Member Info for fleccy

Is it a bad thing that Vodafone's share price remains low in the midst of buybacks? I see more opportunity for profit investing in Vodafone as opposed to RR, so I've just added a further 28,691 Vodafone shares to our holdings.

It's based on a Telegraph article. The article mentions:

"The former state monopoly is in the early stages of exploring a takeover of TalkTalk and its 3.2m customers, according to City sources"

"Insiders stressed that internal discussions at BT were at an early stage and that a takeover bid had not yet been discussed with TalkTalk"

This is probably a follow up to the recent UBS update bashing BT, and there may be even more negative articles in the pipeline from other media. My reasoning for assuming this is part of a new bash BT narrative, is due to entries like this:

"TalkTalk’s challenges have begun to take a toll on BT’s Openreach network division, which hosts the vast majority of TalkTalk’s customers. Many of the customers switching away are opting for new challenger networks which have invested in their own fibre-optic networks rather than rented capacity from Openreach"

It wouldn't surprise me if we see more articles possibly suggesting other providers, like VMO2, will take overTalk with the aim of migrating the customer base away from Openreach. James Warrington, the article author, has form for releasing articles resulting in knocking BT's share price down.

RR is up 2,174% since October 2020 and now has a P/E of nearly 30. Agreed it's had an outstanding run and it's a great company, but I wouldn't touch RR at the current valuation. RR has a current market cap of around £74 Billion and Vodafone has a market cap of around £18 Billion, yet Vodafone generates around £32 Billion Revenue compared to RR's £19 Billion revenue. I realise that there are other things to consider, like debt and free cash flow, but RR is a manufacturer and service provider and in my opinion carries more risk than pure service providers like Vodafone. To anyone who believes RR is a better investment, than Vodafone at current valuations, all I can say is good look to them if they decide to invest in RR.

RR is overvalued.

I'm surprised UBS haven't used Astrology to suggest BT is overvalued. I hope I'm not giving Polo ideas 🤪

UBS jump on anything and everything to create negative spin and narratives aimed at BT.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1072610/bt-faces-fresh-pressure-as-talktalk-payment-issues-raise-financial-and-operational-risks-1072610.html

"However with FTTP the contention ratio is 1:1 so as you say a change of provider should not result in delays such as you speak"

If there's a delay between different providers, using the same FTTP connection, then the bottleneck wont be on the FTTP. At a given location the customer data is separated and streamed off to the various relevant providers, if there a bottleneck once the data is separated, it suggests a lack of capacity on the relevant provider's network not on the FTTP connection.

Looks like the buybacks have increased, nearly 20 million shares yesterday. I notice the lowest price paid was 71.96p, which was the around yesterdays lowest price point, did the buybacks lift the price yesterday?

That assumes the share price will drop more than the per share dividend, post ex dividend, which is by no means guaranteed. If that was the case, it suggests that Vodafone knows, or expects, the share price will stay significantly lower going forward.

Why would the ex dividend date be relevant when it comes to buybacks? It'd make more sense to buyback as many shares as possible pre-ex dividend, because there's no dividend to pay on bought back shares.

"Raoul Pal offers some thought (former UK investment banking macro guy"

Raoul Pal is a vested interest player who benefits from hyping Bitcoin, and any associated tat, he was pumping NFT's when they became the latest thing. Ask yourself, why would anyone believe there's any value in something like Bored Ape NFT's? The vested interests have pumped NFT's, as digital art, that AI could generate for nothing. I seriously question the sanity of people who invested 10's of £1000's into Digital NFT "collectables", when I could produce something similar with a bit of software and I'm in no way arty. NFT's are just part of the hype and you'd think sensible people would see through that, but greed, manipulation and hype is prevalent throughout anything BTC and Crypto currency associated. Blockchain and commodity backed tokens are useful, most of the Crypto scene is useless and likely of no real worth.

Mole do you understand BTC? Because I've spent a lot of time trying to understand if there's any value in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is useless as a method of transacting because it can only process around 1mb of transactional data every 10 minutes, and each Block requires massive amounts of electricity to find a winning hash.

Every attempt to find a workaround for Bitcoin's limitations have failed, with the vested interests now settling on the Digital Gold narrative. Clearly Bitcoin isn't Gold, or in any way relatable to any real world commodity with intrinsic value.

Because Bitcoins value is based on nothing but hype and belief and isn't backed by anything tangible, or physical, it has no intrinsic value and therefore could be considered worthless in real terms.

The scarcity argument is fake because it's simply a design function built into the protocol, determined by developer consensus; Should the developer's ever decide to increase the number of Bitcoin over 21 million, they could do it with code changes on a keyboard. Another method they've used to get around scarcity is subdivision, by creating sub-tokens like Satoshi's. Who's to say they wouldn't create a future subdivision of Satoshi's, in the future, should Bitcoin price keep rising?

Personally I think a handful of sand has more intrinsic value than a Bitcoin Token; Because you can use sand in real world products, whereas Bitcoin can only be stored and traded. Where's the value in something that has no real World use?

According to Ray Dalio the US is going broke.

"Fleccy may have more information but 5.5 Gig to retail customers is plain daft"

I only have access to the same articles and media releases as everyone else. I agree that 5.5 GB/S would be a niche product and not required by 99.999% of residential customers. If someone was running a business with lots of content streaming, I could imagine a product like this might have some appeal, but many businesses also require 4 hour maintenance SLA's which is probably not available with a standard FTTP offering. I'm easily managing with a 35mb/s FTTC service, although I'm going to look at something around 145mb/s download once FTTP is available on my road. I can't imagine I'll ever need anything close to 500mb/s download, never mind Gb/s speeds.

"First of all there are lots of provisos involved here but if you run a given ASIC faster it will use more power. The circuits consume energy when they switch as opposed to being in a static state therefore higher clock speeds uses more energy.

Of course dropping down to a smaller feature ASIC e.g. 7 nm to 5 nm will run faster using less energy"

I don't disagree with any of that Phimx, my point is that if QBT's methods worked, allowing all miners to process less hashes in order to find a winning hash, any efficiency gains would be short lived because the difficulty algorithm would see the increased efficiency and counteract it with more difficulty. If QBT's methods don't improve block processing speed then they wont increase efficiency, the only way you'd see more efficiency is if you process blocks faster and difficulty would soon nullify that. Any methods that improve efficiency would only work if restricted to a selective percentage of miners. If all miners added an efficiency boosting algorithm and Blocks were processed faster, then the increased efficiency would be temporary.

"No it isn't clear, the same number of inputs are processed but only 70% by the SHA256 circuit therefore we can expect an energy saving of 30%. The time it takes to process inputs is less clear and doesn't necessarily mean the inputs are processed 30% quicker. Although from what Gardin has said suggests there could be a speed increase"

Phimx, the only way you save energy is by performing the calculation's faster, the ASICs will draw the same power whatever methods they're running to improve efficiency; Therefore to process Blocks more efficiently you have to process them faster, and if Blocks are processed faster then the Difficulty feedback algorithm reduces efficiency by slowing overall Network Block processing down.

"I always said it didn’t matter whether it was rubber bands or gold ingots that were being traded, there was always a clear message, forget about the process, find the end product"

Gold and rubber bands have real world uses and are tangible, unlike Bitcoin tokens which serve no useful purpose outside of being traded on the BTC network. Whoever invented the term digital gold was having a laugh, what's unbelievable is the number of supposedly intelligent people who have bought into the hype.

"Hi Phimx, you state "one estimate of Bitcoin mining energy consumption is 176 TW. Gardin claims he can reduce that by 30% or 53 TW. This is an incredible saving, worth hundreds of millions""

That clearly isn't correct. If every single miner used QBT's methods, and they worked, the difficulty level would increase to maintain the 1 block processed every 10 minutes speed limit. Any power/efficiency savings that came from processing hashes more efficiently, and finding a winning hash more quickly, would soon be nullified by the difficulty protocol.

They were buys because they were over the midpoint of the Bid/Ask range of 0.60/0.65, with the mid point being 0.625.

The number of shares in Issue have actually increased in May

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