The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring Jeremy Skillington, CEO of Poolbeg Pharma has just been released. Listen here.
"A former governor of the Bank of England has launched a scathing attack on Liz Truss - accusing her government of turning Britain into "Argentina on the Channel"."
https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-turned-britain-into-argentina-on-the-channel-says-ex-bank-of-england-governor-mark-carney-12963829
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkXdFxRHDmQ
Saw that earlier, UBS are working really hard to dent sentiment in BT.
The column values should automatically update as the price changes and the Total column will always show as the current date.
Changed to Black 😉
I made it red to stand out as the total, it has no significance and isn't meant to indicate a loss for AKO. Just for you I'll change it to a different colour. 😒
To add to my previous post in this thread; I've been a bit bored this afternoon so I decided to to build a chart to roughly measure AKO's paper profit on their shorts, not including interest, but the Total column takes the dividend into account. The chart should update every minute as BT's price changes.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRsw9LqqM3qfp1pbyg2fC4UnADyTjldJjpbBz0ejR1F7KI6w6k1OhPW65Iz80lXOgTJh19gwwG7o85U/pubchart?oid=1398899881&format=interactive
Something else to bear in mind, with reference to dividends and short positions, the entity holding the short position is liable for the dividend.
If the dividend is held and the price doesn't decline sufficiently in the meantime; Ako capital as an example, holding a 0.91% short position on ex dividend day, will be on the hook to payout nearly £5 Million pounds in dividends to whoever they borrowed stock from.
Here's a chart summarising Ako's short positions, I used the day closing price to estimate the number of shares purchased and how much they've so far paid out in divi's:
Fund . . Date Changed . Close . Change. . . . . Quantity. . . . Short Price
Ako . . . 7 Mar 2024 . . . . 107.5 . . 0.09% . . . . . . 8,956,646 . . £9,628,394
Ako . . . 23 Feb 2024 . . . 106.9 . . 0.12% . . . . . 11,942,194. . .£12,766,206
Ako . . . 6 Feb 2024 . . . . 107.05 . 0.09% . . . . . . 8,956,646 . . £9,588,089
Ako . . . 23 Jan 2024 . . . 115.6 . . 0.11% . . . . . 10,947,012 . . £12,654,745
Ako . . . 11 Dec 2023 . . . 131.35 . 0.50% . . . . . 49,759,143 . . £65,358,635
Total. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.91% . . . . . 90,561,641 . . £109,996,07
They would also have had to cover the Ex Dividend payout for their 0.5% short position on the 28th Dec 2023, coming in around £1.15 Million. Ako appear to be well in profit from their first short position taken out on the 11th Dec 2023.
I'm only guessing with the above since I've never shorted a stock, I'll happily be corrected if I've misunderstood something.
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.
They're putting every spare penny into capex for FTTP and 5G rollout, it'll be a while before the dividend will increase.
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.