Member Info for fleccy

Nucky the reason I don't mind investing in Lloyds, is due it being massively undervalued at the current price. As far as I'm concerned it's irrelevant that the market has decided to push the prices of stocks like Lloyds down over a sustained period, since I only have to win once. I don't have any leverage, can reinvest dividends without worry, and have no time limit on how long I can hold my stocks for, so I'll just hold, top up, and wait.

In business speak Partner and Client is used interchangeably, I've watched many a CEO refer to customers as Partners.

Why's that Nucky and what would you invest in instead, Dunkin Donuts maybe?

ForensicBloo you must be talking about Doug.

This blog is worth a read, some interesting stuff:

https://forum.cardealermagazine.co.uk/topic/5594-quiet-on-the-finance-front/

https://forum.cardealermagazine.co.uk/topic/7504-finance-commission-bancap-interference-by-fca/?tab=comments#comment-88034

Darth, this is nowhere close to PPI. I suspect it'll be time barred to 6 years and it isn't just the Banks this time, car manufacturers and possibly various dealer brokers will have to cough up. It wouldn't surprise me if the lenders, like Blackhorse Finance, can clawback a percentage or all of the commission paid to the broker/dealers if they were found to have offered bad contracts to the purchasers; The anks probably have clawback agreements to cover against early defaults, but if the dealers acting as FCA registered brokers knowingly arranged unsuitable contracts, to their customers, the Banks possibly have a good case to clawback the commission from the dealer. No doubt all this will open big cans of worms in an industry operating with already thin margins. Big companies like Motorpoint could be the worse hit and may well get finished off by this, it wont just end with the Banks this time.

This is not PPI, the general consensus seems to suggest Lloyds is on the hook for no more than £1 Billion, the Telegraph payout covers it. The market is using this as another excuse for a shakeout, if the price remains around this level in February I'll top up on Lloyds with my BT and Vodafone dividends.

Indeed, people seem to be dropping like flies these days.

I hope you meant 5k and not 5,000,000 😉

I'm not sure why anyone attempts dialogue with Porsche, he cruises between different forums leaving negative comments in his wake. He may even be a Bot since he doesn't hang around long enough to answer questions, or get a response from. If he's real, I suspect he's the type who leaves dog5h 1t bags in peoples cardboard waste bins as he's passing by, rather than putting them into the correct council provided dog waste bins.

This has been a possible issue for many years, the Banks must have foreseen this as a risk. If the reported Lloyds exposure is around £1 Billion, I don't expect it'd be a risk to the dividend. Lloyds should give an estimate of the exposure in the February Full Year Results. They probably have until the end of this year to set aside provisions, so although £1 Billion is a lot of money on paper, it isn't a massive issue for a bank the size of Lloyds.

Pain I'm well aware of the debt throughout the western economies, which is why I have very little in cash. Bitcoin isn't an alternative to Fiat, the value of BTC is based purely on belief and that's basically nothing but thin air. Fiat currencies are valued against the strength of the issuing economy, so are backed by something real. I understand the reasoning for using commodities as a currency hedge, but Bitcoin isn't a real commodity and has no fundamental anchor supporting its value, it could go down as easily as it goes up. If I thought the world was on the verge of economic collapse, why would I pick Bitcoin over Gold and other precious metals? Clearly I wouldn't.

I disagree Pas, Gold has uses in industry, medicine, electronics, Jewelry and that's just off the top of my head. The reason Gold is such a valuable commodity is its resistance to oxidation even at high temperatures, it's also non poisonous so has many medical uses and is an excellent conductor of electricity.

Bitcoin has a high transaction cost, due to the expense of processing each Block and the limited amount of transaction data per Block. The miners rely on the Bitcoin reward to cover their operating costs and make a profit, with each halving they need the price to increase otherwise the only other way to generate revenue is through transaction charges. It's clear that in the absence of a significant Bitcoin reward the miners wouldn't be able to survive on transaction charges alone, and the whole idea of Bitcoin is to have lots of miners in order to prevent things like a 51% attack. The whole Bitcoin Proof of Work concept is flawed and doomed to eventually fail in my opinion. BTC is rubbish at just about any use case touted to support its existence, so it's basically useless, again in my opinion.

"Who created Bitcoin? A UK court trial is set to decide"

https://www.cityam.com/who-created-bitcoin-a-uk-court-trial-is-set-to-decide/

But Gold is real and has multiple uses, whereas Bitcoin is nothing more than a bit of computer code with no uses. Bitcoin tokens are nothing more than gambling chips in an expensive online casino.

I can just imagine the headline, "Palestine protesters disrupt the London Stock Exchange and the market goes up". Nothing would surprise me in this topsy turvy investing world we find ourselves in 🥷🙃😶🙃🤑🤑🤑

Anyone else seen the AI deep fake adverts on YouTube, with Michael Saylor offering free double Bitcoin for every token you send them? Just scan this Barcode and we'll take you to the cleaners. I watch quite a few Crypto related YouTube videos and I must have seen the ad about 20 times today, before skipping, it's embedded in virtually every video I've watched.

Here's a chap in Cornwall comparing Starlink to his current 80/20 Openreach FTTP setup. He says he paid £3000 for the FTTP installation, so I assume he was too rural to be covered by a standard rollout. He liked the higher speed offered over Starlink, but was unhappy with the latency via satellite. On his tests Starlink Latency was between 23 and 69ms, whereas his Openreach Latency came in with 11.1ms minimum and 22.8ms maximum with an average of around 12.5ms; On the video he says his average latency is 17ms, but that isn't what it says on his smoke ping statistics, with it displaying a Median Round trip time average of 12.5ms. I'm not sure why latency is important for him, I can only guess he does a lot of gaming, or video conferencing, or whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izSXVgxgaF8

Https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/14/bt-elon-musk-starlink-broadband-offer/

"BT is in talks with Elon Musk’s Starlink over a satellite phone and broadband service that could help tackle the plague of so-called rural not spots."

The reason this really surprises me is because BT already have a deal with OneWeb to backhaul 5G services via their satellites and satellite to mobile phone communication is extremely difficult. BT are also experimenting with HAP's, so maybe they're looking at relaying signals via HAP to satellite, or using Starlink for backhaul service similar to OneWeb. It's clear that the more satellite access you have the less chance of blackspots, I'll be interested to see how this story develops.

Bitcoin may well be here to stay, it doesn't mean it'll be worth anything years from now. I imagine in the event of a collapse, there'll be some sort of collector value for the Token with enthusiasts running their own node network with no further commercial mining.