Member Info for gewillia

Andrew, thank you for giving me something to do this evening. Actually, I was already taking a boo at 8.5's. These are the really interesting cousin of the 8.3's. 8.5's have to be completed by any traders who are involved in the deal itself.

Guess who appears at 4.20pm this aft - Goldbum Sachs, the monster squid, and who are they acting for? - Apollo International Management LLP!!, who may or may not be going to make an offer. So tracing this back to last Friday, we find:

GS buying an initial 6 million shares at 312.20 and selling 12 million at 312.8p. IOW, a massive short, of a net 6 million WMH, on behalf of Apollo.

Then on Monday, Barclays and Deutsche Bank are trading on behalf of WMH, north of £3. Again selling more than they're buying. But the big fish is Debit Suisse, joining the party at 12.01, disclosing purchases of 19 million and sales of 21 million on the previous Friday. And their client is Apollo too! With another net 2 million short.

GS are back in Monday, increasing their short by a net 1 million.

Now I make no pretence to understand what Apollo are up to, but they appear to be up to something. It seems to be an attempt to bring down the SP, but what do I know? Maybe they think they can turn a profit by selling at over £3 and then closing that short at £2.72 thanks to Caesar's bid dropping the price, but this is penny-ante stuff for Apollo - 30p x 6 or 7 million shares barely takes their board out to lunch.

And so to the last entry at 4.20 today, where GS disclosed trades of 5 million long and 4.8 million short yesterday.

Does anyone understand what all this means? Answers on a dirty postcard to this column, please.

No such thing as a stupid question, DoctorJ. We all once had to learn what you what you want to know. The next step in this supposed deal is the issue of a Circular. This will set out, in enormous detail, the terms of the proposed Caesar's takeover.

From our perspective, the important meat in the sandwich is dates. It will give the date for a General Meeting of PI's to vote on the proposal. You will get 1 vote per share held. There's no such thing as a minimum holding needed to qualify. Your broker will send you an 'Important Notification' email & you'll find the details of it in your online account. This IN will give you a deadline, several days ahead of the General Meeting, by which you must record your vote. There will also be a box to tick with your decision.

You will have noticed that the SP is above the 272p offer. WMH will be aware, well before the deadline, of how the voting is going. If they can see that Caesar's are struggling to get near 75% acceptances, they will tip the bidder the wink. At that point you can expect the announcement of a "Revised Offer". I hope, north of 300p. Good luck.

So, for what it's worth, I'll be voting against, on the grounds that 272p is guaranteed and every 'No' vote raises the chances of an improved offer.

Although we can perhaps not stop, we might at least force Caesar's to open their wallet some more.

Caesar's want a 75% acceptance vote at the general meeting. That's a much higher and harder target than 50%. We have a chance of upsetting their applecart by voting 'No" whenever the meeting takes place.

A lot of buying is going on above the offer price, suggesting the market believes a better price is achievable. If the arbitrageurs from the hedge funds are piling in, as may be the case, I'll ride on their coat-tails.

Second, no-one seems in a great hurry. Today's docs talk of getting a deal finalised in 2021. Thus there's plenty of time for Apollo to put a bid in. So, I see very little downside and good potential upside from either a 'sweetener' or counter-bid.

Patience my friends. Tis' the tortoise who will win.

Bannana597. The board can't accept anything. Only the shareholders. When it get to the final offer stage, the bidder will offer £x, subject to receiving some number over 51% of acceptances from shareholders, by a certain stated date.

If the bidder gets 51%, or whatever number he stated, then the offer becomes unconditional as the bidder will wind-up the plc. The bidder then pays out all the PI's and you'll find £x times 4,100 shares sitting in your brokerage account.

Once a firm offer comes out, you'll find forms in your account, inviting you to accept or decline the offer. Stay cool and keep up to date with any counter-bids, before you accept anything.

Keep smiling and enjoy the ride. Nice trade, by the way, hitting a takeover jackpot on your first one. Just don't expect this to happen again, anytime soon. Once every few years, if you're lucky.

Definitely hold, Moore16. This game is far from over. Nothing is going to get taken over at 272p.

Remember, if Caesar's breaks the US deal, they are left with no sports betting partner at all. I doubt they want that. Their 20% then wouldn't be worth an old lampshade. So, I'm thinking this "right-to-break" clause is simply an excuse to renegotiate the partnership deal on more advantageous terms to Caesar's. This is a very American way of doing deals; "I tell ya what. Cut me in for 35% of the partnership and I'll sign off on the takeover."

Besides, no matter whether the WMH board recommends a firm deal, we all get to vote on it eventually. My view is I'd vote against any amount under £5. I can't see the Done Brothers taking a pittance either.

Well the WMH board got played for a bunch of suckers, didn't they? Effectively giving Caesar's the sole right to take over WMH, at whatever rotten price they felt like offering, by putting in a poison pill. When did anyone ever give a 20% shareholder the right to tear up a deal for no good business reason?

When Apollo makes an offer, which it surely will, because the US business alone is worth £3 a share today, undeveloped and unexpanded, the WMH board should call Caesar's bluff. Apollo also has to know about this poison pill and therefore to have prepared alternative plans for another US partner, or else they know Caesar's won't dare kill the goose that is about to lay them billion of golden eggs. Fingers crossed!

The LSE's official closing price was 312.20p, not the 303.80 shown here.

Even if one of the bidders comes in at £5, I'd be an unwilling seller as the estimated $20 billion annual gambling market in the US is the opportunity of a lifetime, for a company with a 20+% estimated market share.

Why? Because the net profit on that "handle" is an average 6%, or $1.2 billion pa. 25% of that is $300 million pa, which, valued at 10 times earnings = $3 billion, or £2.3 billion.

£2.3 billion was the LSE capital value of WMH before it opened for business in the USA. £5 billion (or £5 per share) for the entire company is a steal, based on the opportunities for expansion into all 50 states and a mature market in, say, 5 to 10 years time.

MrB, these so-called buys and sells are just rubbish. It's a computer Algo that looks at every trade; If the price is closer to the bid than the ask, it calls it a "Sell". If the trade price is closer to the ask, then it labels it a "Buy".

It's nonsense. I did two trades this am. The first was a sell. Halifax got me a great quote, very close to the ask. The algorithm labelled it a Buy. The second was a purchase, and again a good sharp quote, closer to the bid and the Algo called it a Sell. Both entirely wrong.

That's the reason you'll see prices rise when the daily total so-called sells outnumber the buys. Last week there was a day when the sales in William Hill were double the number of buys and the SP rose by several percent.

Go figure. It's very misleading info' and I don't know why these websites insist on labelling the trades as Buys or Sells.

Viera, it's really interesting that WMH's US division is giving lots of interviews about their expansion and talking the stock up at the same time.

I see the undervaluation of this extraordinarily valuable asset as being due to 4 factors: 1. Hill made no song & dance in it's February results to 31.12.19. Flutter & GVC were equally coy. The US numbers were hidden in confusing divisional breakouts,

2. The half-year results to 30th June were upended by Covid. Analysts ignored the improvements during Jan & Feb, and regarded the two weeks market freedom at end-June as too short to base any likely future value on.

3. Most UK PI's have little, or no, idea of the massive size of the NFL betting market, with its' associated MLB, NBA , College Football & NHL wagering. Again, Covid knackered most those markets until after the end of the half-year

4. The half-year report said the the US represented just 7% of total turnover, which is surely true, but extremely misleading. Further, gross revenue fell, for obvious reasons.

The important facts are that WMH is up & running live in 12 states, has a presence, thanks to Caesars, in 13 more, which gives them approaching 50% cover for the whole 300+ million US population and they're claiming a 29% share of this enormous market. This is fantastic. Prior to Covid overall turnover was up 26% in 12 months. More importantly, outside Nevada, which is the only mature US gambling market, turnover in the other 11 states was up 90% - in less than a year.

Hill's second bite at an NFL season started on Thursday & this W/E is Weekend 1 of the new regular season, which concludes at Christmas, along with Hills' financial year,. With the playoffs & Super Bowl , plus NBA, in the New Year. My belief is, if (and it's a very big if) Hill really trumpets its' US results within the Annual numbers next February - lots of hard numbers, with comparisons to FY19, then analysts and PI's will begin to realise the transformative effect of the expansion into the USA.

You have to remember that WMH has no great track record here. A big move into Oz failed expensively a few years ago. Plus, and this a purely personal opinion, the bookmakers are trying to keep a low profile. They're scared that gambling in the 2020's could become the tobacco of the 1970's & 80's & there are plenty of nannies in parliament, who want to restrict the punters to sixpence each-way maximum bets. So the less they are seen to be printing money, the less they'll be of a target, they hope.

Despite these factors, my belief is that Hill's US operations will dwarf their rest-of-the-world revenues within five years. It would be a shame if they got taken over by one of the big American operators in the meantime, but they actually have a poison-pill, which is their UK & European assets. No US investor wants them and it would be very difficult to sell them off to one of their big UK rivals. We shall see what happens, hopefully profitabl

Mark, Go to your broker's website and see how many shares you now hold. This price of 27p is for ex-rights shares. That means anyone who buys them from you has no entitlement to participate in the rights issue.

However, you do have that entitlement. So, you'll also find in your broker's account a second bunch of shares, under the ticker, HMON. These are you rights-entitled shares. You can sell them in the market right now for 11.7p, or you can use them to subscribe for more of the billions of shares that will soon be issued and later consolidated.

Add up the total values of both holdings today and you'll see it's pretty comparable to what your "old" shares were worth yesterday.

Dubs, this is indeed looking very strong, but, imho, large helpings of patience are needed. I bought WMH, plus GVC & FLTR a year ago solely because of their US opportunities. Inside info' always helps when investing and I lived for years just north of the Canadian border. For anyone who doesn't know, the mafia has run enormous illegal gambling businesses for many years & their biggest segment is believed to be NFL football. Estimated at over $10 billion per season, but no-one knows, because the mafia don't publish accounts. Now that the Supreme Court has legalised off-track sports wagering, and the Americans know nothing about making a betting book with any sophistication, the opportunity has been seized by these 3 plc's to offer American casinos profitable partnership terms.

Previously, the only bets offered by Nevada sports books and the mafia involved the "spread". Essentially an even-money bet that Team A would either beat, or lose to, Team B by greater than a certain number of points (the spread). If your team covered the spread you got back $2 for every $1 bet. if not, you lost. Likewise the Over/Under, where the bookie picked a likely total number of points to be scored by both teams and you wagered whether the result would be more, or less, than that suggested total. Again a simple even-money bet.

Contrast these even-money bets, where you can't get rich without risking a bet of $10,000, with the sophisticated betting alternatives offered by UK bookies; singles, doubles, trebles, accumulators, first man to score, named play to score at any time, etc., and the American casino owners, who are sharper than bagsful of razor blades, realised they needed help when the Brits came calling, looking for partnerships.

A year ago, it seemed to me, that if any UK plc could corner 10% of this market, their numbers would eventually be huge, dwarfing their rest-of-the-world operations, but it would take time. 6 states were up and running in '19. Now, I think it's about 10, with another 7 in the process of setting up legal gambling. it'll likely be 2025 before the entire market is covered, but already between 25% & 50% can pick up their cell-phones and place a bet, or visit a betting-shop (sports-book).

My theory was, and is, that if just one of these 3 plc bets pulled it off, their SP would multiply several times by 2024. If all three did, that would be the successful investment of a lifetime. Right now it's beginning to look as if all three are on the right track towards considerable success, even if their SP's are little changed, apart FLTR, which has doubled. All 3 companies were exceedingly coy, when they published their results to 31.12.19. Very little detail given in the form of any hard numbers. Lots of positive verbiage, but nothing that you could financially analyse. That secrecy has to have been deliberate.

Forget a takeover now at £3. The US riches underlying WMH should see it at £10 within 5 years. Might be

Thanks for posting this, Mr.Flibbles. I see from 2018 that Merian started with a £9m investment, which had risen to over £29m by the latest interim results.

Do you have any idea what those funding rounds valued THG at? That would give us some idea of how much of a gain this IPO represents. The story of a £4.5 billion valuation has sure put a rocket under the SP.

The so-called "buys" and "sells" are total BS, buyonfear. It's our old friend 'the algorithm', which assumes that if your trade price was closer to the bid, then it must have been a sell. And conversely, if struck closer to the offer it must have been a buy.

Whoever executed your buy, got you a sharp price. Well done.

You can see how nonsensical the algorithm is by looking late in the day at any share's right-hand column, headed # Trades, just beneath the 3-month graph. It purports to total the buys and value them. Ditto for the sells. Often these "totals" are completely at variance with the reality of where the stock ended the day.

There's a marvellous example today. William Hill (WMH) rose by 1%, or 1.7p. Yet this fatuous totals column claims that shares sold of £6 million were twice the size of the supposed buys at £3 million. In which case the price should have tumbled, but didn't. All this proves (maybe) is that buyers like us cut tighter deals than the sellers, who don't look for sharp prices. It might also be to do with the amount of stock on hand that the MM's are holding, that they're willing to sell cheaper than the offer, just to lighten their books.

Their own, of course! Most of those Wall Street houses would sell their mothers, if there was $1 a share to be made on the turn.

Foxy, you're spot on here. There's a humorously honest reference in the Summary Timetable of Events, scheduled for 4th September 2020:

It refers to "Dematerialised Shareholders". That's a marvellously accurate description of any PI who's held this dog all the way down from £3.08 at the start of the year.

Also, HMSO refers to going away from open-market rent reviews to indexation. Anyone with European retail experience, especially in France & Belgium, knows that this is a disaster for landlords. It creates the tenant's pension fund. Why? Because a successful tenant in a good location will generate far greater sales, meriting a relatively higher rent, than a lowish base rent plus CPI would produce over, say, 10 years. The tenant eventually sells his lease to another retailer at a substantial cash premium and retires rich.

The only way the landlord can catch up, is by buying the lease himself and re-renting at open-market value. Thus, unless indexation provides some way of an occasional adjustment to real market value, perhaps via a percentage of gross sales per sq.ft., the the future value of HMSO's shopping centres will be artificially depressed, in the event of any future recovery in, say, 2045?

GoingLarge, Just last week the government reined in the Public Works Loan Board, which has been lending their billions to local authorities, and ordered them to stop.

Why? Because the councils have got their ghoolies in the mangle with their retail investments. The newly empty units and space rented to CVA tenants have combined to slash the rents received and tipped up the council budgets. The result will be cutbacks in services, which you and I will pay for through our increased council taxes next year.

Councils investing in shopping centres has been an unmitigated disaster, as the shoppers have moved online. Now the councils, who have almost zero staff with any retail management expertise, are going to have to negotiate workouts and redevelopments, with tenants and mortgage lenders. What could possibly go wrong?

So there are no buyers, apart from vultures, for Hammerson's centres. As the sign often seen outside football grounds, before Covid, reads, "Flee From The Wrath To Come".

The info' seems to have frozen around 2.20pm this aft. The stock is closing at c. £14.28 on total trades of 158,000 shares, but this page only records 90+ thousand and a price of £13.92p.

Anyone know why?

Jeez, Mr.Flibbles, in the highly unlikely event that I am the most knowledgeable on MERI here, then we're all in trouble! Thank you for advising that Draper Esprit (what a strange name) is the vendor. My, they did well, doubling their cash in less than 3 years.

Forgive my being slow on the uptake, but are you saying that Richard Watts has bought into GROW through MERI, or was it through some other Jupiter fund?

You're right about the collection RW has put together. I too have high hopes over the next five years, but I'm wondering why you opine that "Meri feels rudderless"? Surely their strategy is to now hold through the growth phases and then liquidate at the IPO stages, reinvesting in more nursery stocks, as they go along. What have I missed this time, please?

I have a pet hate over management who put out the vaguest of RNS and oblige me to go digging in previous RNS and accounts to establish the clear, concise truth over what has just happened. To hide bad news is to be expected, but Meri does it even with good news.

Yesterday's very welcome announcement about a profitable part-sale of the Transferwise holding talks only of a £20 million cash receipt. The result is that Alliance News is trumpeting a sale of the entire holding, which is clearly wrong, but you can't blame them for being misled, and, in turn, misleading existing shareholders, who dig no deeper.

Here's my read on what really happened and I'd be really grateful if anyone else, more skilled in analysis, would correct any errors:

The results to 31/03/20 show total cost of Transferwise holding at £55.5 million, representing 18% of total net assets of £288m. The partial sale represents a 1.7 times uplift on average cost. IE. £55.m becomes worth £94m. The sale proceeds of £20m, reduce the remaining holding value to £74m. The average purchase cost of this sold slice was almost £12m (20 divided by 1.7), so reducing the net cost to £44m.

A delightfully profitable investment, but why can't the management be arsed to give us the full facts, instead of acting like bashful virgins? An update overall value for the entire portfolio would be nice too, given the number of recent new and increased investments. The old, but still less than 3 months old, number of 108p NAV per share, updated to 117p, is possibly quite understated.

Yuri, the reason for the difference is: LSE records records formal notifications of all short positions in excess of 0.5%. Short-tracker records all the short positions. So the explanation is that 5% of the short positions are held by "small" shorters, each of whom accounts for less than 3.8 million shares and 8% by the big boys, each with more than 3.8 million sold short.