Member Info for DorsetLSE

So SMT is almost back to where it was 5 years ago and once again reliant on Elon Musk. I sometimes wonder why I keep my small holding currently worth about £41k.

Some share buybacks happening but not large sums just a few 10s of £k so why bother?

Put my toe in the water and bought a small holding of £10k worth last week. Discount now over 25% so hoping that something will have to happen with this one

Yes it's nearly 10% discount. I have nearly £150k of Brunner, I like the discipline caused by the Brunner family owning about 30%. I might add a bit next week.

About to be merged with something involved with SABA?

Starting to look like Fundsmith Equity going nowhere and not even paying a dividend. Sold out a few moths ago.

I told myself that I would sell when the price next reached £9, well here we are. Last time I bought some they were over £14 so having a heart searching psychological moment. At age 76 I don't need advice like "invest for the long term" either! SMT did well with Tesla for a while and now Nvidia and some of the magnificent 7 so as I said some time ago it tends to rely on finding the next star performer so I might just sell and put the proceeds in an S&P500 tracker and get a better return.

I wonder if Brunner will issue some equity? The NAV is below the share price for once.

Diageo has been buying its own shares for ages and the price keeps going down and are clearly not working. I know the theory of why they do it but I would rather have had a special dividend and I can decided what to do with it.

This is the first time I have had to deal with a rights issue where my shares are in HL nominee accounts. Does anyone know how the process should work?

The buybacks continue (for over a year now) and don't seem to be stabilising the share price. I would much rather they issue a special dividend and then I can decide what to spend it on. At the moment the Board is probably more concerned about the value of their share options and bonuses

In my 40+ years of investing I have learned to ignore so called "experts" and chartists (a bit like fortune tellers) who usually have an agenda to talk up or down the stock values. Remember when oil was forecast by experts to go above $200? Valuing SMT is very difficult as it involves so much unquoted companies as well as the general market movement in the public stuff so I don't really believe the valuations. As for me I still have £22k in SMT and it represents just over 2% of my portfolio so no big deal but its been going nowhere for too long and at age 75 my investment horizon is getting closer :)

Watched the latest video and decided that it's the usual "you need to invest for the long term" story that you always get with funds that are underperforming. Sold out yesterday

Yes considering bailing out of SSON now, it doesn't even pay a dividend

BUT is now a 12% of my portfolio and growing nicely. Its a pity that it seems to be under the radar for most investors.

I understand what you say but I have a few other long term holdings with disappointing results following buy backs such as Diageo which has been buying back shares for a couple of years and it hasn't done anything for the share price (and this was before the recent profit warning) . In reality I would prefer a special dividend if they have excess cash and I can decide where to invest it. Artificially boosting share prices is often about executive bonuses. Incidentally is the SMT buyback coming from borrowing or have they been sitting on a £1bn cash pile?

Once again by signalling a buy back the share price rises which makes the buy back less effective and ultimately it's destroying value. So I am thinking that the recent share price rise is not a true reflection of where SMT is heading as the underlying assets haven't changed. Time to trim my stake a little more perhaps.

I have a subscription to the FT premium online which is very good but expensive at over £560/year (including a 20% reduction for payment up front) you don't get the usual news stuff in there unless business related but it does give you a good background to what's going on in the world with good analysis from experts. After reading this for a while it makes other papers look simplistic.

SMT has been one of my worst performing investments and even recently seems to be being left behind by the rest of my portfolio. It's now less than 4% but I still have nearly £40k worth. At age 75 my investment horizon is getting smaller so time to reduce a bit more I think.

One thing I have always wondered about BG is how they actually operate internally? Normally a fund house will buy and sell the underlying assets in the stock exchange but in the case of BG they have a whole raft of funds with quite a significant overlap in holdings so it wouldn't surprise me if some of the assets are actually held in internal nominee accounts and traded amongst the managers. This would have the effect of reducing external trading costs. Any thoughts?