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Typing this inflight so no access to data, but I have read a free copy of the Sunday Times and note the persistent threat of a "windfall tax" likely to grow when/If? Shell post blockbuster figures week.
As it happens also sitting in business is Ben van Buerden and a guy who I assume is his CFO.To say they have been in animated conversation doesn't cover it , really keyed up and loud enough for me (and others nearby) to hear.
So as a shareholder, I took a keen interest and this roughly noted is what I heard. I wondered what I would do if I was BVB.I would probably seriously think about how to massage the figures to defuse the threats and he's obviously on the same wavelength.
"Right this is what I want you to do, and have it ready for Thursday morning !!
Ok so there will be oodles of cash and I REALLY want to make it look as tho' there's isn't so what do we do to conceal / hide it , here are my proposals:
DRILL the UK government are clearly onside WRT to drilling in the North Sea, WOS or even offshore Ireland, or anywhere other than Russia!. so I want your guys to mock-up a provisional major drilling schedule , dust off some cancelled/ delayed/ridiculous prospects and pile them all into a POSSIBLE schedule to make the UK/Europe Energy independent.
WRITE OFFS We will choose the maximum plausible figure for Russian joint deal write-offs,even though/ we fully expect that we can claw back some of this cash when it emerges that we have overprovisioned (!) or managed to sell those assets.
DEBT REDUCTION This is the time to call in as much finance as we can, at our last year-end we had £50bill plus in debt , which for this size of company is not untypical, but if we REALLY want to take the heat off, we choose to run a programme of debt reduction and announce it this week , listing ALL the high coupon debts and allocating as much as we can of the "excess" profits to " Rebalancing our debt profile" that should work!!
SHARE BUYBACKS probably best to go easy on this, while the general public may not get too stressed about it , some of the left wing journalists(he was shall I say, a little less charitable in his terminology!) will go to town if we increase the buyback program , so we'll pass on that .
DIVIs again not a real option , we wont say anything about divis , except some boiler plate about making sure that the public through their pensions etc get the benefit of buybacks and divis and whatever we do DONT mention the effect on our bonus schemes!!!
By the time that's all done I want to see all of the billions we've made allocated in away that responds to the Ukraine situation , saves Europe from Putin's oily clutches and I want us to look like the ANSWER not the PROBLEM, and I Want it on my desk on Wednesday morning and your CFO team available to work 24 hours from then 'till 7 on Thursday .
CLEAR ?

JUST IN CASE IT WASN'T OBVIOUS the above is fiction

Hi Folks , holding reply on this thread as I haven't got time to write a full post, about to fly home from Singapore where we've been having a family get together.BUT there are a significant number of inaccuracies and misleading statements which I intend to address and to fulfil my promise to summarise my own use of SB's about which I posted a few days ago. Spending almost two days travelling so will post on Monday.
selamat tinggal sekarang!

Bouncy..By the way I have made good money investing in Amazon , their P/S is still about 3 , it used to be in the hundreds!

Bouncy I'm sorry but I cannot agree, ALL metrics have use but they should all be handled with caution, if it were as simple as following a formula we would all be rich. I firmly believe in fundamental analysis, with a degree of common sense. The good thing is that we both expect RR's SP to recover from here, let's hope for our different reasons we are both correct!

Bouncy I have to strongly disagree with your post, In the case of RR the price to sales ratio tells us very little if anything useful. The very old adage "revenue is vanity profit is sanity......" applies here .RR must spend significant sums on research before launching a product and equally large sums in technical support and maintenance once such products are sold . This is not Tesco! where there is a direct correlation between sales and profits.
Your comment
" or in other words; you're paying 60p for every £1 Rolls Royce makes." is simply not true it is better worded " you are paying 60p for every £1 Rolls Royce SELLS" if you look at RR's accounts that £1 of sales translates into 0.3p PROFIT. The reason for that is "cost of Sales", in RR's case accounting for the other 99.7p.

Poker... I don't believe Drahi has spent £3.5 bill buying a position in BT to watch the SP drift slowly down as it has for the last five years........

Mountain.. I assume you know that P/E is Market cap/ earnings, In RR's case the high P/E is largely as a result of a temporary (??) fall in earnings primarily due to the damage to one of their primary income streams of Aero engine maintenance based on flying hours. The reasonable assumption is that as the Covid scare recedes, flying hours and hence maintenance revenues will return, so the market, tho' the RR share price is somewhat deflated does not fully reflect that earnings loss. The market supposedly "looks through" short term issues to project a share price reflecting the medium term future. If for example, next years figures were to show a return of the aero maintenance to more normal levels it would mean a couple of billion on revenue , lets say 20% of which drops through to the bottom line and hence a P/E of maybe somewhere in the twenties , reflecting a company with a couple of stable revenue lines and good earnings prospects in defence and small nuclear.
hope that helps.

Fleccy . You will no doubt know a lot more than me about the internal workings of BT but what occurs to me is that, as well as being seen as a "hidden gem " Openreach is going to be consuming a very significant part of BT''s spend over the next few years, whereas ...(I guess)EE and consumer is much less cash hungry and generates significant revenues in its own right (£4.8 in the last figs).
If BT feel they need to be seen to be doing something to alleviate the pressures of two major holders, then such a break up provides management with a plan, spins off a long-term winner in Openreach and creates an entity which can generate cash for the fibre build-out .
I am sure there is a school of thought which is pressing a view that "the components are worth more separately than the whole is currently valued at"

Thoughts
BT is under pressure from Drahi , who now holds 18%,
Persistent rumours that a spin off of Openreach could be worth "up to "£20 billion"
BT recently did a deal which puts their pension deficits in a box to be funded by Their EE subsidiary.
Bt announce that it will use the EE brand for consumer but enterprise and global will remain as BT.

Am I overthinking in wondering whether a breakup is coming??

I have opened a spread bet "sell" at 46.109. While I have been critical of those spread betting here , I wondered whether it would be useful as a"hedge " for my holding on results days when the SP tends to move more sharply.If the SP rises I make a gain from my holding , if it falls I make a small compensatory profit from the short position.
I will report back tomorrow but have the following initial observations.
Even relatively small positions require a significant deposit to be held as margin, thus it is apparent that those who have alleged here that they have positions worth thousands are either lying or have tied up significant sums of several times the amount risked.
I know that between 60 and 70 % of spread betters lose money and thus far I have made one moderate profit and two losses.
The initial position offerings are a few basis points away from the market price , so at initiation ,positions are instantly at a small loss. I have placed "stops" at ~10% away from the opening position to limit losses , but have not used "limits " to close a profitable position.
The process is somewaht addictive , I am not an assiduous SP watcher but I suspect spread betters are.
More tomorrow.

I don't get worried about short term SP movements if I am confident that I have done my research adequately and nothing fundamental has changed. That is broadly the case here, the significant changes IMV are the recognition that long haul air travel is recovering much more slowly than was expected (with the notable exception, until a few weeks ago ) of the USA and China. That will affect RR's revenues for this year and may even mean no profit. Heathrow figures while good for this summer , included a warning that flights and volumes would probably be down over the coming winter. The other factor is that, while the possibility is still slim, there is now a market fear that RR's working capital is under some threat, the nature of the business is that significant, long-term expenditures required in the hope of longer term profits. The ITP sale is factored in and will , when completed help, but Interest rates are rising and should RR need to borrow more it will be at a higher cost. RR is not a "tech" company per se , but is suffering the same fears, distant profits are discounted more heavily in a rising interest rate environment. The choice for investors is clear, stick with it and hold (or even add) or sell.

fleccy - the answer is clear - MOVE FROM HALIFAX, those dates are ridiculous! I have just googled and there are a number of brokers who offer BED and ISA, many of the well-known names. I won't give examples as that might get the post pulled.

For those who want to move a holding from a share account to an ISA the best means is a "Bed and ISA" transfer, most brokers offer it and as the sale and purchase are "bundled" with lots of others the fees are negligible (99p for II customers), both sale and buy are executed within minutes, so the risk of the SP moving against you is slight and there is no need to "pre Fund" the buy in your ISA. I no longer add to our ISA's but used it for many years and never had a problem. Check it for future reference.

Lordcroker....for the last full year recorded ITP had revenues of 750 mill. Euros but made a loss of 17mill Euros. So I'm afraid there is very unlikely to be a windfall profit for the period until the sale is completed. As an aside FX movements mean that when converted to sterling the sale price will be about 2% lower than at the time of the announcement ie about £1.4bill.

My "watch the SP fly " was an in-joke, last week Boyo laughingly, sort of implied that I had moved the SP after a brief post coincided with (but probably did NOT!! cause) a sharp rise. I reluctantly accept that my intelligent, thoughtful, analytical posts have F. all influence on the SP.

S&p global commodity insights is suggesting that Russian production is falling because of a lack of willing buyers(and incidentally the Indians and Chinese are buying at $20-30 below market prices), the latest IEA forecast has Russian production down by 3 mill BPD from recent average from next month.
Now watch the Shel SP fly!!

Mach..... the shares Falky called are virtually uninvestable to anyone with a knowledge of the markets, the "spread" is between 25 and 30% for BOR and ARG, which means they have to RISE that much to BREAK EVEN .The largest and most tradeable of the three, RKH is down over the last few months. Falky's recent claims on these boards to have accumulated £70k of ARG is, to be kind, highly improbable. It is currently an £8mill market cap share which generally trades a few hundred pounds per day and yet he allegedly accumulated almost 2% of the stock in a period when it traded at about 2p without moving the SP much. That just doesn't happen!

M- Ant WADR if you're asking that question you shouldn't be buying. Consider an ETF for now and if you want to invest in individual stocks do some learning, I recommend "the motley fool investment guide" (a second-hand copy) and after absorbing that a second-hand copy of Benjamin Graham's "The intelligent investor" and regular reading of the business pages of any good newspaper(if you can find one!)
In the meantime read these boards, and see if you can identify the knowledgeable from the fools , frauds, egotists and liars, when you feel confident in that, use the advice of the small number who remain!!
I wish you luck!!

It is reported that shel is in talks with the big chineses oilcos to sell its stake in the Sakhalin project, while they won't get anything like the ~$5bill its worth, any sale price is better than the total write off of the asset . Maybe $1-2 bill recovered?

Noggers I think your conservative estimate is probably about right, the SP action implies that the market doesn't expect a huge premium, recognising that retail is still far from out of the woods. The important question is what do the major holders (Tosca, Schroder, Thread and RK)want to do. As I have said here a few weeks ago(and despite the other estimates ), many of the shares are held at averages which would make a 140-160 takeout profitable. My best guess is that it will happen and the price will be no more than 10% above today's , hence the recent SP flatlining.