Member Info for LordAdam

As always ... the devil is in the detail and you probably need to keep an eye on these ... 90m shares? There's only 89m in the whole company ... me thinks you're a zero adrift there ... Then the killer I'm afraid, and this is a bit of an old chestnut ... the trade at 16:35 is the end of day auction between the market makers themselves and not a regular market deal. So basically it doesn't count for much in terms of the market sentiment. Still, we shall see what Monday brings ... good luck folks. Mike

Quite the opposite ... if the rights issue strike price is below the current share price then it is cost effective to buy in the current market before the shares go ex-rights in order to be able to purchase the extra shares at the reduced price. With the correct strike price there is every reason to expect the current share price to rise. As regards selling your rights, again, if the strike price is below the prevailing share price at the time then there is value in the rights and selling them, minus dealing costs of course, is quite feasible. In fact brokers often offer the option to sell sufficent rights to take up the balancing portion of your rights ... thus leaving you in a cash neutral position. As always it pays to watch the details ... and the past is no predictor of the future! Mike

Ftsemajor ... the interim was declared at 28p (down from the 32p of the prvious year) ... that goes exDiv on 15/3 as you say. The final though of course is yet to be declared and at this stage probably the best that we could hope for would be 64p downgraded by a similar amount to about 56p. (56+28) over the current price gives a yield of 9.4%. That's still high by historic standards and one of two things will probably happen either a) the share price will rise to reduce the yield to a more normal 5-6% ... or b) the dividend will be reduced to drop the yield to a lower range. Anybody's guess as to which it will be! Oh, and the other thing that may happen is that the total dividend payment is kept but is divided over a greater number of shares and hence the yield drops that way. Mike

Yes ... a rights issue is exactly what it says on the tin ... each and every shareholder has the right to purchase the new shares first ... they can elect to purchase them themselves, or sell on their right ... and in the situation that the shares are not taken up they are not issued, unless the company has made an underwriting provision for a 3rd party to take them up (which it has in this case). So, if you hold PHNX shares on the day that they go ex-rights you will participate in the rights issue itself. But as they say, the Devil is in the details ... and now we have to see how the details work out! Mike

Oh ... an extra tip ... if you do go for the iWEB account, or maybe any other ISA transfer ... put the transfer application into iWEB and let them 'pull' the existing holdings across. The process will go more efficiently than if you try to get the existing managers to 'push' the holdings to the new account -- after all what do they care if you have to wait, you're leaving anyway! Also if you have cash/share ISAs and a mixture of managers over the years then iWEB will act as the central coordinators for the operation. Mike

My family's experiences of ISA transfers have been very different. Four of us transferred existing ISA's into our iWEB accounts. In each case the total process took about 2-3 weeks. Once the incumbent ISA manager gave up the holdings they were in the iWEB account and tradeable within about 2-3 days. Our experience was that it was the existing ISA managers that were the ones who both dragged their feet and made things more difficult. On a pragmatic level ... 6 lots of �45 is �270 ... that's a lot of beer tokens for the local ... plus the low cost and flexible dealing made it a no brainer. For a short while iWEB were so inundated with applications that they raised their one-off joining fee to �200. Having been with iWEB for a while I was so impressed that I paid my daughter's and my son's fee for them to get them into the fold for the longer term. Mike

Have a look at iWeb ... no charges for holding ISA's ... �5 per trade dealing cost, free limit orders (within the ISA, �2 outside, discounted on trade) ... special low rate automatic group dividend reinvestment if you want it. Cost to open the account is a low �25 one-off charge. No interest on cash held though, but free transfers into and out of the account so on the non-ISA side you can just manually sweep your balance into something that is interest bearing. Very, very professional trading office and back office systems. Within the family we have six accounts with them and not a bad experience amongst us. Mike

Thanks for the clarification ... my fear was that something had changed in the way CGT was being applied to couples and I'd missed the details. As you say, in the present market you've got to go some to make over �22.6K of profit. Don't forget of course that transfers between married persons is both free of stamp duty and deemed to have taken place at the original purchase price rather than the price on the day of transfer. Both factors help considerably in optimizing the situation! Mike

I'm not nit picking ... just checking that I've not missed something that I should have seen. The CGT allowance for 2017/18 is 11,300 for an individual ... if you split your trading carefully between two of you that would make �22,600 ... but your statement of �25k is free each year for 2 suggests that I've missed something to do with couples or CGT. Were you just rounding or have I missed something? Mike

Sorry ... but his really gets rather tedious ... it's 16:35 ... it's the automated end of day auction that market makers use to pass stock between themselves to even up their books. It's not a normal to the market trade. If you're going to look at the trade lists you have to learn how they work, what they mean and what they don't. It's a noob mistake and it will cost you money if you don't get your act together. Mike

Apologies ... I should have remembered that you were much of the same thought/feeling regarding the buyback ... On a more serious note ... for us income or high yield type investors ... what do you think is going to happen to the dividend after the demerger? Is it going to go with the retail side or stay on the production side? Will it be revised (probably downwards)? How's it all going to work? I'm starting to try and game plan the events as regards either increasing or decreasing holdings etc and I'm sure there's many other folk in the same position too. It would be good if collectively we weren't caught on the back foot! Mike

"I'm sure the remuneration committee have adjusted the eps targets" ... call me cynical ... but I'm not so sure that they will adjust the eps targets. I've said all along that the buy back with our money is to help secure their executive bonus and create artificial dividend growth. I've not seen the board say once that the dividend will grow by 3% as a direct consequence of the buyback. (Less shares means the same amount provides more per share.) I said back in May ... "The influence of the buy back is simple ... every share you own has missed out on a special dividend of 50p ... and the reduction in the number of shares would pay for an automatic 3% rise in the ordinary dividend -- funny isn't it how we've only got 2% and the board doesn't talk of the reduced number of shares in circulation." Sadly I've not seen anything recently that has changed my opinion of the situation. And as a consequence I've not added further to my holding since levelling slightly in July. Mike

Are you posting to the right board? PHNX are an end-of-life policy management operation and Hargreaves-Lansdown (HL) are brokers for shares/ISA's/Pensions ... I can't see how you might even be able to transfer something from PHNX to HL let alone why you might. Some more detail would help to clear up the confusion and perhaps allow others to contribute to your decision making process. Mike

I too have a load of these ... but the fall in actual share price is only of significance if you intend to sell them -- I don't. I bought them with the hope/intention of holding to infinity for the yield of 6%+ that I would be getting. Provided they continue to issue the dividend as they currently do there is really nothing to consider. Yes, I could have done marginally better, (with hindsight, which is always 20/20), by selling the peaks and buying the troughs but then I prefer a relatively quiet life ... and as you say, there will always be someone in the will that can sell them after the final exeunt. Mike

GCP are executing their standard business model ... raise money in the market ... loan it out for long-term infra-structure projects ... pay a proportion of their income as dividends. The actual numbers, of course, depend on market conditions and opportunities. They took advantage of the recent share price rise to issue paper ... and that was a smart move ... and they offer it at a discount to the market price ... ensuring a 100% take up and that too is a smart move. The rest is down to how shrewd a judge of loan/repayment they are as regards who they loan it to and for what interest. History suggests that they have got it right in the past and there's no reason to think they have now got it wrong. The reward in the longer term is a 6% yield for us PI's and in the short term a capital gain for those picking up the placement. As regards the share price ... expect the 120-122 range shortly as the placing kicks in ... followed by a 118-120 range as the dust settles ... followed by a very gentle rise to the 128-130 region again before the next placing. Mike

It doesn't take much to move TRAK's price a long way ... I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see a substantial increase around the time of the trading statement in late February. In these low volume periods the share price really doesn't follow the usual rules of the supply/demand market and I rather suspect that the price more reflects the attempts of the market makers to stimulate volume/churn (and hence make money) than a real market valuation of the company. Sadly the only game that they seem to know how to play at the moment is the 'mark-it-down' one. (Back in 2015/16 at this time of the year the only game they knew was the 'mark-it-up' one.) Eventually truth will out ... Mike

NO it was the end of day auction between the market makers ... 16:35 ... market closed ... UT ... "Uncrossing Trade". If you are going to look at the trade lists do try and find out what they actually mean ... Mike

The block chain is just a different way of showing ownership ... so a block chain on a share certificate is rather likely to be a waste of time. (Neither the share certificate nor your entry in your brokers nominee account validates your ownership -- the final arbiter is the company registrar who unilaterally can verify or not your holding.) As for use of a block chain or some crypto-currency for use as payment for shares that's simply a matter of convention, convenience and confidence. With the current block chain becoming less usable because of transaction delays and transfer fees becoming larger I can't see my brokerage account being conducted in Bitcoin any day soon. Rather than a viable form of money, ie a means of payment and exchange, the current Bitcoin hiatus is one of speculation ... and rather akin to thinking that a £5 note with the serial number AK47 on it is worth a fortune I suspect that some day soon every man and his dog will see that the emperor is rather scantily clad. I for one am not buying any tulip bulbs, bits on a disk, railway shares, investing in the Mississippi adventure or the South Seas company! Mike

I'm on record (read my previous posts over the last 12-18 months) as saying that buy backs are, in general, a sign of an inward looking, self-serving board with a disregard for small share holders. In this particular case they took what would have been a 50p special dividend and used it to guarantee their executive bonuses and create a 3% automatic increase in annual dividend without any improvement in underlying profitability or cash flow. Effectively this company has gone nowhere, merely maintaining the status quo ... and the share price has reflected that ... ... and the worst of it all is that there is no sign of anything ever changing. Mike

Does the RNS amount to a small dilution? ... Yes and no ... The shares are being issued as options under a savings scheme begun in 2005. The worst case is if the shares are being created and issued completely free -- very unlikely -- in which case the dilution will amount to approximately 0.75% of the companies equity. If the shares are created and offset against a value the same as today's closing price the dilution would be zero. In practice it will be somewhere between the two. Mike