Member Info for fleccy

Fat the Enterprise value is meaningless in BT's case, since the market cap undervalues BT's assets. The Sum Of The Parts breakup value of BT would be much higher than the current market cap, with Openreach alone probably worth as much as the Net Financial debt plus lease liabilities, and possibly pension deficit, combined; Then you have the EE/consumer and Business parts too, clearly BT is undervalued. All that said, it's irrelevant anyway since BT isn't a distressed business, and any prospective purchaser would have to go down the hostile takeover route which wouldn't be cheap.

I assume you're basing the "1 million shares" on the 1,034,581 in their 8.A holding? Is this a call on a call, or a call on a put and how would you find out?

Whether or not MS purchased the stock on the 13th Feb, I assume it was related to this RNS.

I saw that Poker, I'm just watching a YouTube Video to try and understand compound (exotic) Options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC9JWooTGrQ

Strange the price bottomed the day after MS crossed the reporting threshold, on the day they probably completed buying to take them over 6%. On the 13th Feb a total of 277,542,819 were traded, with around 30,570,000 On Exchange and 246,972,819 Off Book.

Remember I pointed out the high Off-Book volume on the 13th Feb?

"5. Date on which the threshold was crossed or reached

12-Feb-2024

6. Date on which Issuer notified

14-Feb-2024"

They probably topped it off on the 13th

https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BT.A/holdings-in-company-2r7dguckjhqydhw.html

I'd suggest GSA most likely have access to information we don't, for example you can guarantee their researchers will have spoken to big miners and know what's going on. Also they're are only shorting around £126,000 at the current price, which isn't a great deal of money in the scheme of things, If QBT's valuation was in the Billions it'd be a different matter.

Mole I disagree, Vodafone could easily be taken over. It wouldn't be the cash amount that'd be the issue, it'd be regulatory approvals in the various different authorities that might cause issues. US financial entities could bid for Vodafone without breaking sweat, using the US magic money tree, where money is created and quietly funneled into the system to buy anything and everything everywhere, as long as it's on their shopping list.

I'm still watching and waiting for the "live results", I'm really curious to see how QBT's software copes with current network hashrate and difficulty. Because the BTC network operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, live results should be available very quickly; I wonder if I'll still be waiting next February?

2.76% of Total Voting rights.

274,620,643 traded today against a daily average of 23.7 Million. Most of the volume was Off-Book.

"One remaining puzzle is the market valuation of the large UK banks, which by the way is not uniform,"

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bank-englands-bailey-says-banks-may-choose-hold-more-reserves-than-expected-2024-02-12/

Not really Brixton, we're already using Digital Money, what I believe Sticky is referring to is Stable coins. The reason the Crypto vested interests try to trash stable coins, is because they see them as a threat to the decentralised narrative used to pump the value of current crypto tokens, like Bitcoin. The thing about Stable Coins is that they can be tailored for specific uses, so if someone's on benefits they could be issued specific tokens aimed at covering rent, food, or anything else, so they don't go out and spend the cash on booze and cigarettes. Another use for stable coins might be commodity trading, or currency exchange, etc, so they can be used to record the transaction as well as being used for payment. Unlike proof of work tokens like Bitcoin, Stable coins will be proof of stake and probably centrally managed on private networks interfacing with the public networks. Due to the centralised nature of stable coins, like CBDC's, they should be far more secure than decentralised tokens and are therefore a threat to the current crypto offerings.

The Psychology of Money

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5ecgEXLoCA

"How would that work when investing in regional funds which includes the UK?"

Someone in a SIPP, or ISA, would and should miss out on any tax benefits by investing in Global funds in my opinion; Should the UK Government remove tax benefits for overseas investments, then I suspect there'd be a range of UK focused funds marketing products as benefiting from a friendly tax regime, and probably with much fanfare. It's about time the Government wakes up and smells the coffee, overseas markets are attacking the UK from all directions and winning; The UK Government should treat it as an economic war and fight back with carrot and stick reform, to ensure that UK based investors invest more in their home market.

Unless we're all going to pack up and move to the states, we should invest in our home market. YouTube video's like the one linked to below make my point, why should that guy receive tax benefits for investing in and pumping US stocks?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgzjQojzgFo

Mick I doubt a reduction in stamp duty will help retail investors, like me, unless they day trade. From a retail perspective I have a lot of money invested in my chosen stocks and because I only trade maybe two or three times a year, 0.5% stamp duty doesn't really bother me. There are two charges associated with trading UK stocks, one is the commission charge and the other is the stamp duty; If I purchase £1000 worth of stock, the stamp duty is only £5 and less than the commission I've paid the broker, so I'd argue that 0.5% is insignificant if I buy a dividend stock with a yield of over 1%, and hold long term, since my first dividend more than covers the stamp duty paid. If I traded daily then stamp duty would become significant, since the accumulated stamp duty from each purchase would mean I have to see a meaningful increase in the stock's prices, above 0.5%, to see a profit. Getting rid of stamp duty would only aid groups like day traders and High Frequency traders, and wouldn't do anything to help long term dividend investors like me.

I'm not sure what the Government could do to encourage investment back into UK stocks, but I'd start by removing any tax benefits associated with trading foreign stocks, so I'd ban foreign stocks from ISA's, SIPP's and ensure that pension schemes only realise tax benefits for investments in UK focused funds. I wouldn't stop people or investment/pension funds from investing in foreign stocks, I'd just make sure there were no associated tax benefit for doing so.

Since we're one the subject of debt, here are some some charts detailing Bond Debt maturity.

By Month/Year:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTga-e_OMKY-RszcRtUutcyaP_KjD12HX7w2CCEuL0CvSTuRB6D_nhUO2pY8qYjSmnSXE2e9t2xe5sq/pubchart?oid=50340481&format=interactive

By Year:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTga-e_OMKY-RszcRtUutcyaP_KjD12HX7w2CCEuL0CvSTuRB6D_nhUO2pY8qYjSmnSXE2e9t2xe5sq/pubchart?oid=483405488&format=interactive

Lease liabilities should decline year on year; But going off what BT has said, lease payments of around £700 Million a year wont see a significant decline until after 2030, when most of the redundant exchange leases will end. In the meantime, BT will see significant energy savings and other cost savings from reduced Capex, convergence and staff reductions. In my opinion.

I'd argue that BTC's recent rise could be the last hoorah before it sinks into true insignificance. I think Bitcoin is sustained by group think, with a herding effect when news is released. The ETF's might initially pull in cash and raise prices, but the cash is most likely speculators rather than true believers, the problem with speculative investing is that the cash can come out as quickly as it goes in. The vested interests have tried to link BTC to AI, as they realise that's the new hype bubble, but there's something behind AI whereas Bitcoin is just a waste of energy and resource.

"One of the big challenges that come with value investing is that you have to be patient – sometimes very patient. See, even if a stock is trading at a super cheap valuation, that doesn’t automatically make it a winner. You need other investors to invest too, and push the share price higher. And that’s been a key sticking point for UK stocks: net fund flows have been negative in the past couple of years, marked by a steady outflow, in particular, from active fund managers."

https://finimize.com/content/the-uks-stocks-are-almost-embarrassingly-cheap

They should make all ISA's UK only and give holders of foreign stocks time to sell within the ISA, or see the foreign stocks transferred into a standard account after say 6 months. I don't see why there should be a tax benefit for investing in other countries stocks, it makes no sense. I'm not overly bothered about the 0.5% stamp duty, but giving tax benefits for adding to US stock valuations is stupid.