Member Info for Couerdelion

I fear the momentum might be cut short come Monday by the actions of attention-seeking presidents but it's hard to see how these can go in any direction but up right now.

If we spent all our time worrying about what a certain Tango-man might be posting, we'd all be in bonds and gold.

Probably not too much to worry about here though. If we see a similar pattern to early-April, MKS will be one of the more defensive stocks that people seek out.

I doubt that they aren't buying shares that are not already earmarked within the compensation scheme or perhaps even paid for by employee payments. Point being it's not something that we shouldn't already have costed in the SP.

I did buy in towards the end today. Possibly a little too early but if Monday opens sharply down I will have other bargains to hunt down.

Ah got it!! Trump just tweeted something about tariffs on China connected to rare earths. They are playing him like a fiddle.

US markets took a little dive this afternoon. Do we know the reason?

No dividends paid since March. £40m was the cash position at the end of March

Seems like we're now back to the game of guessing where the SP bottoms out. I'll probably settle for the low 120's but we've seen it drift lower only a few months ago.

Cash is only dwindling because of the buybacks (£6.4m outstanding at HY25 with HY1 cash from operating activities of £2.8m). I'd guess we're sitting on cash equivalent to 70%+ of MCap. Maintain a little cash for smaller acquisitions but since they are not burning through cash at the moment, you could easily maintain the current distribution rate.

At these prices, I'd say you're paying about 10p for the business operations here.

The share is oversold because the cultural impacts have been overexaggerated. They hold some valuable brands and there's large segments of the population that will pay for premium booze - anecdotally I would even suggest they are paying more for stand-out brands and it's the older vanilla brands that are losing share.

For the younger market, they continue to go out - and if everyone is working from home then they'll no doubt have more time to do that. As for the zero alcohol market, DGE have that covered too and will continue to expand in that area to cover those customers.

I've added to my holding here. Given the cash pile, the generous dividend is well covered and sustainable and there is plenty left over for bolt on acquisitions and buybacks. Plenty of room for the SP to bounce back but I'll collect the dividend while I'm waiting.

A brief trawl through the files suggest they are still sitting on over £30m of cash (£40m net cash at 31 March with £6.4m of buybacks scheduled and/or completed).

Probably best not to mix TEK and alcohol. Slightly ironically, I ended up with a few Mitchell & Butlers shares by the end of the day.

Happy buying at these prices.

I don't think sirboring was being serious. Valuing the copper business at around £(20)m is a probably a little too pessimistic. Alternatively they would have to lose £20m somewhere else but be sitting on a worthless copper operation.

Was it share option maturity day?

The third of the three strands of the new business strategy covering products sold to the likes of us. I should probably follow it just to keep up to date at what's happening in the world of life and pensions.

I've been drinking all afternoon in London and come back to find pedro agreeing with aspers and longfell agreeing with me. That's as good a sign as I need for a rerate here :-D

I'll share my thoughts another time on the "valuation discount".

Clearly the market reacted badly but incorrectly (though understandably) in my view. Once they delve into the details they will see the future potential and the achievability of the production targets.

To be fair, there is a certain inevitability about market crashes but the timing is what often catches people by surprise prices might have already risen before the dip. No harm in keeping back some extra rainy day cash just in case but probably not excessively so as you'll be missing out on the income and gains until that much awaited correction arrives.

With LGEN, the price is just the ticket to buy you the dividend but having bought, you can largely forget the price and just pick up the dividend. I'm not going to say what the right dividend yield should be but 9% feels like a very agreeable one and I missed plenty of buying opportunities while waiting for better ones.

Maybe they are a little cheap, but the question is whether they might be even cheaper in the days and weeks to come. It's not cheap compared to where it was a month ago.