch higher SP in the future .
Comment from the usual , much better informed holders/posters here welcome!

Is it just me? or is almost everything I read about a proposed windfall tax based on entirely flawed logic?
Note none of the below is to make party political points.
The labour party proposal was AFAIK first set out in January and here is an article from the guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/08/labour-proposes-windfall-tax-on-north-sea-oil-and-gas-to-reduce-bills

the key sentence is this
"The final £2.3bn required would come from additional North Sea oil and gas receipts forecast, according to the figures used by the party."
So in a time when the UK is suffering from high oil and gas prices, pretty directly as a result of the Russia/ Ukraine war we would tax our own oil and gas resources more highly than those resources exploited elwhere in the world!!
Surely it is obvious that the exact opposite is what we should do ? I propose an "UNWINDFALL TAX"to reduce taxation on the extraction of oil and gas from the North Sea, to encourage companies to redeploy efforts away from sources in other less stable or friendly regimes, maximise resources within our own military, political and financial control, use these resources before they become stranded , drill in sites where the new (and prolonged?) higher price make it
economical and enhance our energy independence until we can dispense with fossil fuels entirely.
Yet again IMV the social/political world has completely misunderstood the problem and proposed the wrong solution.

Came across this which might be of interest here

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-next-horizon-for-grocery-ecommerce-beyond-the-pandemic-bump?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hdpid=8f957b75-001b-4057-a591-bc7fd1b6f7fd&hctky=10376319&hlkid=884c1d01f9bf4118b9f11042e2d2445d

I am seriously considering a re-investment at these levels , busy today but will post some research and questions later , specifically about how /when OCDO receive cash for " international solutions" , the accounts seem opaque and although according to last results, apparent growth is spectacular(modules in operation 12, orders 145) , I want to know when/how revenues to the top line starts to accelerate.
Any clues?
back later .....

Back to RR ! The order is for 10 planes and as usual RR's profit will come mainly from flight mile maintenance revenues. As a regular flyer to OZ where some of my family live I will change from Newcastle Dubai Sydney to Newcastle London Sydney ASAP. It avoids a few hours in Dubai in the middle of the night and the extra security checks involved, it also means a saving to the airlines of landing charges at intermediate airports. I fully expect other airlines to respond with orders, tho' perhaps not for a few years and I also expect other ultra long haul routes to be introduced.While it may take a few years I think this is the start of an ultra long haul era and AFAIK the Trent XWB is the only engine available currently (anyone know different?).
Expect a small bounce tomorrow but the effects on the SP to be greater over months than days.

STOPS are to limit the cost of a bet going in the wrong direction.Without reasonably tight stops( a safety net for the punter)the margin required rockets, without similarly placed limits the margin appears to go nuclear( a safety net for IG)

I will continue for a while to run my experiment , though my initial thoughts are that the structure of spread betting is cleverly designed to limit risk to IG (and presumably others ) and it is little surprise that somewhere between 70 and 80 % of all punters lose money. It also seems that my prospect of hedging my holdings against short term falls up far more cash than I wish to, to create a useful revenue .

BACKGROUND

I promised a while ago that I would post my experiences with an experiment in spread betting and this post is the first of a series on that topic. I begin with the reasons why I thought that there might be a use for spread betting as part of my investment strategy and given that I have frequently said I am a cautious long-term investor you may be puzzled as to what those reasons could be. I hold a number of positions in individual stocks though most of my capital is in Funds ETF’s or bonds all intended to be held for the long term. I do however hold LLOY and a number of other FTSE100 stocks individually. So, while I am content to wait and (hopefully) watch my stocks rise over time I am always willing to find new ways of maximising my overall returns. I monitor the “beta “of my stocks and know that a high Beta leads to more volatility and that on days when Stock exchange announcements are made (interim statements, results etc) there is often an associated sharp move in the price. Obviously when that move is up my holdings appreciate in value, however I wondered whether a “sell” spread bet might be used to create a short-term profit on the day from a downward move and create a profitable “hedge “to my long position. In order to test whether my theory might work in practise I opened an IG account and will describe how things have gone so far.

A few weeks ago, I opened the account and lodged £5k, I have opened and closed three positions so far, made two losses, one trivial, the other slightly larger, and made one decent profit and am up about £750, though that is significantly less than the coincident fall in the value of the holdings I have in those Stocks which are LLOY, HSBC, WG. In chronological order the trades are as follows

WG (John Wood group) “SELL” opened for 40 points at 161.84, closed at 172.48. LOSS £420.56

HSBA(HSBC BANK) “SELL” opened for 40 points at 506.5 closed at 481.4 PROFIT £753

LLOY “SELL “ opened for 30 points at 46.109 closed at 46.9 LOSS £24.7

Along the way I noted the following:

OPEN there is a “spread “ similar to the “BID /ASK in buying shares at about 0.5 %- 1% of the SP, so the SP has to move at least 0.5% before the bet breaks even.

CHARGES each bet is subject to “stock borrowing” and “short interest” charges which for me have so far amounted to a few pounds.

MARGIN even though my funds deposited were £5k, several of my attempts to place a bet were rejected for lack of “ margin” , it’s not clear to me what the margin calc is but it is of the order of Several times(about 6 or 7 ) the risk of a 20% move in the SP . Thus to spread bet in any appreciable quantity requires a deposit in the tens of thousands.

LIMITS A limit is a closing point if the bet goes in the preferred direction and

STOPS are to limit the cost of a bet going in the wrong direction.

tbc