The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring financial educator and author Jared Dillian has been released. Listen here.
Rameriz: On May 26th, regarding the pandemic, you wrote:
"By the end of June we'll be back to normal I have very little doubt here in the UK."
On May 28th, regarding ODX, you wrote:
"I've bookmarked this thread for end of June but I can guarantee this will be around 15-20p by then."
On June 4th, you wrote:
"Covid is diminishing and its quite possible it will die as quick as it arrived...."
Since March 23rd, I have kept a record of global deaths from Covid-19 infection, country by country.
The death-toll for the following countries over the last five days has been (most recent last):
USA: 425, 846, 808, 626, 719.
UK: 38, 233, 184, 135, 173.
Brazil: 729, 1338, 1209, 1204, 1221.
Mexico: 269, 439,730, 770, 667.
The numbers very sadly speak for themselves. I wonder who needs to wake-up here ?
Safy: Spot on ! Three huge known unknowns with the SARS-Cov-2 virus:
1) How infective and for how long in people who have the virus now, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic.
2) Extent and duration of antibodies raised in those who have had the virus.
3) Mutation of virus and how new mutants may change infectivity and antibody production.
On point 3, it is now known that the virus that swept Europe, the US and now penetrating Brazil, Mexico, India etc is a mutant form of the original Wuhan virus. This mutant virus has more spikes and more robust spikes which make entry into the host cells easier and more destructive. This may explain why Beijing gets re-infected by imported new mutant virus.
The two indications from the Nature paper are:
1) Non-symptomatic carriers may be highly infectious and possibly for longer than symptomatic carriers.
2) The extent and duration of protection from IgM and IgG antibodies is unpredictable, which challenges the ideas of both sustainable herd immunity and immunity passports.
To make a coherent plan to relieve the any sort of gathering with larger numbers of people in close proximity (this includes sporting events, pubs, restaurants, hotels, theatres, any form of public transport, schools, universities, etc) governments will have to:
1) Insist on the highest quality tests with sensitivity and specificity as close to 100% as possible.
2) Testing will have to be very extensive.
3) Testing will have to be repeated, probably many times.
4) Testing will have to be for both antigen and antibody.
There is an arcane branch of mathematics called Bayesian Conditional Probability Theory which demands all of the above if any data is to be regarded as truly scientific. Thus the sample size of 37 in the Nature paper may suggest some useful indicators, but is scientifically wholly inconclusive.
Many UK citizens must wonder why our government appears to be floundering. Well, rightly, the government says it wants to be led by the science, but science is driven by evidence and evidence is composed of high-quality data. Until we have all of extensive, high-quality, repeated testing for both antigen and antibodies, the science simply isn't there.
All in my own opinion only as a clapped-out old medic/surgeon with a degree in physics. DYOR. Good luck everybody. Declaration: have just upsized my holding in ODX by a large margin.
I had a "chat-line" conversation with the Team at Lloyds Share-Dealing today to inform them that I would like to participate in the "Open Offer" for ODX. They told me to look out for an email which would then direct me to the "Corporate Actions" section on my dealing platform site. I will post again when this happens.
Lloyds were pretty efficient when I bought shares through PrimaryBid for another company, although in that case I sent a signed hard-copy to their main office. Lloyds were one of the first brokers to deliver the PrimaryBid shares, along with Hargreaves Lansdown. Barclays were very slow apparently.
Fingers: I have sent an email to Zak Mir with a request that he might consider including EMH in one of his very instructive Bulletin Board Heroes broadcasts. If he were to kindly respond, it would be very interesting to see what targets he can deduce from the chart. To my very amateurish eye, the chart is looking very good, with the SP now decidedly above the 200-day EMA with further nice SP action today. Thanks again to you for your constant vigilance and encouragement.
Sending a strong message of support to all you good folk who have been staunch long-holders in EMH. I am sensing that the global mindset has made a shift towards sustainable energy husbandry. We have a cheerleader in Elon Musk, of course, but it's bigger than that. Once again, thanks to Fingers, Sid, Lawrence et al for your awesome scrutiny of the Lithium landscape.
Every best wish to all and keep safe !
Bunsenburner123: You will appreciate that investors' calibration of risk is a major factor in valuing a company. Before the cash-call, TRX faced several major challenges:
1) Heavy expenditure in the acquisition and operational costings of CellRight (San Antonio, Texas, USA) had left TRX reliant on expensive debt with MidCap at 6.75%+LIBOR interest rate per annum.
2) Demand for the tissue products from San Antonio is increasing, but capital expenditure was required to expand the clean-rooms and increase the shifts to meet demand.
3) The board decided to repay Tranche 2 of the MidCap loan, but that exhausted TRX's cash float. Thus, a capital injection from one source or another became vital for survival. A cash-call became imperative.
4) Following the demise of the Neil Woodford funds, there was an overhang from the 19.98% Woodford ownership of the Company. This was taken over by Link Fund Solutions, but that remained a significant risk to the SP.
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The cash call was draconian, but it addressed all of the above risks. Thus, from an investor's perspective, the Company has been substantially de-risked for the forthcoming 12-18 months. In addition, TRX's knee cartilage tissue replacements have recently gained European CE approval. Furthermore, TRX announced that it had established a relationship with a top-ten global healthcare company with the potential to "white-label" TRX's products. In general, TRX's products are highly rated by surgeons.
One of the main points is that TRX is not a "blue-sky" speculation; it has approved products and well-placed manufacturing facilities. The crisis was essentially a funding problem and that has been addressed for the medium-term, hence the significant uplift in the Company's valuation. It is now up to management to take advantage of the Company's many strengths to progress a financially viable business within its established footprints in Europe and the USA.
All in my opinion only. I defer to Chester18's excellent summary of TRX's prospects. Good luck everybody and please keep safe.
Krayl49- Thank you. I have followed Richard Griffiths' investments for about ten years. He is not an activist investor. He appears to have no interest in company take-overs. He is pretty solid and is not known for too much in-and-outing. He top-slices when he deems necessary to clinch a very healthy profit, but he very rarely sells out, just sells down a bit.
Even when things are not going very well for one of his picks, he tends to remain faithful. Have a look at Nanoco Technologies (NANO) or Plant Health Care (PHC).
So with TRX , once again Griffiths is the beneficiary of one of Neil Woodford's former favourites. Being respectful to Woodford, he, Woodford, was a very staunch supporter of TRX as Chester 18 explains in his absolutely brilliant and succinct precis on TRX's past (well done Chester, super job!). One of the reasons that TRX got in a financial muddle was the Woodford collapse- he could no longer come to their support and TRX had to go for expensive debt (6.75% +LIBOR) with MidCap. TRX does still have some debt, about $2M I believe, owed to MidCap.
All very positive as RG is essentially a supportive investor.
Revoy: As I tried to explain in my previous post, Richard Griffiths is a very savvy investor, with a great deal of successful experience in the pharma and biotech sector. He very cannily picked up some very downtrodden ex-Neil Woodford shares.
And no, Griffiths declares the date of aquisition of his shares as Wednesday, June 10th, the date the cash-call shares were distributed. Thus, he did not acquire the shares on the open market, but in the institutional cash-call.
All very positive in my opinion !
Richard Griffiths is a smart investor. He did very well from his investments in Shield Therapeutics and Silence Therapeutics in the past. He has been a consistent investor in Circassia Pharmaceuticals. He has sold down recently in 4-D Pharma and E-Therapeutics. He was in E-Therapeutics (ETX) at 1.55 pence and sold down when it ten-bagged for him. He holds non-pharma and non-biotech stocks, too. He scooped up a number of cheap shares when Neil Woodford's funds crumbled.
He is often joined in his investments by Lombard Odier Asset Management (LOAM). The uplift today in TRX is a signal that he is taken very seriously by the investment community.
Lunchboxbill: www.worldometers.info/coronavirus website has an update on total number of cases, and deaths, each day for each country. If anything, we are already in a second surge. Daily infections have been increasing since early May and are now about 140,000 new cases, globally. The death toll has remained steady at about 5000 deaths per day, globally. From a death-toll standpoint, the USA, Brazil, India and Mexico suffer the highest and have done for many days now. Horrendously, as of yesterday, 428,210 people have died from Covid-19 worldwide.
From about April 10th, the UK daily death-toll has outstripped other European countries. Yesterday, our UK death-toll of 202 was more than France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Sweden combined and by some margin. Sad beyond belief. Please keep safe, folks.
Hargreaves Lansdown also have the MCAP wrong at c. £149M. The official London Stock Exchange site has the MCAP yesterday at £21.70M. With today's uplift, MCAP is £22.71M.
Looking at the charts, it's interesting to see that there has been support between 17.5 pence and 15.5 pence from March 27th, 2018, to January 27th, 2020. Support levels can, of course, act as resistance levels when a share is on the upstroke.
Price on February 4th, 2020 was exactly as today, 14.75 pence, and then a real tumble over the next six weeks to reach a low on March 23rd, 2020 of 8.9 pence. There was no fundamental reason for this dip, but many stocks suffered the Covid-19 swoon.
We have just crested the 200-day EMA, which is sitting at 14.4 pence. The Simple Moving Average "Golden Cross" of 20-day to 50-day occurred on May 7th at 11 pence. The Exponential Moving Average "Golden Cross" of 20-day to 50-day occurred on June 1st at 12.9 pence. Volumes were quite high today. The Relative Strength Index (from London Stock Exchange) was 65.72 yesterday, June 10th.
It will be very interesting to see how EMH's SP fares in the short-term. Markets have been very overbought and Q2 results season will be upon us soon (principally July into early August).
All in my opinion only. Please DYOR. Please keep safe.
Fingers, Sid, Lawrence and others: Again so many thanks for your diligence and highly intelligent pro-active positioning on EMH. You've been an inspiration to me. Your posts are of truly outstanding quality, so different from the twaddle found on many boards, particularly the frothy stocks.
Krupa can go hang, but it's so good to know that EMH is beginning to feature on the radar. I'm slightly annoyed with myself in that I took my own advice and was deliberately wary as we approach Triple Witching. I ghost bought 40,000 more shares today at just under 14 pence, then decided to play safe.
The big markets have been terribly overbought in my opinion and a downturn was inevitable as we are seeing today. There's a lot of borrowed money being gambled and Triple Witching means margin calls.
I haven't yet looked at the charts, but I think we will now have just crested the 200-day EMA, which is a nice follow-on from the "Golden Cross" between the 20-day EMA and 50-day EMA of several days ago.
Krupa's cheeky offer puts a bit of support for the SP.
Once again, so many thanks to you good guys. Best wishes and keep safe.
HBomb5- I secretly hoped that one of the reasons for the very draconian cash-call was to flush out the Woodford/Link 19.98%. Does look like Acacia have picked them up, then sold down to 15.72% on June 8th, now a much lower percentage owing to the dilution. To me, the Woodford/Link overhang was always an elephant-trap, apparently (hopefully!) now resolved.
Although the PrimaryBid shares will get delivered to investors in dribs and drabs, those 800,000,000 shares have already been amortised into the dilution: am I correct ? We may see some volatility owing to PrimaryBid share-holders selling out, but looking forward to some stabilisation.
Acuteperception: I don't quite get your point, unless you are making a generalised comment on all equities. As far as risk is concerned, would I have been smarter buying Royal Dutch Shell at £26, or Rolls-Royce at £9, or M and S at £2.30 ? Last time I looked, the lows for each of these were £9.20, £2.50 and 85 pence within the last twelve months, respectively. And these are all venerated, highly vertically-integrated businesses with established track-records. Or at least they were !
With EMH, of course there is an execution risk. But CEZ is no virgin in the realms of mining and power. Their geological experts will have gone over the Cinovec project with a tooth-comb. I don't regard myself as a high-risk taker and I tend to veer towards defensives. I've scanned umpteen small companies with a view to investing and, on balance, the reward-to-risk ratio for EMH is as high as I can find. It has a profile very much oriented towards a more rational, cleaner, environmentally sustainable future. It has a "moat" in terms of high barrier-to-entry and its mineral asset is rare on European soil.
I'm not a qualified geologist, but I hold a first-class honours degree in physics and do, therefore, have some insight into the issues surrounding the power-potential of lithium.
If you would care to elucidate some specific issues with regard to the execution risks ref. EMH/CEZ/Cinovec, we would all be very pleased to hear them. If the quality of reportage found on this BB is anything to go by, the investors here are intelligent and studious. Over to you !
TheOldBee- The algorithms that discern whether a transaction is a buy or a sell operate on an average of the bid and the ask. As you say, it's not any kind of misrepresentation, just not very bright robots !!
The SP is hanging in there. Some comfort that the institutional buyers have sticky hands. From previous posts, it looks like the PrimaryBid shares will be delivered to us at various times, depending on one's dealing platform. Not bothered- not selling !
If things come together for TRX, a consolidation may occur. I've said before that the now exuberant Avacta (AVCT) performed a 100-into-1, converting their 6.7 Billion shares into 67 Million in January, 2016. Their SP is now about £1.50, which does sound better than 1.5 pence !!
My view is that we've cleared a major hurdle for the short to medium-term. The US bio-tech investors have, at long last, noticed the very undervalued British bio-tech stocks, so I'm quietly optimistic.
Good health to all !
Adam: I learned a lot from reading Anthony Bolton's "Investing Against The Tide". Bolton, now retired, was a very dignified and very successful money-manager for Fidelity.
James Montier has written other books. One of his books, "Value Investing-Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investment" is rather technical, but he does give a list of tenets of investing, some of which are:
1) VALUE: Put in a margin of safety to minimize the risk of overpaying for the hope of growth.
2) BE CONTRARIAN: Sir John Templeton said: "It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different from the majority."
3) BE PATIENT.
4) DON'T FORECAST: Or in the words of Warren Buffett: "There are those that don't know...... and then there are those that don't know that they don't know !"
5) CYCLES AND HISTORY MATTER: Markets have moods and rhythms, not always rational.
6) BE SCEPTICAL: Critical thinking skills are vital to long-term success and survival.
For my own part, I have to constantly remind myself to always leave some cash on the top-line. There's a lovely saying: "Don't measure the depth of the lake with both feet!" AIM can be a real snake-pit and we privateers are up against the immensely well informed and all sorts of very complicated games get played. Yesterday, I asked a good friend on mine, who used to be on a major London trading desk, what Market Makers (MM) do. I was somewhat horrified by his answer !! To me, it sounded like a stitch-up between the Company Analysts (making buy/hold/sell calls, plus target prices, etc) and the traders on the large trading desks. That applies to the whole market and the sums involved can be huge.
Good luck and keep safe!