George Frangeskides, Chairman at ALBA, explains why the Pilbara Lithium option ‘was too good to miss’. Watch the video here.
Lloyds stock price had performed inline with Barclays over the last 5 years, the price would now be around 77p, and if it matched Natwest the price would now be over 69p.
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LLOY:LON?comparison=LON%3ABARC%2CLON%3ANWG&window=5Y
I can't see any valid reasons for Lloyds underperforming Barclays and Natwest.
It's still around a 5.5% Yield at the current price and there's a good chance Vodafone's stock price is around the bottom, especially with £4 Billion in buybacks on the horizon. If you invest through an ISA, there's a reasonable chance that an investment in Vodafone will outperform Bonds.
Wacky Races
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZNf0G6Vnq8
"Openreach has deployed fibre to “just under” 14 million premises, of which four million are “right here in the north”, and the operator’s £15bn build programme is on track to pass 25 million homes by 2026, she said.
Grimes distinguished the operator’s rollout as the “fastest” in Europe and the only one in the UK that has committed to a “proportional build of rural and urban footprint” as it rolls out fibre to “anywhere that is economically viable”.
She also flagged Openreach’s 34% takeup rate, which is the figure the operator reported in its quarterly results for the three months to 31 December 2023. The operator expects this to grow to “50%-plus in the coming years”."
“ Altnets are in a difficult spot right now, given the cost of money, under-penetration, and dreams not coming to fruition. It’s a moment of peril in terms of people thinking that there’s plenty of capital to build. All those billions [from investors] that came into the UK, they’re scratching their heads right now thinking about what has happened to my investments.”
https://www.telcotitans.com/btwatch/openreach-targets-30m-full-fibre-premises-nexfibre-calls-for-altnet-ramp-up/8014.article
"The Group recognised remediation costs of £25 million in the first three months (three months to 31 March 2023: £19 million), in relation to pre-existing programmes. There have been no further charges relating to the potential impact of the FCA review into historical motor finance commission arrangements, with the FCA having indicated it will update in September."
Pas Blockchain technology was first described in 1991, it's just that developers leaped onto the technology in 2008/9.
https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/blockchain-and-cryptoassets/blockchain-articles/what-is-blockchain/history
Blockchain is basically a distributed leger, or database, it's nothing special. Blockchain is a mechanism for securely exchanging information between servers and is only really secure if the information is exchanged privately between secure servers. My personal view is that Bitcoin is inherently insecure due to the fact anyone and everyone has access to the Blockchain; It's only as secure as Sha256 plus the amount of participation in the network allows it to be. Sha256 will be obsolete once Quantum computers reach a certain size, and if the number of network participants drops below a certain level it may open the Blockchain up to a 51% attack, so decentralised Blockchains are unsafe in my opinion.
https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/blockchain/?aws-products-all.sort-by=item.additionalFields.productNameLowercase&aws-products-all.sort-order=asc
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
I would say the pension deficit is well on its way to being resolved. BT owns valuable assets like Openreach, EE and its core/access network assets. A good chunk of the Net Debt is lease liabilities, which will steadily reduce over time, and the financial debt is easily manageable. The £5 Billion a year capex bill will also decline post 2026 and BT/Openreach will still have the largest Network coverage of any provider in the UK. If the market is as forward looking, as we're led to believe, why doesn't the above ever get mentioned?
Personally I'm going to continue topping up BT stock while I consider the price to be dirt cheap.
Pas I'm not saying people can't make money out of Bitcoin, many have and will probably continue to do so, what I'm saying is that BTC is a made up entity with no real world use. As I've mentioned before someone with the relevant I.T. skills can create their own Proof of Work Crypto, DOGE is a good example, and if something is easily replicable with no useful purpose how can it be deemed to have any real value?
Bitcoin wont lead to future change, since it has no real world use, whereas AI will. The biggest problem for Crypto is the emergence of useful technology competing with and pulling investment away from the Tokens. AI just like Bitcoin requires masses of power hungry computers to process data, but AI has easily identifiable use cases whereas Bitcoin has none. It isn't unrealistic to believe that money will be redirected away from Bitcoin and into AI, since Bitcoin is useless and AI is useful.
The odds are against Bitcoin and other decentralised crypto's surviving in the long term, whereas Blockchain generally does have a bright future since the underlying technology is where the use case exists.
Some people will say anything to gain a few extra votes, and even if he beat all the odds and became US President he wouldn't have the power to push through legislation to back the US Dollar with Crypto. The US Dollar is backed by the FED and the US economy, if it was backed with Fakecoin it would bankrupt the US in a matter of months.
Pas a Bitcoin isn't art, it has no substance in the real world and the only value it has is dependent on speculation, belief and hype. As I've pointed out previously there's only one Mona Lisa, but there are currently around 20 Million Bitcoin, so at best a Bitcoin is comparable to a Jpeg of the Mona Lisa.
https://images.app.goo.gl/eZ5r1QayiLAR5NF37
https://images.app.goo.gl/xNTxC6kXcPVNmyH57
https://images.app.goo.gl/9wnhNVkYphHDGkdG7
The reason I post in here is because I don't believe BTC has any useful purpose, and I also don't believe QBT's products will work outside of the lab testing environment.
My reasoning behind the 2nd part of that statement is that I believe QBT are trying to achieve the impossible, and their efforts to achieve lab level performance on the live Bitcoin network will be thwarted by the current Network Difficulty and Hashrate. I could be wrong, but producing Nonce ranges and distributing them fast enough to compete with the pure Brute force processing power of the Network, would mean QBT's SaaS would have to process and distribute at comparably fast speeds.
I'm not an expert on Bitcoin mining, so my opinion is based entirely on common sense reasoning, I suspect we'll know within the next year if QBT will succeed or fail.
Of course it's here to stay, no doubt it'll have a collectable value once the hyped enthusiasm evaporates away. The reason it's survived this long, is due to the massively successful marketing machine that's continually encouraging new money into the token, but that'll only take it so far. At some point the Whales and HODLers will want to take profit and since Bitcoin doesn't pay dividends, the only way to eventually realise profit is to sell; If enough of the big money starts to shift out of the token, a trickle could soon turn into a flood. There's some big money financial players with interests in the token, who'll have to rely on good volumes in a rising market in order to take profit, which explains why they've pushed so hard for the US spot Bitcoin ETF's in order to bring in new retail cash, via the institutional back door.
Bitcoin enthusiasm will eventually dissipate because Bitcoin has no use. The cost of Bitcoin production valuation model for minting new Bitcoin is also a fake valuation tool, since the Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic use once it's created; A Bitcoin isn't a store of potential energy, the energy used to produce Bitcoin isn't stored within the Token itself and can never be retrieved, you can only use more energy to transact it by mining ever more Blocks and using more electricity. One example of using excess electricity to store energy is a gravity battery, where excess energy is used to raise a Mass to a height, hold it there, and produce electricity when it's eventually allowed to fall under Gravity. Bitcoin is just a dud battery that continually sucks in energy and returns nothing.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1805/1805.07610.pdf#:~:text=Dimon%20and%20the%20grim%20hypotheses,concerted%20computational%20effort%20requires%20the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
The only reason Brexit is being discussed again, is because Starmer was a vocal remainer and the Remoaner cult think the Labour party will somehow take us back into the EU, which is total fantasy; No UK political party is going to turn that stone over again, they simply wouldn't dare because of the turmoil it will cause.
I've been disillusioned with the Labour party since Brown screwed up Final Salary pensions and I think the Conservatives are all for lining their mates pockets, so I wont be voting for either of them at the next general election. I wont vote for Lib Dems because I didn't like their policies around Brexit and their part in trying to derail it. Once the decision was made to exit the EU, the whole of the political class should have rallied behind the decision and helped the UK Government to get a good deal. The EU made a big deal over the solidarity of the member states in supporting Barnier in his negotiating strategy, whereas two thirds of the UK political class tried to destroy the UK negotiating position.
For Bitcoin believers and disbelievers.
Peter Schiff echo's my view perfectly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfHCly1ZCQ0
It could be days, weeks, or months. The CAT panel will have to wade through over a month worth of legal argument, check legal precedent's, look at industry practice, weigh up general consumer law and practices, decide if any decisions should be left to OFCOM with them being BT's regulator, etc, etc, etc.
I haven't watched the court case, apart from a brief look in at the start, but I suspect it isn't a black and white decision for the CAT panel, in fact it would probably come down to the personal opinions of the panel members, and if that's the case then BT shouldn't face any further penalty.
The litigation also included Split Purchase customers, with a much wider time span, OFCOM decided that these customers were well engaged with access to online offerings so didn't regulate in respect of them, are the CAT panel more qualified to overrule the regulator on this point?
The reasoning behind OFCOMS initial decision, to push BT into reducing landline charges, was down to a technicality that many older people weren't engaged and therefore had no knowledge of, or access to, better online deals. I don't believe this is an easy case to unpack for the CAT, since there are many variables that should probably be left to the regulator who pull's BT's strings.