Member Info for lordloadsoflolly

Baf3 - shows how much you know about the short term loan industry.

Talking of short, my only experience of shorting TEK is of them short changing me something rotten. Forever promising special dividend payouts that have simply never materialised. And now, the value of their residual holdings is so diminished, any payout would be unlikely to recoup all our losses anyway. Let alone deliver anything approaching a decent profit.

Still, we’re all helping to save lives (Clifford’s lifestyle mainly) by throwing money Tek’s way. So it’s all good.

Baf3 - I sleep just fine at night thanks. Which is probably more than most TEK holders can say right now.

Of course pawnbroking interest rates are high, reflecting the risks involved & the flexibility these loans offer. No credit checks are ever required and loans can normally be up & running within an hour.

We’re not talking multi year lending here either. Average loan redemption is in only 3 months or so and the typical maximum term is 6 months . If the loan isn’t repaid and the pawned item has to be sold as a result, any excess beyond the loan value is automatically repaid to the customer.

You take the moral high ground, I’ll bank the profits thanks. Safe in the knowledge H&T is offering a valuable service, for which the vast majority of its customers are genuinely grateful.

Meanwhile, Clifford & his family of cronies continue lining their own pockets very nicely, while TEK continues to crash & burn.

Baf3 - negative reviews generally don’t make great reading. Doh!

You can rarely please all of the people all of the time. And any company that does will probably be spending much more cash than makes real commercial sense. The key to interpreting reviews of any sort is to look at the bigger picture i.e. the overall trend.

Veteran10 - if Trustpilot did that routinely, there wouldn’t be ANY negative posts on there. Which is far from the case.

No system is perfect (any more than you can rely 100% on customer reviews). But they’re usually a very helpful pointer nonetheless.

Baf3 - who’d have thought the likes of you would take the moral high ground all of a sudden. It somehow doesn’t sit well, but never mind.

TopCatz - if I’m a prawn, I’d say you were a whole steamed lobster mate.

For your info, today’s H&T price movement is FAR from their first move northwards. Just as today is FAR from TEK’s first move southwards.

I agree with you about potential government regulatory tightening of the pawnbroking industry by the way. Nothing is risk free (as TEK holders know only too well by now). But I’m comfortable the Tories have bigger fish to fry ATM. And by the next general election, I’ll probably have banked my profit & reduced/exited H&T completely.

As for ethics, most customers are pretty happy with H&T - see all the positive Trustpilot reviews. If you don’t qualify for a bank account, need a short term loan and would otherwise be dependent on a loan shark, pawnbrokers look like a godsend. Not just me saying that. There was a recent BBC Business feature on pawnbroking and several customers who they interviewed said precisely the same thing.

Topcatz - I hope we're still on for our little wager? You know - H&T versus TEK.

H&T has been moving along quite nicely since I last added in early Sept '23 at just under 396p following our wager. And there's been a 6.5p dividend per share since then too.

Meanwhile, all the uber-optimistic posts about Microsalt transforming TEK's prospects have come true. Transformed, certainly - though not in a good way so far at least.

Tivman - at the last one of these I listened to, Clifford clearly redacted any awkward questions as he went along, simply answering the non-controversial ones.

He spent most of the time telling existing investors absolutely zilch that they didn't already know. Maybe that was the whole aim. Leaky bucket syndrome means you have to try to recruit more wide-eyed novices to replace all the battle-weary loss-makers pulling out.

Baf3 - well, at least your last post made me laugh, despite my heavy (& increasing) TEK losses. Here's a reminder of your latest pearls of wisdom:

"The biggest problem is the markets and the poor quality and knowledge of investors. The CEO and company have done a fantastic job of building 5 incredible companies with huge potential. If these companies and TEK itself was actually valued correctly as it would be in a normal world we would all be making a very large amount of money, unfortunately that isn't the case which makes it more difficult."

So it's the investors' fault

No, wait, it's the market's fault

No - hang on a sec - it's the world's fault

Nothing to do with the various CEOs. Or indeed TEK's strategy.

No course not. As you say, they're all INCREDIBLE with HUGE potential. Doing a FANTASTIC job in fact.

Simply misunderstood. Hence TEK's share price heading south faster than a bullet train.

It's all just so VERY UNFAIR really.

Badsterman - my main strategy with TEK is not to throw any more money at it. However tempting it may be when - like now - the share price is on the floor.

I don't deny there's potential within some of TEK's holdings. But I'm still failing to see any strategy from Clifford to release it.

Instead, he seems hell-bent on re-investing any proceeds from existing holdings into new - equally risky - ventures. Sure AI may be huge. But so are the risks of any university AI start up succeeding, when they're up against multinational giants with near bottomless pockets.

We were originally sold a story of:

1) Find promising-looking start ups

2) Nurture them to flotation

3) Reward patient backers with some - not all - of the proceeds from those flotations

Now, Clifford seems to have mislaid his own memo on point 3 above. Of course, he's OK either way, drawing a mega salary & bonus just as long as this is strung out.

But TEK's share price firmly suggests investors have smelt a rat over the past year or so. They're no longer prepared to give TEK the benefit of the doubt and are waiting for Clifford to show them just part of the money. Until he does, I'm afraid it remains a broken model in my book.

PS: Funny how quiet TopCatz has gone, all of a sudden.

Tambo210 - as I suggested previously. I prefer to concentrate on the overall performance & direction of travel.

Rather than fixate on a few individual components.

You can almost always pick out both poor & excellent performers within a portfolio. What matters more to me is which way I think the scales will tip over time.

Badsterman - adding new holdings (AI or otherwise) is hardly likely to boost the share price for long.

Look what's happened to the existing four holdings. Half have already IPO'd, with Microsalt looking imminent. Yet TEK's share price is still stuck right down in the basement (and IMHO we're not even talking bargain basement here).

To me, it increasingly looks like TEK's business model is broken. I've said all along it should have divested part of its interests at IPO stage and rewarded existing investors via a special dividend (just as Cliff originally set out to us). Other posters on here ridiculed my idea, saying it would harm the IPO prices or that they'd rather wait until the holdings had increased much further in value.

Well that simply hasn't happened folks. And now look where we are.

Personally, I think it's always best to look at an investment trust in the round.

Rather than focus on a single holding which happens to confirm your stance at the time.

With talk of Microsalt being renamed Crystal on the market, let's hope the shortened ticker isn't CRYS.

AquarianAge - point taken.

I guess my counter argument would be that hedging - like investing - is a gamble in itself. And as you admitted "Most of the time such a 1% hedge ends up being worthless".

Sometimes it makes sense to take out counter-balancing insurance. But whether this should be by SMT's own managers is perhaps more debatable. Their remit isn't necessarily to mitigate risk, so much as invest long term in what they regard as high risk, but potentially high reward businesses.

You may recall I started a thread on here a few weeks back, asking what - if any - steps other SMT holders had taken to offset the potential volatility & risk in Scottish Mortgage. Most - myself included - HAD taken out some form of "insurance", by diversifying their portfolio or at least setting some sort of SMT % limit.

I'd argue that's probably the level at which any margin of safety should operate. But I fully take your point that with hindsight, an option on rising interest rates was a smart &/or lucky move by Aurora.

TopCatz - I’m not in the least bit bothered about having the last word.

I just want to show potential new TEK investors that your forecasts have consistently been wildly over-optimistic & are therefore best ignored & pitied.

So, 25/26p was a flash crash sale was it?

Which makes the current 10p what exactly?

TopCatz - £165 a share. Yeah right. About as accurate as your 16 August 2022 prediction for TEK. Let's just remind ourselves of what you said, shall we:

"I'm still predicting 40p inbound shortly, with lots of news once the LUCYD float is concluded. 28p should be a floor with 25/26p as a flash crash sale."

CauldStream7 - I think you know the answer to that already - it's just pure guesswork.

DorsetLSE - I agree. No such thing as normal.

However, there are periods where external influences are generally conspiring against global economies/markets. And other periods where events are perceived to be more benign.

The former generally leads to a bear market, the latter to a bull market. Neither lasts forever before sentiment starts shifting in the opposite direction again.

Current sentiment is - understandably - firmly in the bear camp, given all the uncertainty. Which also means value investing will tend to win out over growth. But it won’t remain that way forever.

StrictlyZinc - I’m afraid you completely missed my point.

I wasn’t questioning the £200k figure at all. What I DID question was it being termed a loss.

It didn’t sound to me as though the poster concerned had sold his SMT holding. Just that the value of his holding had dropped by £200k. A loss/profit can only be realised when you actually come to sell. Until then, it’s all just paper losses/profits which are really fairly meaningless.