Member Info for Copout

Yep! One of my better jinxings. It's now official, I simply do not understand modern markets - good half years, a real turnaround stock under sound leadership making the right decisions and a thumping increase in the interim divvi. What's not to like?. Can the 'market' see something I can't?

Not half bad these half year's results. Well done Mr H. Might as well jinx this straight off though - looking for 7 this week as a result then some more once the brokers get down to some re-rating work.Getting to be a good long term hold too with the divvi coming back.

You're a chartist Borgy, course you sold too soon!

What RNS?

For us unfamiliar with shorting shorthand Obo could you explain what those numbers mean?

Thumping sell of 3.4m shares today. Be interesting to see who's downsizing if an RNS comes out. Still, not bad when that happens and the SP goes up!

Good RNS today resulting is a very good uplift in the SP. GVC is very good at buying and assimilating companies and producing very strong dividends as a result. There remains a slight uncertainty over the whole betting environment and regulation but otherwise this is a great investment.

I suspect there is an erroneous assumption going round that higher fuel oil prices (crude is up 25 p.c. in a month) will adversely affect profit ratios. They may, but only slightly. As I've said before P Stevens is well versed in derivatives and price hedging is well understood in energy markets. Seems to me PPG is off the blocks and can only grow from here. Keep the faith!

Great responses guys, thanks! Got the references in the appendix. Looks very promising for future growth.

Hi guys, where are you seeing these auction results for PPG? I've looked in the Appendix A list from National Grid and there are 630 lines of awards to all sorts of companies (including Alkane which I was in) but I see nothing for PPG or Rockpool. Also, if these awards are so apparent how come there's no serious buying interest. I'm confused. I topped up heavy at 2.5 so looking for an upgrade from here.

Higher diesel prices will have been factored in by PPG. Boss Phil Stephens is very familiar with the derivatives markets and he's almost certain to have built in some hedging strategies. And thanks for the reminder re Dec 6. Today looks like it's a top-up opportunity!

Good steady numbers from today's trading update. Still don't understand which this came off from 950 earlier this year - perhaps this reinforcement of the business model and a divvi increase will get the investors back in.

What's with the slide from 760 to, now 100p lower? It's a fairly steady downtrend on the graph despite last week's good news on the integration front and divvi reinstatement. The threat of an investigation into online gaming may generate a few jitters but that was also fairly recent. Thoughts anyone? PS shorting already ruled out.

Don't think there's a takeover in the offing yet. Can't see who would be the buyer. It's good technology with a wide base of customer potential but that wouldn't work if it were owned by a bank, for example. Another payments firm might be a buyer but they would just junk the EPO system and integrate the customer list, or do the reverse manouevre - unlikely. And although recurring revenues are good the case isn't proven until EPO makes a profit, otherwise it's too speculative. Maybe in another couple of years when there's critical mass EPO could be acquired by an FX quote system to make a front to back end unit. Meanwhile takeover chatter just increases the likelihood of carpetbaggers coming in to disrupt things for a few weeks before leaving disappointed.

Interesting. Looks like there's a change of investor sentiment around EPO. The main new news is the Bank of India announcement - most other info and the recent updates hasn't changed much from earlier presentations/forecasts. But a definite reversal from 15p! I guess Hank has been on the road selling the story to investors and there's some quiet stake building going on. Promising.

No company ever pays out 100 per cent of profits but if EPO pays out half that's 12.5p which on a p/e of 10 gives us over a quid. We can dream.

Solid annual report - lots of peripheral information which seems to indicate a well-managed company. We'll need some broker re-ratings soon to reflect the new engineering setup and sales prospects but I guess we won't get those until diamond recovery starts to work properly and the occasional big uns get picked up. But yes, agree,100 per cent gain in next twelve months wold be welcome.

Sounds reasonable. My experience of this stuff in the City was that there tended to be relatively high break even costs due to the initial IT and development costs but once you got to b/e the unit profitability soared. That's assuming you avoided stupid losses like Baydonhill!

Great stuff John21. Serious, considered analysis which is most welcome. Well done. One question though - transaction fees in financial services tend to decline due to cheaper IT, competition and higher volume processing. Are you assuming £2.2 per transaction will be stable in future?

Hardly! Read the numbers not their headlines. Pre-tax loss down from £8.7m to £7.2m. Slightly encouraging. But dig a bit and you can see that gross revenue increased by £3.5m but costs rose by £3.2. Plus there's around £8m of something called derivatives gains in there (note 12). Not sure that's easy to replicate year on year. All in all not bad numbers but not great. I see they are predicting cash flow positive in the coming Q4, which is very precise and suggests they are aiming to keep costs flat till then. More waiting for the SP to get back to the 40s I'm afraid.