Member Info for LordAdam

Thank you for the input ... I totally agree, and with your detailed analysis too. There's hardly any BG shareholder with a shred of self interest that will vote against the deal, and a share holder revolt on the scale needed to prevent the deal on the Shell side is unthinkable. In addition the bulk of the market thinks the same ... witness today how the merger arbitrage on BG is being reduced (eroded) as uncertainty on the deal evaporates and how the RDSB price declines as uncertainty increases regarding oil price/supply etc. Mike

I use the iWeb dealing service for ISA and non-ISA, plus my wife uses it too ... but we got in before their £200 application fee was implemented. Once you're in there are no annual charges and only £5 per trade. Plus ISA based limit orders are free -- the £200 startup though is high now and discouraging many I suspect. Mike

There's no manipulation. The simple explanation is that they didn't put it down as either a buy or a sell. The trade lists only contain the date, time, volume and price. There's no indication of whether it was a buy or a sell in there. That's something that is added for our convenience by the sites that display the list and what they do is use the bid/offer price at the time that the trade is recorded to make a best guess as to whether it was a buy or sell and put some colour/indication in for our benefit. In a moving market it's not always correct and made worse when the posting of trades is delayed for a variety of reasons. It's a complicated business but for what it's worth I think the LSE site makes the best attempt at getting it right. Mike

Prospectuses, election and proxy forms are dropping onto the doormats of BG Share holders this morning. I know, I've seen my aged mother's copy. She's filled hers in and it will be in the post tonight. Thousands of others will be doing the same. There isn't a BG shareholder anywhere who is going to vote against the offer in the hope that they will be given only half the cash and a tad more of a Shell share ... basically to give up £1.83 in return for 6.5% extra of a Shell share (worth 85p at the time of writing). Also BG shareholders don't know of any other offer ... it's not in the paperwork and its not being put forward or supported by the board of directors. So why would shareholders reject the offer in a vacuum for something that they don't even know about. Any £2 + 0.5 of a share offer is purely speculation, a what-if being used to fill column inches at best. For BG or Shell the cost of varying the offer, both practically and politically is far too high to even be contemplated. The deal will either succeed totally or fail totally ... my money is on the former. But it's not done yet and that's why there's a difference between the £10.73 theoretical price of BG and its actual £9.85. There's a 9% arbitrage in there if you think its going ahead ... and if you don't then take the premium and run -- some have, only time will tell if they did the right thing or not. Mike

There won't be a new deal ... the prospectus is out, the numbers have been agreed, known and on the table since April ... Shell/BG have been around the world getting approvals ... they have the institutions on board ... they are not amateurs. This will happen. And as has been pointed out before ... any BG holder that thinks it won't has sold out already. Other wise they will lose big time when the deal collapses ... and that means they can't vote. So all the holders of BG shares are going to vote in favour. Which only leaves us with a shareholder rebellion in the Shell camp ... come on ... time to get real on this. Mike

It's been a pleasure ... it's really been nice to contribute to such a sane and considered discussion. Trakm8 is not your typical company, in many ways it is quite exceptional, and it's only fitting that it should have a non-typical, exceptional board to reflect it. I'm really looking forward to coming year ... much of what I had hoped for Trakm8 is coming to fruition ... what's really taken me by surprise is the pace of development -- nothing short of exceptional. There was a discussion recently about the forward p/e seeming high, but in the light of recent developments it would seem fully justified. As others have said, the new AA Business Division could well be a serious game changer for the company! Have a good one ... it will probably be quite now until the New Year, it may drift up, it may drift down, but come January it will be interesting for sure! Good fortune in this and all your holdings, may the New Year be a prosperous one for you. Mike

It's been a pleasure ... it's really been nice to contribute to such a sane and considered discussion. Trakm8 is not your typical company, in many ways it is quite exceptional, and it's only fitting that it should have a non-typical, exceptional board to reflect it. I'm really looking forward to coming year ... much of what I had hoped for Trakm8 is coming to fruition ... what's really taken me by surprise is the pace of development -- nothing short of exceptional. There was a discussion recently about the forward p/e seeming high, but in the light of recent developments it would seem fully justified. As others have said, the new AA Business Division could well be a serious game changer for the company! Have a good one ... it will probably be quite now until the New Year, it may drift up, it may drift down, but come January it will be interesting for sure! Good fortune in this and all your holdings, may the New Year be a prosperous one for you. Mike

"going down too well" ... wrong tense ... the placing took place several days ago ... is totally complete and was oversubscribed ... it was a success and gave Trakm8 the capital required to make the purchase without recourse to debt or interest bearing paper. The BOD did the right thing and used their own price improvement to make the deal happen at very little real cost to themselves. Smart move in anyone's book. As others have said the price of 333p was most likely fixed by the company in conjunction with FinnCap their broker some time ago ... TEA is just a very small cog in a mechanism for offering the placement shares to a band of select PIs ... the discussion here has been along the lines of how to join the in-set. Further the decrease today and yesterday is on the basis of a total of about 400,000 shares traded (bought and sold that is) ... if someone had tried to buy 1,800,000 shares in the market it would have been impossible without increasing the price by several pounds. To be able to get 1.8m shares at 333p is a major coup. In addition those new investors are looking, as we move into 2016, at one of the best (if not the best) performing AIM shares of 2015. There isn't a long term watcher of this board that wouldn't have bought in at that point if they had had the cash and the chance. This is the week leading up to Christmas ... most of the bigger plays broke up from school last Friday and won't make a move on Trak until after the new year ... in addition anyone who took a position for the short term will be getting back into cash for the long, quiet, Christmas/New Year break. Having bought at much lower levels than these and seen the behaviour of the share in the past ... I'm not at all concerned about the last couple of days. Hey remember the dip to 250 just leading up to the results in Nov ... what an opportunity that was in hindsight! Mike

As I thought the share drop today is overdone ... so today proves to be a buying opportunity which is another reason for there being a 2:1 ration in favour of buyers. Last night we closed at 375 for a cap of 112.575m ... add to that the 1.8m new shares at 333 ... and we get a new total of 31.82m shares at what should be 373p ... so today's 360 is a discount. So together with the improved outlook you get 3-4% discount compared to yesterday. We may not make the 400 figure before Christmas Eve now, but it won't be too far into the new year before we do. Mike

Yes ... rights issue ... as you say, its not that simple. The trouble is that word 'rights' ... basically you have to give *every* holder the right to buy and that means writing to them all, giving them time to reply, etc ... and then having to set up an underwrite to pick up any unsubscribed shares ... also some sort of facility for holders to sell their rights if they choose not to take up their rights. And finally you'd be giving 42% of the placement to the BOD in proportion to the equity that they already hold. Umm ... maybe the placement method is the better one for the company ... we just have to crack the nut on how to get in there ourselves. I'll put my thinking cap on and see what can be done as its a recurrent problem with fast growing AIM companies -- they need access to capital and rights/placement is the way to go rather than debt! See my next post for some maths on the numbers. Mike

This might be a bit off topic but I'll post it as it may well be useful to us AIM investors. Looks like AIM companies that want to raise capital often go for the private placement option rather than a rights issue as its cheaper for them. Of course that may save them money but it leaves us little guys at a disadvantage in that we're keen to be invested, keen to increase our holdings (at a reasonable offer price) ... but we're frozen out and suffer when the share is diluted and the price inevitably falls on our part of the holding. Enough moaning ... the positive answer is to get in there and get a slice of the cake ... Teathers the android/apple app looks to be a way of doing that. But if I've read the details right then you have to have an account with a participating broker and until mid-Jan that's only Shard Capital. Their costs for a placement/IPO appear to be up to 5% commission and £75 admin charge. (That would turn your 333p shares into a cost of 357p on a parcel of 1000 shares.) Looks to me that I should wait until mid-Jan and see if other brokers come into the system and push the costs down. This is the second time that I've been miffed to miss out on a placing ... any thoughts or ideas how to avoid a third time would be appreciated. Mike

Very interesting move by Trakm8's board ... we've just had the extension of the working relationship with the AA and the establishment of the AA Business Division under a very experienced director. Now we have the acquisition of Route Monkey whose specialization is route planning and management. (For the mathematical among you it's called "The Traveling Salesman" problem -- and its not trivial.) The RNS said that the acquisition will be immediately earnings enhancing and the implication/statement of the rest of the news is that Route Monkey will be kept intact and left to get on with it ... but there's an obvious link here ... Route Monkey will ultimately have access to the corporate customers of the AA via the division that is being set up. So Route Monkey now will have the inside track on a whole bunch of new potential corporate customers ... and it's corporate customers that makes Route Monkey work -- so we should see a very good increase in their cash flow and profit rate over the next 1-2 years. Overall this looks very promising for the medium term. The only slight grouse I have is that the placing was done privately and not as a rights issue to existing shareholders. At the offer price I'd have sold the house ... you can bet that I'll be looking at this app that's been mentioned -- does anyone know any other way of getting into this private offering business as this is the second time that a hot company of mine has had its shares diluted without me getting a piece of the action! Mike

I don't think we see day traders on Trakm8 as the spread is really very large ... often its 5% ... and the market is very thin. In order to make a decent turn you'd have to have a day movement of 10% sort of thing (and be able to guarantee it which is worse). Plus you'd have to trade with a decent volume and you can't shift more than 5000 shares without talking to a market maker -- and that triggers a price move against you! So I'd be surprised if what we are seeing is day trading as such. Mind you taking a position until the new year or the next results is quite feasible. Plus there's something else ... because the market is so thin and there's only 2-3 market makers in it ... a lot of the price movements are done manually so we often see a peak in the day and then the MM move the price back to a centre point toward the close of the day. I think they do this to give themselves a safer opening on the following day. In the long run it doesn't matter but if you're watching the screen you have to develop a certain laissez faire so that you don't go mad! Mike

The next few days are going to be really interesting. The reason? The folk who bought in 2 weeks ago are now looking at a 25%+ sort of gain and they are going to be very tempted to take their profits. The long term holders and watchers here will have already been through this a few times before and will know that with the spread as big as it is and the market as thin as it is, the only real thing to do is to continue to hold. This really isn't a share you want to try and trade on the dips -- its just too easy to be left out in the cold with this one! In addition, what's going to make it even more interesting is likely to be the weekend press ... unless the FED decision goes the unexpected way and gobbles all the ink ... there's going to be some discussion of the AA restructuring and its implications. With all the news and all the numbers pointing towards very good results in March and an exceptional year after that there really is only one way this can be going. Mike

Very interesting development announced in today's RNS ... the creation of a specific business division with its own, highly experienced, director to manage the newly extended contract with the AA. Looks extremely promising in that the board obviously have reason to believe that the new division has very significant growth potential for the future. Whilst its easy to think of the AA in terms of the very nice man and roadside recovery etc the real 'hidden' jewel in the crown of course is the business fleet management services that the AA provide to large customers. Putting that alongside Trakm8's vehicle/driver monitoring is a natural and potentially huge extension. Effectively Trakm8 have 'bought' into the AA's corporate customer base ... this is looking very good for the new year. Mike

Bear with me ... its a bit detailed but worth it ... looking at the half-yearly report in some detail (RNS 23/11) gives last years results for H1/H2 as 2.70/6.24 EPS. That's what gives the current P/E as 60+. Now we've just had the H1 results for this current year as an EPS of 5.08 (nearly the whole of the previous years value in 6 months). If the second half goes as H2 did the previous year we'll have a year end total of about 11.74 ... that would bring a share price of 380 down to about a p/e of 32. And that would be cheap for a company turning in 85-90% growth. So the whole thing repeats and the market factors in the following year on top of this one. Hence the inevitable increase beyond 3.80 towards 4+ as PJ points out. With results as expected (and TRAK has never disappointed) the sp just has to rise to cope with the profit stream. As you say, the market will accept these high p/e's while it has the confidence that the company will deliver the numbers on an on-going basis. As you point out that there are few companies in AIM that consistently come up with the goods ... and inevitably the ones that do attract a lot of attention. Coupled with the thinness of the market in TRAK, I can only see this going one way, what has always consistently caught me off guard is just how fast it's going up. Mike

64 ... you're right that's a big p/e, but of course that's based on last years (past) figures and the market has already discounted those and is working not on this current year's values but the one's beyond that. With the growth rate that Trakm8 is producing then within a year or two that p/e becomes a much more reasonable figure. Also because Trakm8's business model is based on data processing services rather than just hardware sales then its scale-ability and profitability is uncharacteristically high. What the market sees, and likes, is the steady growth in the overall business ... What I see here today and yesterday is investors wanting to get into what is likely to be the best share of the year ... before it becomes one of the best shares of next year as well. I'm just glad I got in earlier in the year! Mike

Well positive press over the weekend and a good RNS posted first thing this morning about the extension to the AA contract. What better way to start the week? Mike

General FTSE-100 market looks as though its going to close about 2% down ... and if TRAK closes 4% up ... then that's going to be seriously impressive! After all the doom and gloom that will have been splashed around all weekend by the financial press ... Trakm8 will be one of the few items of positive news that they will have had a chance to write about ... come Monday we could see a very positive move in the share price. Mike

Found this in the online FT for 7 December ... http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4f97a60e-9d08-11e5-8ce1-f6219b685d74.html?ftcamp=traffic/partner/feed_headline/us_yahoo/auddev The gist of the piece is the following: "Chief executive Peter Scales and John Lynch, the finance director, are founding partners of Cathedral, which Lancashire bought in 2013 for £266m to gain access to the Lloyd’s insurance market. People familiar with the situation confirmed the pair had left Cathedral, and that Lancashire was unable to comment for legal reasons. A corporate culture clash was to blame for the dismissals, said one person, who added that Lancashire remained committed to the Lloyd’s market." That might go some way to explaining the relative silence surrounding the situation ... From a personal holding point of view I don't see any cause for undue concern ... In due course they will be replaced and in the mean time the rest of the Cathedral crew will man the ship. #All the important building blocks remain in place. I'm holding and in fact topping up as reserves come available. Mike