Member Info for Love_You

My focus is on growing the UK economy - more organic meat production, more fishing in the Atlantic, more oil and gas production (fortunately there is still plenty of oil offshore Angola, Mexico, Falklands etc) to be shipped to UK, and a more inclusive economy whereby the standard of living rises for everyone who contributes productively to energy production, food production, travel, music, fun times etc. If everyone contributed 3 days a week to the core of a good life - energy production, food production, researching happiness, healthcare and healthy living - then everyone could spend three days indulging in their own specific hobbies. The society our children will live in will be the one shaped by how we have spent our time .... that doesn't mean working super hard as then they might think hard work is a good role model ...personally i think working smart with good values is a more sensible approach....that's what I would want for the next generation.

But that's just my opinion and this is a democracy.

The people are in charge of the country. This is a democracy. If the majority want to drive cars to the beach/supermarket/weekends away, have foreign holidays, eat local organic meat and fresh fish, then that's the will of the majority.

Specul8 - I thought about that years ago. One could just assume the markets are full of lies as it is not in any company's self-interest to tell anyone else when they have found a massive new seam of gold, copper, or a large oil accumulation.

However, given that the markets are regulated, I'm just assuming the rules of the game guarantee fair play. Also in a civilised society it probably is in company's self-interest to tell the truth about the natural resources they have discovered. For example if I find a large seam of gold and I only tell a few people then one person could try and claim it all for themselves. But if I tell the regulators and the civil authorities that my company has found a large deposit of gold then it cements my company's claim to it and to get a share of the benefits from mining it.

I guess it's bound up with civil society and why civil society developed instead of humans just remaining as tribes of hunter gatherers. Dealing honestly with one another had so many benefits that I guess evolution selected those people as "fitter" and gradually they prospered whilst less honest people couldn't build up such a wealthy society and the stronger/more honest members of their tribes would have been assimilated into the more honest tribes ... and the people who were overly greedy/selfish would of died out due to not being able to build such large, powerful and wealthy tribes (which eventually evolved into massive groups of mutually cooeprative networks - or what we know of as our current civilisation of which but we as individuals are just like grains of sand which together make up a beautiful beach).

Don't people talk about other than trying to halt projects these days. What about halting the revamp of the House of Parliament? What about halting the progress of civilisation? What about halting the use of warships and planes unless there is actually a war? What about halting poverty? Why is everyone trying to halt drilling a few wells at Barryoe. What harm does would developing the oil at Barryoe do? It will put fuel in people's cars and the lorries that deliver food and medicines. Plants recycle carbon dioxide and turn it back into oxygen. Hence Barryoe would only do good - good for the economy and it would be climate neutral. Why isn't there more support to go ahead with it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49654281 - Retailers shut 2,870 stores in first half of 2019 - About 16 shops are closing every day as retailers restructure their businesses and more shopping moves online.

Can't see the Conservatives winning a general election. It's an easy decision for Corbyn if he wants to be the next PM - just vote for a general election.

At the end of the day if the high street keeps disappearing voters will become more and more unhappy. The problem with online is that it is just not an enjoyable experience like going to town for a mooch around, having a coffee, and doing some shopping. I bought some clothes recently online and a pair of shorts ripped the first time I worse them, and most of the other things weren't as described (the material was cheap and horrible) and they had to be sent back for a refund.

If the government thinks forcing people to shop online by closing down the high street (due to ludicrously high business rates and allowing landlords too much protection from the law meaning cartels can be easily formed in certain towns allowing rents to increase every year despite an economy going downhill) then I think the government is wrong.

I think voters do want the high street to thrive and prosper. The government need to start cutting taxes and business rates. Otherwise I think it is going to get a large share of the blame for the shop closures and the replacement of quality shops with betting shops, kebab shops and charity shops.

Just a smokescreen to obfuscate how bad the UK has become as a country for the vast majority of its citizens and the government still takes no responsibility for robbing people's pensions, for allowing the financial markets to fleece people with impunity, and for spreading a load of bull about climate change being a worse threat to people's quality of life than economic poverty.

The trouble is the market has sold a lot of companies down the toilet over the past decade: patisserie valerie, debenhams, carillion, rbs, lloyds, barclays, afren, thomas cook, xcite energy, etc. to name just a small percentage of the shareholders which have lost 90% plus (mostly been financially wiped out completely).

I don't think anyone could trust the city of London anymore, and the government wants to know why the UK's reputation is in tatters - it's because the directors don't seem to think they owe any duty to ensure the market does not manipulate their share price miles away from fair value. To my mind capitalism works best when people don't get rich from manipulating prices to silly places. Unfortunately the city manipulates everything it can to make a quick buck - but I doubt anyone in the global economy could say London was a reliable place to do business. I hope the politicians get angry with the city again like they did in 2008 - capitalism can't continue if the city keeps behaving like this .....

Glad to get that off my chest. I wouldn't know about the directors lifestyles ....however they must have very strange mindsets to think they needed to get the Chinese involved when their are tens of thousands of people in Ireland who would love a well-paid job helping to extract the oil from Barryoe.

Best wishes ranger4.

Hello Jimjam, I appreciated your post. I found it to be very interesting reading. Thanks.

Levis I would agree it's hardly the banks fault if someone takes out a loan and then makes a bad decision. I would even agree that this could be summed up as a snowflake society. However, I slightly disagree about the solar power market and how it has been structured. This market was structured so as to hugely financially reward the early adopters and to enable them to generate 300-400% financial returns from installing solar panels. I think was rather unfair personally because a lot of people would not have wanted to risk borrowing £12,000 to install solar panels on their roofs. And hence it tended to benefit the wealthy who could afford to spend £12,000 from their savings on installing solar panels. Solar panel schemes were by-and-large a massively over-generous subsidy for the already quite wealthy within society. I would say the policy was a complete failure really as the amount of homes with solar panels appears to currently be less than 0.5%. However those that did install solar panels from 2012-2014 made out like bandits making risk-free profits of over 15k if they had the 12k to invest initially (this is a profit of 125% from their investment as the initial 12k they would also get back as well). I feel sorry for the shareholders in the utility companies such as Centrica - those shareholders have in effect subsidised the already affluent eco-warriors within UK society. And one can't really say that if you'd held Centrica shares from 2002 then you'd of done okay because many people might of bought the shares in 2010 thinking the Conservatives were not really a party out to destroy the privatised energy sector within the UK. Of course with the benefit of hindsight it seems the Conservatives have sought to destroy investors/shareholders wealth whilst finding ways to funnel this money to the old boys network and to already wealthy landowners and special interest group connected through the old boys network. I'm absolutely shocked with hindsight at what has gone on in the UK since 2009. The Conservatives had me fooled in 2010 when they talked of family values, a more responsible society, smaller government, a stronger economy. The UK looks like it is doing economically far worse now than it was before they came into office - the number of boarded up shops, closed pubs, and small business closures has been truly heartbreaking for thousands of communities across this country. Personally I feel if Corbyn doesn't say much and tries to say he will undo the damage the Conservatives have done then he will win by a landslide at the next election. I really feel a significant proportion of the UK will feel the Conservatives have made the UK economically poorer not better off. Living standards have fallen as far as I can tell. Yet the opposite should of been fairly easy to achieve ....incompetence or what?

Also thank you pbody as well. If the market is forward looking then the only way to explain the current market valuation of PVR is that the market thinks PVR will run out of money well before any commercial oil is extracted from Barryoe. And I've been worried about the excessive cash burn at PVR ever since 2013 which is why I never invested. If anyone had asked me over the past six years whether to invest in PVR I would of told them to run a mile because PVR were spending other people's money as though money wasn't a valuable asset - in effect they were completely irresponsible in my opinion with their spending and for years I have been waiting for them to raise money at cheaper prices. After the first cash raise I thought I would buy some shares: but then I had second thoughts because I thought to myself why wouldn't the directors just keep spending money irresponsibly as they had not suffered any personal cost (cuts in salary) from making bad decisions previously (a long list of bad decisions. Anyone could make one or two bad decisions. But the board of Providence have made eight or nine bad decisions on the bounce). So I waited and then they did a second cash raise and diluted their investors. So then I thought to myself well there have still not been any consequences for the directors spending shareholder's money like water and in an irresponsible and stupid manner. So I waited. And to be honest I have very little faith left in the board of directors at PVR.

People were talking about electric cars being the future back in 2009, and some investors in BP and Shell were taking their money out of the market for that reason.
Also oil prices going over $100 per barrel was unprecedented from 2010-2014 and back in 2005 people thought the price of oil would never go above $40 per barrel for over a sustained period. Hence it should of been obvious to the directors the oil price of $100 per barrel was too high and that it would be causing demand destruction for oil.
Also cars have been becoming more fuel efficient ever since the mid 1990s.

All of this means that if the directors were competent they would of prioritised doing a deal to farm out Barryoe when the oil price was too high from 2010-2014. The fact they showed no urgency to do a deal on Barryoe indicated to me that the directors were completely incompetent (except at ensuring they were being paid millions regardless of the damage they were doing to investors - they were very competent at paying themselves millions and at wasting investors' money).

So I have been shocked that markets could be this socially inefficient. The directors shouldn't of survived beyond mid 2013 if it wasn't crony capitalism that the City of London/Dublin seems to like to promote. Anyone everyone has suffered apart from the directors - they had a golden chance to farm out Barryoe from 2010-2014 when oil prices were at the highest sustained level in the history of the oil market. Instead they shafted inve

Thanks longwait - lovely to hear a sensible response which makes sense to me from these boards.

But we know it isn't water in Barryoe - every well drilled so far has found oil. And even fields a tenth of the size of Barryoe are commercial/economic in the North Sea, and the Irish sea is a less harsh environment and so would be even more profitable.

So what makes you say, "trst me when its not wter they find it will be a different story," because it's been known for over a decade that there are large quantities of oil at Barryoe (proven by several previous drills). So why would anyone doubt that there is a significant quantity of commercial oil at Barryoe? Why is the share price not reflecting this - i.e., why is the share price not at £2 per share?

Wids you are right of course. Things will only kick off though when the ppl who run the show accept the ship has sunk. That's a question of timing and could take 1 or 4 years.

Agreed the world is upside down. The policy response to the last crisis was almost the exact opposite of what was needed. They should of put up interest rates and allowed savers to buy assets at average prices for the past 20 years which were lower than the lowest prices recorded in 2008 for most areas of the economy. By perpetuating the fake money bubble the lesson that savers would of learned is that the way to get on in life is to become feckless, lying, greedy, short-term, and also perhaps a banker.

The government was just not logical. The last economic crisis was caused by too much fake money (money newly created by banks from the fractional reserve system) entering the general economy. The policy response was to exaggerate this over the next decade and then to expect different results to what happened in 2007/08. Then again all of this is pointless as I never really agreed with the Iraq war and yet the politicians decided that there wouldn't be complete chaos amongst the civilians after destroying most of Iraq's infrastructure and locking up many of those who were running the country. The worse thought is that politicians knew this was an extremely likely outcome and yet didn't care about the civilians in other countries. If they didn't care about the civilians in other countries then will they care about the civilians in the UK in a future major crisis?

My opinion is that we all try and stand together or else we lose our civilised values, perhaps forever.

You could say the market moves in mysterious ways. Or you could just say that the way it prices things represent political views rather than economic fundamentals. As you said RBS shares were far more expensive when the bank was losing money. Also, look at the market valuation of technology companies .... does this reflect what citizens value ....of course it doesn't .....97% of people could easily live without companies such as Uber, Groupon, PayPal, Facebook, etc, but not many people could be happy without a home of their own, a car, and meaningful/longstanding social relationships in the real world (not the virtual world). But people will do what they do ....only you can have my view for free ...my view is that the market is not a true market in the sense that it doesn't set market capitalisations which are realistic numbers for takeovers ....it has assumed that since 2008 there will not be free-market capitalism but a sort of weird technocratic economy where people were less well off (in terms of housing and the affordability of travel/fuel/petrol) than in the 1990s.

To a logical person people before profit would mean that we encourage the economy to grow, to develop offshore oil reserves, to keep people in employment, food in the shops, and to try and grow the economy with more hotels and new beach/coastal resorts in Ireland. Surely such a view is positive for investors? Surely it's fairly obvious the oil needs to be developed unless the politicians are going to be responsible for undoing about 6 decades of economic progress. And all of this economic progress could unravel in about two or three years if the shortage of fuel in Ireland continues. Yes, there is a fuel shortage, it is being rationed by price. If petrol was priced at 50 cents per litre then you would get a better idea of the true demand for fuel amongst the citizens .... people are not going to the beach because fuel is so expensive ...and politicians expect to be popular amidst this crisis when they can't see that the one thing that unites 80% of citizens is the desire for their children to live in a better economy than they lived in. And better generally means you have more travel choices and better products.....you can't do this without lowering petrol/diesel prices.

To a logical person people before profit would mean that we encourage the economy to grow, to develop offshore oil reserves, to keep people in employment, food in the shops, and to try and grow the economy with more hotels and new beach/coastal resorts in Ireland. Surely such a view is positive for investors? So why would investors be put off by "people before profit." People before profit means the oil in Barryoe needs to be developed in order to maintain living standards and to avoid our economy going backwards by about 80 years. And if the oil is developed why wouldn't shareholders who have bought in at much higher share prices than the current price be rewarded with a profit. Who else is it better to put money into the hands of ....at least shareholders wanted to maintain people's living standards ...would you prefer to give the money direct to a bunch of hippies and the children of the people who were fortunate enough to make their money already and are now out to thwart others also improving their living standards. Personally I think if you work hard then you should live to a higher standard, if you have good ideas then the same applies, but if you only want to prevent other people from building their own house, running their own far, or buying a car then you won't remain very popular as you are the one who is now behaving irrationally and you can't expect the money your family made twenty years ago to win a political argument based on how are we going to grow the economy and improve millions of people's living standards over the next 5 years?

But what does that contribute to society Jack?

How does your shorting of Barclays shares put fuel in the tanks of private jets?

If everyone made their money by shorting shares then where would the petrol come from so that we can go skiing in Canada this winter (or any other activity which you think is more fun than just sitting around watching pretty patterns on a screen (TV watching))?

The issues is not the courts - the issue is why PVR doesn't choose to employ local people and companies for this project. We don't need the Chinese to even be involved - local people would appreciate the employment if they were offered the chance to contribute their time towards developing the Barryoe oil.

The issue I have, which is perhaps a new issue for this discussion board, is the lack of investment in Ireland shown by PVR. Why are PVR using a Chinese company to finance the drilling and support services? There are hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in Ireland. Why wouldn't PVR invest in the training of indigenous employees to get the oil out of the ground? If they trained up 1,000 Irish citizens and paid them £75,000 per annum each it would still work out far cheaper than being lazy and outsourcing this project to a Chinese company.

The issue I have, which is perhaps a new issue for this discussion board, is the lack of investment in Ireland shown by PVR. Why are PVR using a Chinese company to finance the drilling and support services? There are hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in Ireland. Why wouldn't PVR invest in the training of indigenous employees to get the oil out of the ground? If they trained up 1,000 Irish citizens and paid them £75,000 per annum each it would still work out far cheaper than being lazy and outsourcing this project to a Chinese company.

Jack,

I thought you used to believe in using prices to help generate a healthier economy - for example fundamental price setting can facilitate the quicker turnover of goods.

Now you seem to be suggesting you would go short just because you see a correlation between the DOW and the Barclays share price. Well where is the fundamental analysis in this?

Have Barclays lent to markets which are growing or not?

I'm disappointed to hear that you would price a share based on a correlation with the DOW which is something which is completely irrelevant to the value of Barclays using a traditional investment perspective. The traditional investment perspective would say that Barclays is worth the sum of all future payments to shareholders (such as dividends, buybacks, etc.), discounted to negate the effect of inflation.

The other traditional way to value Barclays would be via the current net asset value (NAV) - (all assets at prices paid minus liabilities at current value).

Of course the NAV might need to be adjusted lower in future if people decide that Barclays overpaid for assets they acquired in the past.

Even so I was shocked to hear that you would consider a downward channel for the share price coupled to a correlation with the DOW (that has only worked over the past few years) as the basis for how you would consider whether Barclays shares were overvalued or undervalued.

Surely the more traditional investment perspectives of future total shareholder returns discounted back to the present, or the NAV, would not have been used for many decades if they provided nothing of substance/value to the investment community?

Are traders even part of the investment community these days or have traders separated themselves by becoming divorced from traditional valuation techniques and instead relying on chart patterns (which I may add are a meaningless way to value companies and I find it hard to see how any traders solely using technicals (as as hammer candles) can contribute to debates about a realistic or normative valuation of a company in a takeover situation.

Hence, if traders solely using technicals have nothing of value to contribute to the debate about a fair takeover price (one where the buyer stands a reasonable chance of recouping their money, yet also offers the seller a chance to remove all risk and hold cash instead) then why on Earth are technical traders granted so much influence on setting prices within the daily pricing of equity markets - even when takeover prices are determined by people using more robust/longstanding valuation techniques (such as estimating the next decade of future cashflows based on reasonable assumptions and then discounting the money which would be available to be returned to shareholders back to its present value (i.e. with the effect of future inflation in the monetary system factored out))?

I can see it is far easier to make money trading purely technically - but it doesn't