Member Info for gewillia

Oops. That should read 'BOUGHT 5 MILLION HEIT". Apologies for understating the disaster.

" . . . How I loves ya! How I loves ya!" Sung loudly to the tune of "My Dear Old Swanee" is the ballad of the moment, especially for the poor clown who wandered into the arms of the market makers earlier today and BOUGHT 500,000 Heit at 97.5p.

Tomorrow morning, he'll be greeted warmly by the same MM's, who'll help him crystallise a cash loss of a mere £250,000 in less than 24 hours, when he sells them back at Foresight's price (if he's lucky).

Oops, there goes someone's 2025 bonus, straight down the Swanee. Courtesy of Dax bottling it at the last minute.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

16 April 2025

RECOMMENDED CASH ACQUISITION

of

Harmony Energy Income Trust plc ("HEIT")

by

PP Bidco Limited ("BidCo")

(a newly formed company indirectly and wholly controlled by two funds within the portfolio of funds managed by Foresight Group LLP)

to be effected by means of a scheme of arrangement

under Part 26 of the Companies Act 2006

Summary

· The boards of BidCo and HEIT are pleased to announce that they have reached agreement on the terms of a recommended cash acquisition pursuant to which BidCo shall acquire the entire issued and to be issued ordinary share capital of HEIT (the "Acquisition"). The Acquisition is intended to be effected by means of a scheme of arrangement under Part 26 of the Companies Act.

· Under the terms of the Acquisition, HEIT Shareholders will be entitled to receive:

for each Scheme Share held: 92.4 pence in cash.

------------------

The fight continues!

Former long-term holder here. I keep coming back to see if the tide has turned for RCP. It hasn't. A 17% discount to NAV in July '23, widened a year ago to 24% and is now a massive 32%. Trusts seems right out of favour.

One interesting point for those who like patterns. Ever since 1st May '23, the SP is sine-waving. Every time it goes below £17.50 it rises within 6 months to 20 quid and thereafter it sinks back to a touch below £17.50. Has now done it five times - 3 downs, 2 Ups. It bottomed at £17.22 a week ago and appears to be moving back up to £20. A hint for the brave trader?

The answer to your question, Taverham, is that Draft Kings released their 4th Q results to 31/12, after the market closed last night at 9.15pm GMT and they're good. Plus DKNG is forecasting a 35% increase in US betting turnover for 2025.

As of 2.10pm EDT Friday, DKNG has risen 11.3% and FLTR's US quote is up 5%, so the market is reading across from DKNG's results and assuming that FLTR will produce equally good results on 25th March.

It would seem that the US market is settling down towards early maturity with both DKNG & FLTR having roughly 40% each of the market. BetMGM has 11% and the rest are nowhere.

This stock, IMO, still has a long way to go over the next five years as the size of the overall betting market continues to grow like Topsy and the boys take a steady 6% to 9% profit on turnover.

I started buying years ago when the market was legalised and the SP around 60-something quid, reckoning that at least one of the 3 plc bookies would clean up in the States. William Hill sold us out for pennies, but still showed a 50% profit. Entain holds 50% of BetMGM which with 11% of the market is worth something hefty to someone. Maybe MGM themselves, now they have the expertise to run a bookmaker? FLTR will, I hope, see £500 a share by 2030. I'm sure there will be volatility along the way. Rumours of big tax increase perhaps. But just look at the overall trend since legalisation - steadily upwards and there's no reason to suppose this will change anytime soon.

Traded at £230 today. Another ATH. Let the good times roll!

Morningstar says the annual results are due to be published today, but no sign. Funny how it always seems to take the beancounters longer to add up bad numbers. We shall see.

After 3rd Q results release at 9.05 pm, Flutter is trading at £209 ($267). Very volatile, as the evening after-market often is, but the numbers look good, apart from two warnings that 4th Q customer results on NFL bets are presently more unfavourable than the 3rd Q was very favourable to the house.

Tomorrow's more measured, general trading looks like being positive. Will London open at £200+?

How KC blocked that last-second field goal to win the game is beyond belief.

I held no brief for the Tory prime ministers since Cameron and rather despised Johnson's fundamental dishonesty, laziness and marital shenanigans. Johnson though does have the ambitious chancer's nose for others weaknesses and observed in late August that while the support for Labour was miles wide, it was only inches deep. So Friday's opinion poll showing a Labour lead of just 1% was almost expected. Though maybe a year or two down the line. Certainly not within 3 months.

The incompetence of Starmer is unbelievable, especially from a man who occupied a "Caesar's Wife" position as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, where his conduct had to be seen to be above suspicion. A whiff of corruption over the prosecution, or non-prosecution of an arrested party, casts a nasty shadow over the entire process. He had to know that "Freebies" for himself, his wife, and any of his ministers was an enormous No-No.

We have sat through a summer of pensioner bashing, public bickering over the state of the government's finances, £3,500 spectacles for the PM from a wealthy party donor, the defenestration of one very angry woman, Sue Grey, who had "Trouble" written all over her forehead from the moment she first appeared as a Johnson appointee (just like Cummings), and a PM whose public photographs resemble that of the school swot caught with his pants half-way down. All accompanied by a tsunami of leaks to the Press & TV.

Now we are into the Budget farce stage. Instead of silence, diligence, and the execution of a well-thought out plan, we appear to be in the midst of an "OMG, we've got to cover this £22B shortfall that we announced and we've painted ourselves into one helluva corner, by 'promising' not to touch income-tax or VAT for 'average workers'. Quick, what can we go for?"

Capital Gains Tax has been in their sights, but they ignore one vital point. CGT is optional. It's the opposite of a pay-packet. It affects a tiny minority of UK taxpayers, because the liability only arises when you sell something at a profit. Unless I have to sell a profitable holding, I won't, especially if the tax rate is raised to 40 or 50%. Meantime, by telegraphing the strong possibility, the astute minority of holders of large paper-profits have been analysing their assets and liquidating where necessary, so removing Ms. Reeves opportunities in 25/26. Besides the history of CGT, since 1965, shows clearly that at 20% investors don't mind sharing their profits with 11 Downing Street. Anything much more than that and we'll sit on our profits for a few years until the current Chancellor gets fired, either by the PM, or the electorate.

Talking of the PM, can anyone see this man leading his party into the 2024 election? What's worse, is when you look behind him. Weaklings all. The only person with credibility appears to be the elected mayor of Manchester and he's too intelligent to get involved with Westminster. Interesting times.

On the way to £160 again, with luck, based on last night's results. The US betting market seems to be becoming a two horse race between Fan Duel and Draft Kings, with our man's nose just out in front.

Wow! How to lose half-a-billion pounds on one deal, and with the ironic name of Value Retail. To this, now long-retired commercial surveyor, who introduced the very professionally managed Hammerson to good deals half-a-century ago and watched a well-run, broad international, post-war, portfolio grow like topsy, that profited its' shareholders enormously, it is almost unbelievable that management decided to dispose of everything back 15 or 20 years ago, and go "all-in" on retail.

To billy-oh with a good spread of risk across all of the commercial market and all of Europe and North America, we'll bet the farm on shops, even as the first inklings of online-retail were beginning to show the sea-change that became the tsunami that swept away Intu and many others, leaving tertiary shopping forever unwanted, secondary shopping permanently scarred by betting shops and charity outlets and top-class centres in over-supply and forced to slash their rents in a vain attempt to fill the gaps in their teeth.

"Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" said the Romans, and as we gaze on the ashes and a few , still glowing, embers of one of the finest property companies ever to grace the British and European commercial property market, I shed a small tear for the men and women who built this company, over half-a-century, with their sweat-equity, only to see it destroyed through gross mismanagement by the disastrous hubris of their successors. That's life, I suppose.

"Positive Momentum" Monsieur Garonne?

Dear VOD has raised €6 billion from selling down its' interest these towers, all to reduce debt, since November '22.

And what good has it done the poor blooming shareholders? The SP has swooned gracefully down from £1 to 70p.

Based on this rather negative momentum, I would anticipate an SP of 50p, after the currently proposed asset sales for more cash are completed. Nothing seems to go right for this cash-burner.

SD 235, Thank you for very firmly placing my greedy feet back on the the ground. Your serious valuation based on real numbers makes far more sense than my pie-in-the-sky, wildly optimistic choice of the next round number, and a date plucked from thin air.

To imagine Action continuing to grow like Topsy is not beyond the realms of possibility, but to assume that the market will put 3i on a 30% premium to NAV is drunken lunacy on my part.

If your calculator is working well on the weekend, I'm wondering what date 3i might hit £40, assuming today's constant growth rate, but with the market valuing 3i at, say, 95% of NAV?

This stock is becoming dear to my heart (always a foolish thing to attach emotions to bits of paper) because I bought it for my wife's ISA portfolio in mid-May of 2020, after she got cashed out elsewhere for less than £15k thanks to 2 small takeovers. I'd seen Covid bring 3i down from thirteen quid to eight, for no reason whatsoever, so we plonked the lot down for a few pennies less than £8, hoping to see £13 again in the reasonably near future.

And now just 4 years later, it has almost quadrupled. What that represents in terms of a compound annual growth rate, I've no idea? But it has become one my very best, and fastest performing investments over a sixty year history of investing in markets and I can only wish Action well. At some point, one day, the Law of Diminishing Returns has to kick in to reduce their phenomenal growth, but for now, long may it continue to prosper.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Three i has today broken £30 a share. What a stock!

Congratulations SD235. Your, I thought, optimistic forecast of a June breakthrough has proved correct.

Is the next stop £40 by the end of 2028, or am I being greedy? Action seems unstoppable.

CJ, a bill to tax any company on 40% of its' gross revenue, with no deductions for legally incurred business expenses, is such an obvious nonsense, that it will never pass into law. And if it did, no court would uphold it, because it's totally against the principles of natural justice.

Illinois is a usually sensible state. If the bill was proposed in Arkansas or Mississippi, it might be different.

This stock is the old '888'. It has merely changed its' name. Kindly link up the old 888 site to this one, so we have a full history of graphs, RNS's etc.

This is not an IPO with zero history. Please connect up the history. Preferably today.

Thanking you in anticipation.

This report dated 28th March is on SONG's website. It refers in great detail to the due diligence undertaken by the Investment Adviser, or rather the very slap-dash DD that the IA performed. It seems clear that, as a result, rather over-optimistic numbers relating to income, income growth rates and capital value were served up to shareholders by SONG's previous management. It states expressly that investors overpaid for most of the acquired assets.

Conflicts of Interest were present throughout the dealings of previous management and a failure to disclose full details of purchases and contracts between the IA and SONG, meant that investors had no way of establishing the true underlying value of acquisitions. Another conclusion is that SONG was not set up to professionally collect all the revenue to which it was entitled. Its' systems were inadequate. IOW, a landlord who didn't know how to collect his rents.

The report is extremely thorough and one lesson it taught this late-middle-aged, very experienced, investor is to be so careful when a new investment field opens up. The complexity of the music industry is enormous and the various interests that can be purchased are many and very varied. I thought commercial property with its' variety of short-leasehold interests was complicated. Music rights are on several levels of greater complication.

Which, of course, attracts smooth-talking artful dodgers to persuade the shareholders to overpay for assets. Small wonder so many musicians were willing sellers.

The good news appears to be that there are some pretty valuable, long-term, assets owned by SONG. The cupboard is far from bare and this is not an out-and-out fraud. The new management appear to be honest enough and skilful enough to run the business professionally and profitably. Though, quite how profitably is something that probably only time will reveal to the shareholders.

The problem asset is now sold, but that doesn't alter the equation for the horrible problem that underlies all the company's efforts. VOD is billions in debt from all the costs of equipment for 1G, then 2G, then 3, 4 and finally (so far) 5G, plus, each time, hundreds of millions in fees must be paid to various governments for permission to use certain, usually different, bandwidths. Very little of this has ever been repaid, because interest rates were an historic joke. Now, of course, the piper will have to be paid 5%+ as the bonds mature.

So the first major problem is the debt pile that feasts on the shareholders revenue from operating mobile 'phone lines and the fact that the interest burden is likely to increase substantially over time.

Then there is the problem of competition. Lots of different operators, all offering the same product and being differentiated by the customers purely on price. The monthly rent. Which means zero opportunity to increase profit margins to a decently remunerative level.

And always behind the curtain, the fear that a competitor will try and steal a march with 6G, and force you to borrow billions to install all the upgraded infrastructure to compete with their 6G, or 7, or even 8.

This is a utility that will never make decent profits. Just look at its' P&L record for the last 20 years. Steadily downwards, like its' steadily falling share price. Yet the comments pages are always full of optimists that the price is just about to jump 10, or 20 pence. Again look at the SP record and observe how rarely this has ever happened.

And all the while the MSCI World Index has shown a passive 10%+ annual compound growth, net of very low fees, for you doing nothing except watching your capital double every seven years or so. Had you put your hard-earned cash in that fund in the early noughties you'd have turned every quid into £8 today, instead of turning every quid into ten pence.

£8 compared to 10p seems a no brainer to me, yet the optimists here blindly throw their money away on a dead duck. Why? Is there a rational explanation for an optimism that ignores past history and little evidence of ever seeing a worthwhile recovery? Just asking.

From 13 quid down 99% to pennies in nine years, with no sign of a recovery. Small wonder Private Eye years ago christened it, Crapita. Time to call the undertakers.

Long-term very dissatisfied Standard Life holder here. Bird has had three years and the merger with Aberdeen has proved a financial disaster. In a world filled with Nvidia's Meta's and Microsoft's, abrdn with its' dumb name has proved a veritable dog of the first order, while good profits are being made elsewhere.

Is it time to euthanise the beast, flog off the parts and hand the cash back to shareholders, via an orderly liquidation?