Member Info for HopeGreedNothing

AS1 - you may know what damage the Fed will do re-rates, but I don’t, however I see it as, they are likely to overshoot with rates, (higher for longer) rather than undershoot.

Hosai - hope you are right, but call me cynical every time I hear analysts use that phrase , the market still seems to find a reason to go down. I don’t know what way the markets are heading, up or down, but I have always liked to understand both ends of the spectrum, that way, no major surprises or disappoints.

Morgan Stanley strategists still calling 20% indice drop in US markets.

Fed interest rate rise in Feb.
Recession still to fully bite.
2023 doesn’t look good.
War ongoing.

Not saying markets can’t increase share prices while all of the above going on, just that things are not exactly rosey at the moment.

Not expecting much in the short term. Long term looks good.

tinker - Was thinking along the lines of running out of buyback money for the quarter, however there was someone on yesterday saying there was 400m - 500m (cant remember exactly) still left of buyback allocation.

Frustrating re price movements up and down without actually going anywhere, but as you say the cheaper they can buy them back the better for us all in the long run.

The Bernstein team also noted more platform-specific criticisms, including the notion that crypto user applications are in “a speculative feedback loop” and that blockchains face challenges to scaling and operating at transaction costs. These should be solved by the “ample” developers working in the ecosystem on consumer-facing apps and an overall trend of improving scaling, they said.
“Investors should continue to focus on the long-term consumer adoption of crypto. Long-term crypto adoption should mirror the adoption of the internet,” Chhugani and Agrawal wrote. “As blockchains scale and applications mature, we expect the monthly user base to grow 10-100x over the long term.”
That sounds great—but having the stomach to bet on that thesis as analysts focused on market technicals say Bitcoin remains on a long-term downtrend is another matter.

B?itcoin has entered 2023 so beaten down that analysts beyond the chorus of crypto perma-bulls are saying the largest digital asset may be at historically cheap levels. But that doesn’t mean the bull case is solid—far from it.
The market capitalization of cryptocurrencies sat around $800 billion on Tuesday, a far cry from the near-$3 trillion market cap at the peak of prices in November 2021, with Bitcoin down by some 75% over the same period. 
Digital assets experienced a painful rout last year amid rising interest rates and a sliding stock market, to say nothing of cracks in crypto that exacerbated losses, like the meltdown of stablecoin ecosystem Terra or the bankruptcy of exchange FTX.
Many on Wall Street are betting against a recovery in token prices any time soon, with market participants across traditional finance seeing Bitcoin as more likely to halve in 2023 than double and even more optimistic price targets still classifying as grim.
P?erhaps it’s a surprise then that analysts at Bernstein—decades-old and a stalwart of the Street—join the chorus of Bitcoin “whales” and crypto bulls who see digital assets not as facing existential threats, but rather at historically cheap levels.
“Buying into crypto stress has a perfect track record. Bitcoin in its 13-year history has experienced two winters prior to the 2022 winter, and has always come back with exponential returns from the bottom,” Bernstein’s Gautam Chhugani and Manas Agrawal wrote in a report Monday. “This is not simply about discounted prices, but it is about the long-term future of the industry. The industry has a great track record of fighting back from its lows and taking punches when down.”
In fact, after a year in which Bitcoin outpaced losses notched by the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq indexes, the Bernstein analysts see crypto as being a better growth play than tech stocks. This isn’t a thesis based on retail investor-mania or Tesla (ticker: TSLA) buying more Bitcoin, but rather about the potential for wider adoption among internet users.
“Crypto is probably amongst the few industries that can clock frontier-tech-like growth, in a maturing tech landscape,” Chhugani and Agrawal wrote. “Crypto touches less than 5% of total internet users with significant headroom for application led adoption.”
But there is a bear case—and a big one. Crypto faces dire headwinds going into 2023, including existential threats from regulation, a still-gloomy macro backdrop unfavorable to risk-sensitive assets, and waning demand from institutional and retail investors alike.

Happy Birthday Bitcoin! It was on this day 14 years ago that the first Bitcoin block was mined. Despite numerous doubters, haters, and premature obituaries, its performance has been quite impressive.
Even after the first block was mined, it took awhile for the coins to have a market price. There was a transaction in October 2009, where 5050 coins were sold for $5.02, giving each one a price of roughly $0.00099. Since then the price is up around 1,690,706,971%. Not bad at all.
Since we’re not used to seeing numbers like 1,690,706,971% in traditional finance, it would appear as if Bitcoin has delivered returns unlike any other in history. But to some extent this unique performance is a mirage, owing to the fact that there are publicly quoted prices so early in its existence.
Meta Platforms Inc. (then Facebook.Inc) was launched in February 2004. Fourteen years after its existence, in February 2018, it had a market cap of around $500 billion. By comparison today, Bitcoin’s market cap is just $322 billion, according to CoinGecko. In other words, if you start counting both since their inception, Meta has accrued more value than Bitcoin. The difference is, of course, that Meta didn’t have a publicly quoted price so early in its existence. The company only went public in 2012, by which point it had a $70 billion market cap already.
Meta is a good comparison for several reasons. Both Bitcoin and Meta are both network-effects entities, whose value is dependent on achieving a critical mass of users or owners. Neither is useful or valuable as a standalone piece of technology. There’s no point in owning Bitcoin if nobody else will accept it or buy it. There’s no point of posting a photo to Facebook if there’s nobody else there to look at it or comment on it. Both are global. Both are associated with a single founder. Bitcoin hasn’t changed the world like Meta has. So Meta has a headstart, but who ultimately knows. Both Meta and Bitcoin more or less created new categories, with each having seen several competitors emerge.
And both have kind of gone nowhere over the last five years, after surging massively during the 2020-2021 boom, suggesting that from an investor perspective they’re seen as similar types of assets.
So hats off to Satoshi Nakamoto. Some 14 years later, Bitcoin hasn’t changed the world. And its performance isn’t unprecedented. But it is up there along with some of the great tech stocks of the last decade.
To contact the author of this story:?Joe Weisenthal in New York at jweisenthal@bloomberg.net

Thanks Ste

Does anyone know the margins for My Protein on these products?

Why the small amount of buybacks, average has been around 9m-10m?

Carol Alexander: $50,000
Carol Alexander, professor of finance at Sussex University, wasn't far off the mark with her prediction that bitcoin would slip to $10,000 in 2022.
Now, she thinks the cryptocurrency could be set for gains — but not for reasons you might expect.
The catalyst would be more dominos from the FTX fallout tipping over, Alexander said. If this happens, she expects the price of bitcoin will top $30,000 in the first quarter, and then $50,000 by quarters three or four.
"There will be a managed bull market in 2023, not a bubble -- so we won't see the price overshooting as before," she told CNBC.
"We'll see a month or two of stable trending prices interspersed with range-bounded periods and probably a couple of short-lived crashes."
Alexander's reasoning is that, with trading volumes evaporating with traders on edge, large holders known as "whales" will likely step in to prop up the market. The wealthiest 97 bitcoin wallet addresses account for 14.15% of the total supply, according to fintech firm River Financial.
Some investors have given up trying to predict the price of bitcoin. For Antoni Trenchev, CEO of crypto lending platform Nexo, the recent events are a sobering moment.
Bitcoin was on a "positive path" earlier in 2022, with institutional adoption rising, but "a few major forces interfered," he said.
Trenchev once predicted bitcoin surging to a peak of $100,000 by early 2023. Now, he's done trying to predict the price.
Laith Khalaf, financial analyst at AJ Bell, suggested attempts to forecast bitcoin's price are futile.
"We could be sitting here talking this time next year and it could be at $5,000 or 50,000 it just wouldn't surprise me because the market is so heavily driven by sentiment," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe."

That's historically a good sign for bitcoin, said Vijay Ayyar, vice president of corporate development at crypto exchange Luno.
"In prior down markets, miner capitulation has usually indicated major bottoms," Ayyar told CNBC. "Their cost to produce becomes greater than the value of bitcoin, hence you have a number of miners either switching off their machines … or they need to sell more bitcoin to keep their business afloat."
"If the market reaches a point where it's absorbing this miner sell pressure sufficiently, one can assume that we're seeing a bottoming period."
Standard Chartered: $5,000
For some market participants, the worst is yet to come.
In a Dec. 5 research note, Standard Chartered said bitcoin may sink as low as $5,000. The prediction, one of the bank's list of "surprises" that are being "under-priced" by markets, would represent a 70% plunge from current prices.
"Yields plunge along with technology shares" in Standard Chartered's nightmare 2023 scenario, "and while the Bitcoin sell-off decelerates, the damage has been done," said Eric Robertsen, the bank's global head of research.
"More and more crypto firms and exchanges find themselves with insufficient liquidity, leading to further bankruptcies and a collapse in investor confidence in digital assets," he added.
Robertsen said the scenario has a "non-zero probability of occurring in the year ahead" and falls "materially outside of the market consensus or our own baseline views."
Mark Mobius: $10,000
Veteran investor Mark Mobius had a relatively successful 2022 in terms of his price call. In May, he forecast bitcoin would drop to $20,000 when it was trading above $28,000.
He said bitcoin would fall to $10,000 in 2022. That did not happen. However, Mobius told CNBC that he is sticking for his $10,000 price call in 2023.
The investor, who made his name at Franklin Templeton Investments, told CNBC that his bear case for bitcoin stemmed from rising interest rates and general tighter monetary policy from the U.S. Federal Reserve.
"With higher interest rates, the attraction of holding or buying Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies becomes less attractive since just holding the coin does not pay interest," Mobius said via email.

Bitcoin fell over 60% in 2022, driven lower by a series of high-profile company failures and a bleak macroeconomic climate.
Those who made predictions about bitcoin's price last year really missed the mark.
With 2023 almost upon us, some market players have stuck their neck out with price calls for what could be another volatile year.
2022 was a rough year for crypto. More than $1.3 trillion was wiped off the value of the market. And bitcoin, the world's largest digital coin, saw its price slump more than 60%.
Investors were caught off guard by a wave of collapses in the industry from stablecoin project terraUSD to crypto exchange FTX, as well as a worsening macroeconomic climate. Those who made predictions about bitcoin's price in the past year really missed the mark.
But with 2023 almost upon us, some market players have stuck their neck out with price calls for what could be another volatile year.
Interest rates around the world are on the rise, and that's weighing on risk assets like stocks and bitcoin. Investors are also watching how the FTX saga, which resulted in the arrest of the company's founder Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas, will develop.
CNBC rounds up some of the boldest price calls for bitcoin in 2023.
Tim Draper: $250,000
Bitcoin bull Tim Draper had one of the most optimistic calls on bitcoin of 2022, predicting the token would be worth $250,000 by the end of the year.
In November, the billionaire venture capitalist said he's extending the timeline for that prediction until mid-2023. Even after the collapse of FTX, he's convinced the coin will hit the quarter-of-a-million milestone.
"My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending, and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women that the dam is about to break," Draper told CNBC via email.
Bitcoin would need to rally 1,400% in order for it to trade at that level.
Despite the depressed prices and trading volumes drying up, there could be reason to suspect the market has found a bottom, according to Draper.
"I suspect that the halvening in 2024 will have a positive run," he said.
The halvening, or halving, is an event that happens every four years in which bitcoin rewards to miners are cut in half. This is viewed by some investors as positive for bitcoin's price, as it squeezes supply. The next halving is slated to happen sometime in 2024.
Bitcoin miners, who use power-intensive machines to verify transactions and mint new tokens, are being squeezed by the slump in prices and rising energy costs.
These actors accumulate massive piles of digital currency, making them some of the biggest sellers in the market. With miners offloading their holdings to pay off debts, that should remove most of the remaining selling pressure on bitcoin.

By comparison, U.S.-based Exxon Mobil advanced almost 80% and trades at almost 10 times forward earnings. Chevron rose 50% and trades at 11 times earnings.
All four have set 2050 as the target for making their businesses carbon net zero. BP and Shell are investing about $1 billion a year in low-carbon energy such as electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, wind and solar power.
BP and Shell may not be able to close the valuation gap with Exxon and Chevron in 2023 unless green investors become more inclined to buy shares. That seems unlikely, as ESG groups tend to criticize oil and gas producers for not being aggressive enough with their low-carbon targets.
But even if the gap doesn’t close, BP and Shell are still attractive at these levels for those investors looking for exposure to oil and gas, according to Morningstar’s Good. All big oil companies’ capital plans are based on oil being at about $60 a barrel, he said. As long as prices stay above that—they’re currently around $80 a barrel—the dividends and buybacks should keep coming.
After a year of rapidly rising interest rates, the outlook for weakening economic growth will almost certainly keep a lid on oil prices. But there’s probably a limit to how low they’ll go—the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has already cut output quotas to stop prices from falling too far.
“Recession is certainly going to affect energy, there’s no way around that,” said Good. “But on the other side, you’ve got a relatively tight market. I don’t think that European earnings being down makes them a bad play in 2023.”

I?t was a great year for oil companies such as Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP. But the giants of European energy are still trading at significantly lower valuations than their American counterparts, which means they could be buying opportunities.
All the major oil companies benefited from the surge in oil prices as the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia invaded Ukraine. The war threatened to cut off some supplies from one of the world’s biggest exporters, though the crude has kept flowing so far. Prices have dropped back since then, but not before delivering a few record quarters of earnings, along with plentiful buybacks. Unlike the broader market, share prices have surged.
The question is whether the good times will last. Oil prices have come back down. European governments are dead set on clawing back some of those high profits with windfall taxes to help shield households from soaring energy costs. Countries on the other side of the Atlantic have earmarked more than $700 billion to pay for subsidies and price caps to help their citizens keep warm over the winter.
To be sure, there are risks to taxing energy companies more. “Windfall taxes and price caps do little to solve an energy shortage, and are ultimately likely to exacerbate the problems caused by reducing incentives to invest,” said Biraj Borkhataria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.
Nevertheless, analysts say it won’t be a big hit to the bottom line for companies and are optimistic about the coming year.
“2023 earnings won’t match 2022, but they’re still great,” said Allen Good, a strategist at Morningstar. “Shareholders are going to see a lot of cash flow coming back between repurchases and dividends.”
For one thing, windfall taxes only kick in at high levels of revenue. James Hubbard, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, says the sectors’ earnings will only be reduced by about 3% to 4%, or “the low single digits.”
The additional taxes will hit U.S. companies as much as European ones—all operate globally, and U.S. firms pay taxes in Europe as well. But European companies are still trading at a significant discount to U.S. peers. According to Morningstar’s Good, that may be because Shell and BP have made big investments in sustainable energy over the past few years.
Those investments mean they have been left with less to spend on trying to increase their output of oil and gas, which discourages stock investors looking for exposure to hydrocarbons. At the same time, the investors interested in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues haven’t rewarded BP and Shell by buying their shares because they’re still big producers of greenhouse-gas emitting fuels.
BP and Shell, both based in London, each trades at five times next year’s estimated earnings. Share prices for both gained about 40% in 2022.

MicroStrategy Inc., the enterprise-software firm better known in recent years as the largest corporate buyer of Bitcoin, announced a series of transactions including its first ever sale of the token. The company remains a net buyer.
In a filing Wednesday, MicroStrategy said it acquired approximately 2,395 Bitcoin between the start of November and Dec. 21 through its MacroStrategy subsidiary, paying roughly $42,8 million in cash. It then sold 704 of the tokens on Dec. 22 for a total of around $11.8 million, citing tax purposes, before buying 810 more of them two days later.
“MicroStrategy plans to carry back the capital losses resulting from this transaction against previous capital gains,” the company said to explain the Dec. 22 sale. This “may generate a tax benefit,” MicroStrategy said in its filing.
Because cryptocurrencies largely aren’t deemed securities, there are no crypto-specific “wash rules” that would apply to the market, says Sean Farrell, head of digital-asset strategy at Fundstrat, who doesn’t work on tax implications directly but tracks the space closely.
“So we’re operating in this world in which, for lack of a better word, it’s a loophole where if you are sitting on a position below cost, you are able to sell that position and immediately re-buy those assets at the same spot price,” Farrell said in an interview. “That’s essentially what MicroStrategy is trying to do to optimize their holdings and help obtain some tax relief.”
All in, MicroStrategy held about 132,500 Bitcoin worth more than $4 billion as of Dec. 27. The firm paid an average purchase price of $30,397 per Bitcoin. Bitcoin on Wednesday traded at around $16,650, having lost more than 60% for the year, a decline that puts it on pace for one of its worst annual stretches on record.
“There is no change to our Bitcoin strategy, which is to acquire and hold Bitcoin for the long term,” said Shirish Jajodia, head of investor relations and treasury at MicroStrategy.
MicroStrategy had over the pandemic years become well known for its Bitcoin acquisitions, led largely by its charismatic Chief Executive Officer Michael Saylor. Saylor earlier this year relinquishedthat role and now serves as executive chairman at the firm and still leading its Bitcoin strategy.
The company’s shares fell 6.5% on Wednesday to around $138, the lowest level since August 2020. They are down roughly 75% year to date.

PI - on all the boards, yeah I’m posting on all the boards day and night. Not.
‘I still believe this will rise above 20p, let’s wait and see many months to come’. Now 20p is months away. Oh dear!

PI - ‘We are here to make money and that's it’ says it all about you and your character, just a pity some people may have been taken in by your ramping and like you they are now trapped into a share that’s on its last legs. Shameless!
Oh wait......12p, 15p, 23p or even 30p in the next few days.
What’s your average now? I suppose it’s down to 4p by now. Pmsl

Pacifiers are for babies, so here is a lullaby to help you sleep.

YTD Group revenue growth of +8.8% (+9.9% across Beauty, Nutrition and Ingenuity) is in line with expectations, supporting FY 2022 revenue growth guidance of +10.0% to +15.0% which remains unchanged.

·Full year adjusted EBITDA guidance is maintained between a range of £100 to £130 million pre Software-as-a-Service ("SaaS") cost reclassification.

·Guidance for cash on hand at year-end of c. £500m remains unchanged, with an additional £170m undrawn revolving credit facility available.

They either hit targets or they don’t. Fear and greed is the game, it’s not one for babies.

Billionaire Mark Cuban is doubling down on bitcoin and says he even prefers investing in the digital asset over gold.
The longtime cryptocurrency advocate said he hopes the price of bitcoin goes down further so he can buy more during a Dec. 26 episode of Bill Maher's "Club Random" podcast.
Bitcoin has lost over 60% of its value in 2022 and prices were hovering just below $17,000 as of Dec. 27 – far below the digital coin's 2021 highs.
Financial experts typically consider gold to be a good way for people to protect the value of their investment portfolio from declining due to inflation. However, Cuban called gold investors "dumb as f---" during his interview with Maher.
"If everything went to hell in a hand basket and you had a gold bar, you know what would happen? Someone would beat the f--- out of you or kill you and take your gold bar," he explained.
When comparing the two, Cuban said that both gold and bitcoin are a "store of value", meaning he believes that both assets maintain their value rather than depreciating.
However, there is a key difference between how gold and bitcoin derive value.
Gold's value is derived from its relative scarcity and its long history of being traded for goods and services.
On the other hand, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a relatively new form of payment.
Most digital coins don't derive their value from an underlying entity which makes them subject to unpredictable fluctuations in price.
Bitcoin prices are currently trending far below their January prices while gold has only diminished by a little over 1% year to date as of Dec. 27.
In a recent research report, Goldman Sachs predicted that gold would outperform bitcoin in the long term per Coindesk's article.
The billion dollar global investment bank called bitcoin "a solution looking for a problem" and says it is likely to continue to be a highly volatile asset until there are more reasons for people to use it.
To that point, investors seem to have less of an appetite for crypto investing than Cuban.
About 60% of Americans believe investing in digital currency is highly risky — up from 45% in 2021, according to the recent CNBC Make It: Your Money survey, conducted in partnership with Momentive.