Member Info for fleccy

Kintbury don't even show up as current short position, so must be under 0.5% if still in play. Blackrock and AKO are the only two current listed short positions.

Good question, anyone found anything driving todays share price underperformance?

According to their interim results, on the 30th June 2023 they had Cash & Cash equivalents of €752,000. They raised £2 million from the placing according to the RNS dated 30th October 2023. The Repo Rollover has been extended out to the 31st March 2024, requiring FG to repurchase 5,000,000 shares from MCS Strategy at 3.3578p per share, that will come to £167,890; On top of that there's the €2,708,170+3% outstanding on the zero coupon Bond, also with MCS Strategy, now moved out to 2026.

Even if QBT had retained all the €752,000 Cash available at the end of June, they would have only just have had enough to pay the outstanding balance on the zero coupon Bond. It looks as though they had no choice but to delay paying off these debts, without further Placings/Capital raises, since paying them off would likely have made them insolvent if I'm reading it correctly. I'll happily be corrected if I've missed something and got something wrong.

The volumes are trending down:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSVzuExpz8wA6wSe4UYNF77ABNpeZl6fyFbNG9CvFN9Dfan-bb1ShTTcPXaj77fXju6TMPEIPkjDys5/pubchart?oid=2085752711&format=interactive

I'm no expert on Crypto myself; I've just looked at Bitcoin in order to understand the basics and that was enough for me to realise it's all hype. I have no idea how Proof of Stake tokens work, but Blockchains are basically databases with each entry tied to the previous entry, ensuring you can't change existing entries without breaking the entire Blockchain. In the case of Ethereum I believe they use validators who stake their Tokens to allow the creation of new Blocks.

The problem I have with any of these is that anyone can create their own Blockchain, to suit their need and there are alternatives to Ethereum, like Solana. Because Ethereum was designed to apparently run applications from the Blockchain, it's more versatile than Bitcoin. Some of the apps and developments around Crypto are probably really useful, but I don't see value in something that's easily replicated in a different form. Central Banks could create their own Blockchains for CBDC's, or the market makers could create Blockchains for trading commodities, why would they need to use DeFi Tokens when they can just create their own Blockchains and their own Tokens? One more thing, anything DeFi involves having the entire Blockchain on the internet and even though the Chains are currently secure, as Quantum Computers emerge things like store now and decrypt later might become relevant.

Poker I agree with everything you've said, I believe the US Spot ETF's are going to be used as a vehicle to pump the Bitcoin price in order to bail out over invested Whales. At the moment if the large Whales start selling there isn't enough liquidity to hold up the price, so the solution is probably to pull in new money from pension and investment funds. I just view ETF's as a way of pulling in cash, via the backdoor, from people who'd never knowingly invest in Bitcoin or Crypto themselves.

Ethereum is Proof of Stake so more geared toward centralised finance and control, but I wouldn't buy the Token itself since anyone can create their own Blockchain along similar lines. I can see a uses Proof of Stake Tokens in the DeFi sector, for things like tokenised ticket sales and other similar uses, but I'm not not sure how that translates into monetising Ethereum when alternative Blockchains can be used.

More likely that the X login details was leaked to a party looking to profit by issuing a fake statement. Bitcoin is just a pantomime made out as something more serious, the whole pump and dump and pump again scenario's is normal operating procedure for this joke of a sector.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsLb5y5tcYk

Live Countdown

https://watcher.guru/bitcoin-halving

Add three zero's to those last posted figures to convert to millions

..............................................................................2022 . . . 2021

Operating loss ................................................... (4,547,000) . (4,970,000)

TOTAL COMPREHENSIVE LOSS FOR THE YEAR. (5,026,000). . (5,396,000)

..............................................................................2022 . . . 2021

Operating loss ................................................... (4,547) . (4,970)

TOTAL COMPREHENSIVE LOSS FOR THE YEAR. (5,026). . (5,396)

Suthy, as a Chartered Accountant maybe you can advise how much QBT are spending in Operating Costs and Comprehensive losses per year?

"They have very little cash outflow from what I can see as well"

What are the cash Outflows per year?

The Vantage Towers growth capital expenditure entry might be a one off in the last FY22/23, probably wont show in the current FY figures.

Vodafone's a complex beast, but the three stand out's are EBITDAal, Net Debt and Capex. Dividends are accounted for separately from Free Cash Flow and adds directly into Net Debt.

These are the entries feeding into the Cash Flow calculation:

Adjusted EBITDAaL

Capital additions (Capex)

Working capital

Disposal of property, plant and equipment and intangible assets

Integration capital additions

Restructuring costs including working capital movements

Licences and spectrum

Interest received and paid

Taxation

Dividends received from associates and joint ventures

Dividends paid to non-controlling shareholders in subsidiaries

Other

Working Capital is deducted at H1, but adds back in at H2/FY, so the FCF fluctuates synchronously with Working Capital:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSNxkKmgR2PzSL1NH5uvhJAIl6TyUm-PpH2hChEFWELeB8mLB-V562E7qRdDL0lOSa8NyAUBbokBjVp/pubchart?oid=498591&format=interactive

I suspect the Working Capital goes toward paying down debt as it becomes due.

Free Cash Flow feeds into Net Debt, but separate to that these also feed into the Net Debt calculation:

Acquisitions and disposals

Equity dividends paid

Share buybacks

Foreign exchange (loss)/gain

Other movements in net debt

When Vodafone publish their Adjusted Free Cash Flow they add these Adjustments back into the figure:

- Licences and spectrum

- Restructuring costs including working capital movements

- Integration capital additions

- Vantage Towers growth capital expenditure

- Other adjustments

Overall without doing a deep dive into the segmental analyses of future required Capex and licences/Spectrum, it isn't clear how much selling assets like Spain and Italy, or merging VOD UK and Three would save on future Capex; Vodafone probably know how much difference these changes will make going forward, but it's beyond me.

Vodafone could maintain FCF if they can reduce Capex and Spectrum/licences, on the back of any disposals. Interest paid and received is less than half the dividend payout, so easily manageable. If Vodafone cancelled the dividend it would be equivalent to around Taxation and Interest on Debt combined.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSNxkKmgR2PzSL1NH5uvhJAIl6TyUm-PpH2hChEFWELeB8mLB-V562E7qRdDL0lOSa8NyAUBbokBjVp/pubchart?oid=325944045&format=interactive

If I've got anything wrong, let me know and I'll take another look.

"Qbt has no competitors"

Could that be because they're chasing a Ghost? Back as far as 2014 mathematicians and Engineers have been trying to find alternatives to Brute Force Bitcoin Mining, or faster ways to gain an advantage. The one enduring method of winning the Bitcoin reward has been to speed up Brute Force, by increasing processing power to test more Nonces at ever faster rates. To gain an advantage over pure Brute Force an algorithm would have to take the newly built Block and narrow the Block range, to gain the 2.6x increase in probability of finding the winning hash and communicate that back to the miner, in the case of SaaS. Even if they could narrow the range based purely on the header, the task gets exponentially harder with every increase in Bitcoin difficulty, if I'm understanding it correctly. If QBT have succeeded in what they're saying, then in a couple of years they've achieved what some extremely clever people have attempted and failed to achieve over the last 10 years, no easy feat.

"But here’s the twist! In just a few days before the big decision regarding the SEC, over $1 billion worth of Bitcoin has been withdrawn from the Kraken exchange. The crypto community is in a mad rush following this unexpected move. Why now? What’s the deal?

These massive withdrawals are attracting attention to Kraken, a well-regulated company in the US. All eyes are on the bitcoin’s third halving as it approaches in under 100 days."

https://londonlovesbusiness.com/whales-withdraws-1-billion-worth-of-btc-as-bitcoin-etf-decision-looms/

Nick, the problem with using Bitcoin as a store of value is the volatility and the fact it isn't backed by anything. The reason Bitcoin has climbed so high is that there's no way of pricing it against anything, which also means it could just as easily go to zero if the hype bubble deflates.

I knock Bitcoin because I don't see any intrinsic value in it, or purpose to it, it looks more like a gambling chip used in a Casino game. I don't dispute that many people have got rich off the back of Crypto, but for every winner there's a loser, or many losers. Bitcoin as an investment is simply a way of transferring wealth between gamers, with the House quietly racking up huge profits in the background. If someone can tell me what use Bitcoin is, outside of allowing criminals to move funds easily, I might change my view. Bitcoin is rubbish at whatever it does, with each Halving a step in the countdown to the eventual death of the token in my opinion. The whole DeFi Proof of Work concept is flawed as far as I can tell, relying on Bitcoin climbing ever higher to cover the cost of mining, all it will take to kill the miners is for the price to drop post the Halving, with the miners operations threatened under that circumstance. Blackrock, Fidelity and others are only interested in making money, they'll happily make money off fool's if an opportunity shows itself.

So Garwool1 tell me, what can Bitcoin do well? What can it do that TradFi can't do better? What happens with transaction charges once the Bitcoin reward doesn't cover the cost of mining operations?

Yet another CNBC video where they only have bulls talking it up, where are the dissenting voices on channels like CNBC? Cathy Wood and the others just talk their own book. This Digital Gold narrative defies common sense, I can't find Bitcoin anywhere on the periodic table, but I can see Gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium. Bitcoin also isn't useful like rare earth elements either, it's just a distributed ledger that consumes a lot of power to process a small number of transactions every 10 minutes. Honestly I think the World's gone mad, it's crazy that something so useless could be pumped up to be worth around $47,000 a token.

I'll be surprised if Bitcoin lasts another two years. If the price collapses following the ETF hype and doesn't climb ever higher post the Halving, most of the big miners will go out of business.