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The surprising thing about that was Kelso coming back for more after Moulding publicly disrespected them, feel a bit bad for them as frankly looks like he's getting last laugh again, they've been cucked x2

Totally agree that this ongoing blaming of the macro has become absurd now.

The thing is Sorrell is far from stupid, if anything he'll know better than how much the US booming.

Blaming external factors (especially non-existent ones) leads to market assuming a lack of willingness to change the internal things they can control.

More seriously if he is saying something he must know is not true, it risks impression they are trying to mislead investors, especially in context of trust being low anyway after all the missed forecasts. This is far more problematic (and more damaging to sp imo) than if he'd presented identical numbers and just come clean said we're underperforming because we've dropped the ball but here's what we're going to do to fix it.

No question during James Anderson's reign this was unbeatable. Unfortunately he's long gone now though and since he left it's been consistently underperforming benchmarks.

Slater is a bit of contrast and joined Ballie Gifford straight from university, there's quite a stark lack of outside experience there.

In answer to your question OP, I would say worth at least considering ditching this for a S&P tracker or similar. Just taking S&P500 example, SMT has now underperformed S&P500 on 1, 3 and 5 year ranges now.

Fwiw Tom Slater was interviewed in Times this weekend, comes across as a bit of blagger, deeply unimpressive manager imo

Ideal scenario would be Sorrell swallowing his pride, accepts he's struggling now, and if Stagwell are still interested he bites their hand off with a big yes. Cleanest way this ends.

At this point splitting any further would be disastrous. After seeing how easy it was with Ingenuity, imagine if they tried a similar scheme with Beauty, leaving just a battered husk for the plc in the form of Nutrition.

Sounds ridiculous I know but if you'd have posted here a year ago risk of them placing sub 50p and using that money to take Ingenuity private for £25m net, imagine the response you'd get. I bet you Moulding's thought about it. This is the one way in which having debts helps regular shareholders - creditors wouldn't allow it. They are our only safeguard at this point.

The debt needn't be existential if they stick well within covenant levels. I'm glad those covenants are there in a way because it forces company to be rigorous with cost-cutting. I'm not sure they'd bother otherwise, they seem quite happy meandering along with same strategy/top team despite chronic underperformance and structural shifts in industry. But those covenants being based on minimum EBITDA gives them no choice but to slash costs, especially while it doesn't seem they yet have a handle on topline being in such steep decline.

Going back right to the start the whole company was founded on the quite shakey grounds around tax avoidance. Moulding was only able to grow at first by undercutting proper tax paying UK-based retailers by shipping from Channel Islands. He used growth generated from that scheme to buy MyProtein (at a value its founder later disputed), got other investors on board, rest is history. Moulding is a very good financial 'engineer' from his background as a big 4 accountant.

Only time will tell, but I don't see it happening. Burrows is a special breed and this is a king amongst dogs. 5 year chart shows a loss of over 99%. No-one sane puts up capital here imo.

I'm not sure anyone would even be willing finance a CLN at this late stage. CLN provider would do assessment of finances and outgoings bound to raise major eyebrows. They would also have to factor in how shares are being diluted every month anyway just make payroll, and very little liquidity, would be tough to find enough willing buyers for them to dump shares into. I think this is bargepole territory.

Market clearly assumes there are more nasties to come and risk of a Vistry type scenario. Best thing for board to do would be to firstly at least acknowledge there's an issue, especially around historic cladding provisions. Secondly even though Vistry's a mess, it would help Crest to follow their example in one sense - commissioning a detailed report, looking into processes, costs and historic statements.

If market assumes worst anyway nothing to lose. Get it all out there and then process of rebuilding trust can begin.

Fallen outside top 10 for US already, can see reviews having a tangible impact on sales

One thing that's a bit odd is how easily Moulding rolled over to signing the company up with Frasers Plus. If you look at the latest Boohoo letter to Ashley, one of the major points of dispute seems to be Ashley pushing for it, Boohoo effectively refusing, then it's all kicked off big time. Asos not signed up either. Makes you wonder why these companies are so against it - even with MA pressure and his massive stakes in them - yet Moulding only too happy to say yes.

WG is undertaking an unscheduled audit for potential accounting misstatements around revenue recognition in prior years, so normal value metrics need to go in the bin there really. Rather than comparing it to THG, one to pray there are no similarities at all to be honest.

You must be joking, that is a horror show of an update - investors in this company have been utterly mislead, just like you are trying to do with this thread title.

Post of the week that 👍

Not many can start by likening Sorrell's tortured career twilight with the outgoing President, ending with metaphor of him being a bit of livestock fit only for being euthanised, and still come across as a highly sensible read, but agreed with every word.

The 'professional' reviews are largely paid for, nobody trusts them. Steam users are effectively providing crowd sourced real-time voting data and are the industry gold standard now - it's not an exaggeration to say they are make or break.

There was a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that maybe Moulding has been trying to destroy the share price deliberately, with a view to picking up bits on cheap later on. I thought that was a bit far-fetched at the time and others countered with fact he has family/friends with money at stake too.

But now I start to wonder. He's sort of doing that with Ingenuity as we speak. Is it a dry run for what he has planned for rump of the group? I don't know, but family and friends could clearly carrying on benefiting if they owned a stake in a private company.

Yes he's bought shares but using only a tiny fraction of money he made from IPO.

And if you think about it, most of his actions since IPO have had consequence of destroying value. Rejecting bids and not sharing information with shareholders, not putting up prices, running at huge losses year after year, no progress on debt mountain, endlessly antagonising city/media, Linkedin guff, belittling shareholders.

It almost seems like a conscious effort to be a terrible CEO.

Makes sense to me, you have to stay nimble in volatile micro caps like this. By the time company updates guidance or analysts rewrite projections, it's already too late. To carry on holding despite new information is in itself is a decision.

Share price moves fast in advance of 'official' news on a stock like this, so early user feedback as useful a gauge of trajectory as any other metric. Better in some ways as it's totally unvarnished and in real time.

At this point it's like Sorrell is a guy in an OAP home convinced he's Henry Kissinger