Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
I don't wish for anyone to lose money Pas, In fact my posts are worded in a way to encourage caution.
As far as my investments are concerned, I'm showing a significant paper loss on my BT and Vodafone investments, but I'm seeing a good paper profit on my Lloyds shares. All three of them pay good dividends giving me a choice to take the cash, or reinvest while I consider my chosen stocks to be cheap.
There are a few things that worry me about QBT.
First it's the history of the company, being formed from the ashes of Clear Leisure and going from a company investing in theme parks to a technology company. Choosing a name like Quantum Blockchain Technology was obviously aimed at tapping into the hype permeating throughout the tech focused investment community, they missed out on slotting AI into the name.
What QBT are trying to achieve is like a holy Grail to the Bitcoin miners; But with the many Billions of investment poured into Bitcoin mining, you'd think the miners themselves would have found quicker methods if it's possible, rather than pooling thousands of ASIC's and focusing on brute force Hashing power.
Even if QBT have found something, they'll probably need scale to make it work and there's no guarantee the large miners will want to incorporate it into their operations.
QBT's updates don't inspire confidence, with the last one suggesting there are issues commercialising the products and they can't give a timeline when the issues will be resolved:
"All of the Company’s current efforts are now focused on turning Methods A, B and C, into commercial products. This has proved a very time consuming, due to the tremendous reverse engineering efforts involved in using totally undocumented third-party ASIC chips."
https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/QBT/rd-update-wkfr1diw051iepo.html
All these contribute to my opinion that QBT have a less that 10% chance of commercialising their products, if I'm wrong I'll happily eat humble pie.
Pas would you bet over £100k on the toss of a coin, knowing you had a 50/50 chance of winning? I used the term less than a toss of a coin to give a visualisation of the risk I believe Obelix and others are taking. In terms of the less than 10% comment, I was trying to indicate that I am open minded since I can't say there's a 0% chance of QBT being successful.
It'll be interesting to see if any large Off Book trades are reported later today, they're not price setting but that spike up is unusual. Maybe someone fat fingered one of the algo's programmed to push the price down, causing the price to climb instead.
If you're being honest about your QBT investments, you'll deserve your winnings should QBT succeed. In my opinion the chances of QBT achieving their goals are extremely low, by extremely low I'm thinking less than 10%. To bet well over £100k on something I consider has less chance than a coin toss, makes you extremely brave, I can only assume you're rich enough to not miss the cash you've bet on QBT should the companies offering fail.
Cursedddddd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMef23zFSuU
Total Voting rights 498,879,186 lower for April.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vS0oSavIsBjHgD7k6NMyk7Z591Cm2IrevvLI-Jq95gOmESrOI0Vi_NhA8LIO9rMz90Y5zCOCoFuEItG/pubchart?oid=1812824850&format=interactive
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vS0oSavIsBjHgD7k6NMyk7Z591Cm2IrevvLI-Jq95gOmESrOI0Vi_NhA8LIO9rMz90Y5zCOCoFuEItG/pubchart?oid=1451011517&format=interactive
I can't claim to understand the FCA regulations but MS are reporting these as 8.A voting rights, which would indicate they're holding the stock. If they'd loaned out the stock for shorting, then I assume they wouldn't hold any voting rights since the shares would have been sold as part of a short position.
https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/DTR/5/?view=chapter
Looks as though MS bought some stock to their 8A position, 0.001375% (136,841 shares).
https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BT.A/holdings-in-company-9ys1uequwl4e0zy.html
I doubt it's the FCA investigation holding Lloyds back, for example on the 30/01/2023, Natwest's closing price was 308.6p and the Lloyds closing price was 52.98p; Pretty close to the current prices, which is surprising since Lloyds have had a £2 Billion buyback since then; Natwest also had a Buyback in May 2023, of Government held shares valued at £1.259 Billion.
If it's the potential Motor Finance compensation speculation that's causing Lloyds underperformance, either Lloyds are underplaying the impact of the compensation payouts, or the Martin Lewis type speculation is way over the top.
Qver the last 6 months, Lloyds is up by 30%, Barclays is up by 58% and Natwest is up by 74.5%. If Lloyds had seen the same percentage increase as Natwest since the 1st Nov 2023, Lloyds share price would now be 70p per share, can someone explain to me why Lloyds is underperforming Natwest an Barclays?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSVzuExpz8wA6wSe4UYNF77ABNpeZl6fyFbNG9CvFN9Dfan-bb1ShTTcPXaj77fXju6TMPEIPkjDys5/pubchart?oid=1767587241&format=interactive
The Morgan Stanley RNS, reported on the 25th April, showed in the Off Book volumes on the 22nd April. On the day 194 Million Off Book volume went through, with a further 25.95 shares traded On Exchange.
https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BT.A/holdings-in-company-oxsnr5qe18ti6g8.html
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vS4gJMsDAQq9sJ_zHqi_JnoVTryAdb4X64c7Clw12E2sGT3N6dTJfB60O8bc5Ns4burXvSSCVFrLvWC/pubchart?oid=457705223&format=interactive
Lloyds would be over 70p now if its share price performed in line with Barclays and Natwest, clearly it hasn't, I have to say the difference in market sentiment makes little sense to me. The market appears to be ignoring buyback's, so I can only guess that it's possibly the dividend debasement that upset sentiment and resulted in Lloyds stock underperforming since. Under AHO Lloyds did buyback's, but only enough to counteract the effect of block listings and the Lloyds dividend still hasn't recovered to the pre-covid level under Nunn.
Jansen/BT have well telegraphed their strategy going back as far as 2019/20, it isn't his fault if the market chose to ignore the updates.
From 2019 results
"“Our aim is to deliver the best converged network and be the leader in fixed ultrafast and mobile 5G networks. We are increasingly confident in the environment for investment in the UK. We have already announced the first 16 UK cities for 5G investment. Today we are announcing an increased target to pass 4m premises with ultrafast FTTP technology by 2020/21, up from 3m, and an ambition to pass 15 million premises by the mid-2020s, up from 10 million, if the conditions are right, especially the regulatory and policy enablers."
https://www.bt.com/about/investors/financial-reporting-and-news/results-events-and-financial-calendar/2018-19#tab-18-19-accordion-1
Jansen had only been in the job for a couple of months at that point, obviously they've speeded things up since than entailing spending more on Capex. I'm not happy when my dividends are reduced, but I can see where the cash is going. I didn't work for BT, so I can only go off what I've seen and heard over the last 5 years, but I've agreed with Jansen's plan to rollout Fibre and 5G as fast as possible.