Member Info for getafgrip

I bet Dark has a hand in the spike in company surveillance of employees - a really big market growing exponentially:

https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/news/articles/employee-surveillance-spiked-last-six-months-research-finds?utm_source=mc&utm_medium=email&utm_content=PM_Daily_08112021.Employee+surveillance+spiked+in+the+last+six+months%2c+research+finds&utm_campaign=7295441&utm_term=1066641

Yes - 72p! Does anyone know a good yacht broker!

Spot on Bald E - in the hands of politicians we have not got much of a chance. Even now countries are not singing from the same hymn sheet, and several major players flatly refuse to even believe there is a hymn book! The best case scenario is that cremation will be free for everyone at the point of use! The worst case scenario is that the cremation of the World's population will occur simultaneously!

Sheltie - A time and price gives no indication that you traded at the time you state. If you are so convinced that you did why not state the volume as well!

Yes, they've got caught looking for Fools Gold before being rounded up and locked up for good by the old cyber-Sherriff!

Was it Clint Eastwood who said words to the effect " Selling shares you don't own ain't much of a living son!"

HKK - you are right. They like foodbanks so why don't we get together & fund their Christmas party!

In honour of the now out of work trolls who think they helped drive the SP down!

JC - the voice of sense. I got the deeply disturbed treatment yesterday, when if my post had been read correctly it was addressed to Rhythmquest & fellow trolls,and actually supportive of CR & HKK.

Let's face it - when the politicians & excessively rich evacuate the planet, it is highly likely the space craft will be powered in whole or in part by fossil fuels. Economies only hope for survival will be the Investment Banks invention of a variety of novel financial instruments including of course specialised Bonds, enabling us to package and sell the planet as " nearly new" or with "one careful owner!" The unwitting taxpayer will be convinced that sub-prime planet bonds are a great opportunity - "Let's get a Greta Bond."

Boyo & BE are right on this. There needs to be an injection of reality to politicians & greenies alike. I generally spend half the week in the Scottish Borders. Although towns and cities in the Borders and Scotland have mains gas and electricity - a typical village does not have mains gas, but some use say Calor gas for cooking. There is only minimal evidence of Photovoltaic Panels & very few have ground-source or air-source heat pumps. There is an odd bio-mass boiler, but the vast majority of people have oil boilers. Many residents still have - wait for it - real coal fires. Virtually everyone else has multi-fuel stoves - and when coal is banned, what effect will it have - they will most likely burn wood which is plentiful. Lighting and cooking is of course largely electric.

There are many UK country areas like this & embracing the green revolution is going to take vast amounts of capital, heavy subsidies, import of specialist expertise, heavy training expenditure, cultural hearts and minds changes, plenty of time, and synchronisation with other allied initiatives that prevent flooding, provide insulation, reduce reliance on fertiliser usage, soil erosion etc.

Currently the "Plan" taking shape from COP 26 appears to be agreeing to reduce methane levels and 40 countries agreeing to ban coal. It seems to be a couple of easy-kill objectives rather than a plan. I'm inclined to agree with Greta that COP 26 is simply not fit for purpose. I simply do not see the Polar ice caps reforming, or extreme weather events reducing any time soon!

She can't have it all ways. If it wasn't for burning fossil fuels she wouldn't have had any wind in her sails! It would have been good watching her try to blow enough hot air in to the sails to get going, but failing that I have a deeply disturbing picture in my mind of her trying to use her own methane!

It seems very unlikely that ML& his wife will suddenly offload, big blocks of shares. What message would this send across the Atlantic to the Courts seeking extradition? What message would it send to the Government/Courts here delaying or possibly preventing extradition? Would he leave himself open to accusations of hiding or attempting to hide capital?

Without any doubt he has to behave in a saintly fashion, because his every move is being closely scrutinised & interpreted. The focus on him has if anything intensified because his shares have been elevated to a major holding in a FTSE 100 company. Also the issues and threats to ML are probably not wholly financial in terms of importance. At his age a lengthy sentence in the US could equate to him spending the remainder of his life in jail!

I think it is a very astute political input from Ben as well. He has not only stated the obvious, and planted in peoples minds, that Shell is paying for green initiatives through demon fossil fuels, in common with other super-majors. But, also put a spoke in the wheel of any plans for windfall taxes. The PR line to take from Shell looks like being "Fossil fuels are a necessary evil to facilitate the green transition."

Also when the issue of windfall taxes is raised, he can simply state, that they will reduce the speed & quality of transition. And instead of the capital being in Government hands to make lame-brained decisions on subsidies to all and sundry for going green, it is better in Shell's commercial hands driving the green transition more speedily, expertly & with optimal direction.

They have a good reputation as far as I have seen. The reality is there is no such thing as a free broker, or trader, providing professional services for nothing! They tend to either hit you on the spread, bundle shares through the day & trade at a point later in the day, and often do not make a market in every share.

Cloudflare appears to be a sound recommendation in cyber-space security, recently partnered (along with Zscaler), in a tie-up with SentinelOne - quite an endorsement. They are on my buy list, although I already have some Zscaler. Both are doing well & worth a look for Cybernauts.

They are consistently comparing performance, progress, prospects & valuation with a like-to-like peer group, which seems to be a very valid analytical approach.

I am certain that the Darktrace management team will have been quivering with anticipation, over the new-found knowledge, that the bob-a-job student population, might suggest listing on the Nasdaq as a strategy. Is this something to do with research indicating that the average US student has a higher IQ than their British counterpart, or do they simply have more time on their hands, or is the piece-work rate better?

I know that they post sporadically during the day - in between financial awareness lectures! This afternoon I think the Student's Union must have been shut!

I can't imagine Shell will be ecstatic about these developments:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59107805

A lot of fun can be had speculating on strategy & ultimately history will most likely define a Board on the basis of the results of a single merger or acquisition. There is an incredible range of opportunities & directions, even a last major hydro-carbon foray cannot be ruled out. Shell has started to show it is willing to get involved in the "green" revolution, it might be able to convince competition authorities that it could do the same for another company.

Shell is in an incredibly strong financial position. Oil was always going to lead us out of the Panicdemic & is doing. Historically cheap capital is readily available. Many share prices do not fully reflect the prospects. The only certainty to me is that a major acquisition or merger will take place.

As you say nothing is too big to be taken over! Nothing is too big to fail! The new economic paradigm to overcome any hurdle is to simply issue more bonds and print more money. With 40% more dollars in circulation now than there were only one year ago the US markets seem to have totally embraced magic money & it is infectious.

capable of, or intent on disrupting supply. I think Shell will want to secure & control its own supplies of the Rare Earth Metals etc that will be the backbone of the green revolution. In doing so they will have to lay the ghosts of past failures like Billiton, but it is essential to putting its green fate in its own hands rather than that of others. The easiest way to make headway on this is through a strategic acquisition & they would most likely be backed by Government to do this, because it would likely fit with Government strategy on resources etc.

L - that makes you a pretty serious Shell shareholder, and you give a great background of where Shell is coming from relating to mining, and you are well ahead of me in this background, as I am relatively new to Shell & Income Stocks generally. And I agree that they are completely different not-necessarily compatible industries even though there are rudimentary similarities. Without any detailed knowledge at the time I saw Billiton as an attempt to diversify, for a number of very valid reasons at the time. It was also, almost "fashionable" for companies to diversify away from their core activities at the time. Conglomerates like Hanson, BTR and Williams seemed to manage a diverse portfolio of companies quite successfully, so why could they not do the same.

After nearly a quarter of a century trying to make it work, Billiton has to be seen as a dismal failure. Always a learning process, but definitely a skeleton in the cupboard as a reminder to future Boards.

To explain a little better as I have been a bit obscure on the reasoning side in my statements. I don't personally see Shell making an acquisition on traditional lines as say a diversification play, justified by their knowledge of the extraction of gas and liquid fossil fuels & them seeing cross-overs & parallels with what they already do for a living.

I see Shell wanting control & ownership of a significant slice of the raw materials (largely metals) that are mined, processed and ultimately form critical components in manufactured green essentials such as wind-turbines, batteries etc. This includes lithium & all of the Rare Earth Metals etc etc & there is nothing much short of an economic "war" going on to buy up deposits & secure supplies because it currently looks highly unlikely that future demand can be met.

China can see the end in sight for production of its own Rare Metals. They have subsequently bought vast tracts of land particularly in Africa to boost their opportunities to exploit the planets Rare Metal reserves. France has late in the game acquired the rights to exploit Rare Earth Metals often situated in undersea areas. As an isolated example the Democratic Republic of Congo supplies more than half the world's cobalt, which is indispensable for the manufacture of EV's lithiun-ion batteries. Extracting the cobalt is straight out of the middle-ages, 100,000 miners with picks and spades dig in to the earth to find the mineral, particularly around Lualaba.

China has shown how they can exploit the market by blatantly manipulating prices in the marketplace. Essentially starting off with teaser low prices, largely western "green" companies buy, then China restricts supply and puts up prices. Then they offer companies consistent low prices if they manufacture in China.

OPEC + and particularly Putinomics has taught the world how political the energy production and supply arena is. I think the green revolution will just throw up another set of exploitative parameters,