Member Info for Love_You

Surely the average (mean) amount of life savings is around £120,000. The median is probably more like £20,000.

Don't know why you used £20 as an estimate of someone's life savings. Anyway, if they did invest their life savings in Barclays why would you not want them to earn a decent return on their investment. If they bought in at 250p per share then I'd be quite happy to see them sell out at 300-350p per share. Why does the market want to punish people for investing in the economy - so else could the economy thrive? Also, how could an economy function without banks?

Why don't PVR offer some of the future oil production as payment for the survey vessel?

If I was CEO of the survey company I'd think what is the risk of this field not being developed once the survey is done - maybe 30%. So I could accept $10 million in cash, or I could accept $20 million in the promise of future oil but with a 30% risk. The choice in effect boils down to (1) $10 million, or (2) $14 million once the risk is factored in. Hence as CEO I would be happy to supply the survey vessel for a legal document granting me 350,000 barrels of crude oil to be delivered to my company no later than 2023.

In fact why don't Providence just pay all the contractors needed to produce the oil with legal documents granting them so many barrels of crude oil once it is being produced?

So why doesn't the US government just give the right to develop Barryoe to Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Anadarko, Conoco, Apache, or any one of the hundred other American oil companies with experience in developing shallow-water offshore oil fields?

It makes no sense to block the Chinese just to punish them for trying to contribute to the global economy. Where would America be without all the products (iphones, ipads, computers, clothes, steel slab) that are manufactured in China at a far lower cost than the US economy could achieve.

I actually wonder if PVR were naive to approach a Chinese company to develop this oil field. I would of felt happier personally if they had turned to American companies to develop this field - I'm surprised the government didn't try and link keep the Irish economy linked-in closer with the American economy. For sure the Chinese produce cheap goods - but I'd say the Americans produce quality goods. Would you rather have their satellite technology or the Chinese's at your disposal?

WGR - I think yourself and I agree that the role of policy is to try and create more win-wins within society. Hence, this is an idea for the government - why don't you write to everyone in the country asking them these five questions. Once you have the answers then you can better plan the economy to suit everyone's desires:

(1) If you could have 8 week-long holidays a year what would you spend them doing/where would you like to go?
(2) List your ten most important staple foods. And list you twenty most enjoyable foods.
(3) List the pros and cons of the alternative methods of transportation available to you if you didn't go by car.
(4) List your eight most important leisure activities/hobbies/past-times.
(5) How is your general health? What local services/amenities currently benefit your health (including feeling more positive emotions)? And also, what extra services/amenities would be of benefit to your general health (including feeling more positive emotions)?

What do you think WGR? Surely it's the case that in a smallish country of 65 million people one can not simply just believe that enshrining private property in civil law, and trying to create free-market trade, is enough anymore?

I think Central Banks should have been honest about the plan they hatched in 2009. That they wanted to tighten up banking regulations by 2019 so that all liquidity was squeezed out of the system by then. Hence the share prices of RBS, Barclays, Deutsche Bank - and they're the lucky ones. Look at what has already happened to the smaller banks in Southern Europe - mostly shareholders and bondholders have lost everything (100% of their investments lost. Were these people bad people? What have they been financially punished for?) Must be very close to a social revolution happening in parts of Southern Europe - if people were prepared to put up with what has happened then humans would not have been so successful as a species...so there is a logical inconsistency here that mainstream politicians haven't been replaced with people who actually want to grow the real economy (transport, housing, food production, travel) rather than only to grow the unemployment rate. Of course most people still seem to get their news from the TV and from large media organisations online. Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on your point of view) the government has managed to convince these organisations not to speak of the true horror of the economic crisis since 2009, the millions using foodbanks, the millions only able to find part time work, the millions having a percentage of their pensions stolen from them to go into a "bail out" pot for the bankers and other people who want to continue to use their gas guzzling private yachts despite that fuel being desperately needed by the "rest of society."

Poorly received because the price paid to Ocado was uneconomic. Hence Marks & Spencer did a deal they knew was uneconomic for some other reasons .... political reasons perhaps such as when the government interfered in the Banks in 2008 instead of letting the market determine their value - that was officially the end of capitalism when that happened. It's not a case of the government will screw this country up .... it's already been screwed up so much over the decades that nothing can sort it out now except perhaps to reboot the financial system from zero.

Hi Cash Ferret,

You sound pretty successful at trading. What do you enjoy spending money on?

Even if Lloyds miss their own costs estimates, how are shareholders meant to know the cost estimates were rational/sensible to begin with?

I can see why technical traders use technicals now. Especially for banks, they are such complex financial institutions, that it really is very hard to know whether the estimates provided to senior management are rational/sensible, never mind whether the final costs come in anywhere close to those original estimates (which could have been made by people putting self-interests first or just by "bad actors" to quote Warren Buffet).

I do actually believe fundamental value is of worth within the investment community, and that over the medium to long-term prices often do return somewhere close to estimates of fundamental value, based either on sum-of-the-parts metrics or on the estimated discounted future free cash flows available for return to shareholders.

However, the share prices of many companies seem to be many multiples removed from sensible/reasonable estimates of fundamental value based on the above two mentioned metrics.

Hence, the stock market is a bit batty in terms of how it justifies the market capitalisations of many listed companies - but when hasn't that always been the case to some extent?

But how can we value Lloyds? What market capitalisation is sensible/reasonable?

Does anyone have any idea what of percentage of Lloyds clients are profitable for the bank, and which are actually loss-making?

Someone once said to me that fundamental value is just whatever you want it to be just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, there has to be general agreement between traders about ball-park figures unless there couldn't be any economic cooperation at all.

However, it does make one wonder how are people justifying the valuation of Amazon shares for example? They seem to be shifting the volumes of products but their margins are tiny and they have only made about four quarters of net profit during the past 22 years. Indeed they have over $8 Billion of net debt so if the banks/bondholders withdraw their support then Amazon could become bankrupt just as quick as any other company that has net debt.

Most listed companies are not net cash positive - everyone is borrowing because otherwise the entire global economy/financial system would collapse because too few citizens (in terms of a general global basis) are spending too little money - of a few companies are too successful at sucking money out of the financial system and storing it in accounts with the ECB where it does nothing but either earns 0% interests, or takes a haircut it 0-0.25% per annum.

Investors are still saying the financial system is so unsound and so unbalanced that it is better to take a haircut of 0-0.25% per year for guaranteed capital preservation rather than risk investing it into businesses in the real world. Or the other way of viewing things is that there are not enough businesses with

Have you compared the net debts of Enquest and Hurricane Energy?

Hurricane shares may well be more investable because they didn't pay stupid amounts of money to get their production infrastructure up and running.

Enquest invested their shareholders capital when costs were at an all-time high in the oil industry. Yet their contractors only delivered the production several years later at a time when oil prices were at some of the lowest inflation-adjusted prices for the past 60 years.

There are two things that matter to make shareholders wealthier:
(1) The point in the multi-year cost cycle when you invest in new production
(2) The economies of scale which the new production fields/infrastructure has.

I think I view the situation as follows. Hurricane got (1) and (2) correct above in that they signed contracts with their contractors at a point when virtually every other oil company in the world had wasted lots of shareholder capital by signing contracts at ludicrously high prices for oilfield services during the oilfield service price bubble from 2007-2013. Also Hurricane have discovered somewhere between 1 - 10 billion barrels giving them an economy of scale which surpasses BP and Royal Dutch Shell and most of the majors. Whereas Enquest invested in some tiny projects which weren't really worth bothering with such as Alma and Galia which contained between them about 0.012 billion barrels (compared to Hurricane's 1 - 10 billion barrels).

I think this company was doing poorly because they invested too much into the UK North Sea at a time when costs were rising far too fast and Gordon Brown/Labour were taxing oil more-and-more every 3 or 4 years. In the end it got ridiculous and foreign companies left the North Sea and probably PMO should of done the same back in 2010 before the started on the financially disastrous Solan project and before they could be stabbed in the back by the UK government giving them far too little support over developing the SeaLion project in the Falklands.

Overall PMO have done some good things also, such as progressing Catcher roughly on time and under budget (although in a time of falling costs anyway/a deflationary period). Also selling the Pakistan gas assets seemed a good decision as it's harder to get a commercial price for gas than oil and Pakistan could have been a distraction for management when there wasn't much value there compared to the assets in Mexico and the Falkland Isles.

However, the Solan project could have been shrugged off as a disaster, but not a company breaker, by a larger oil and gas company such as Apache Corp. However, this one project going nearly $1.3 Billion over budget and delivering only 25% of the oil that was initially expected has come very close to breaking PMO financially.

So PMO seems in a much better position than a few years ago - but how long must people wait or investors to see them progress some projects with real scale such as SeaLion, Tolumount and Zama? And it's not until PMO successful progress at least two of the projects that they will have enough economies of scale to really deliver good returns for investors. Everyone knows the oil industry is risky as there are more things to go wrong than in most industries - hence even a return on capital of 35% per year would probably be seen as the minimum necessary to balance the risks for those wanting to invest in keeping the global economy moving through suring up the global oil supply with new projects.

As I mentioned previously and which many other posters agreed with earlier this year. EIA figures were manipulated earlier in the year, if they can even be trusted to any extent at all. There were glaring discrepancies between the different sets of EIA data even within the same single page report - which is how I knew it was being manipulated. By my calculations they manipulated it to show over a period of a couple of months that US crude stockpiles were about 25 million barrels higher than in reality. Be interesting to see if we get another draw of 12.5 million barrels next week to correct the figures back to what they should of been if reality mattered to the US government (rather than politics).

However, Woodford is currently at the centre of a controversy after one of his flagship funds was suspended earlier this month. Woodford had invested in a high level of unlisted companies, which created a mismatch between liquid assets he could sell to meet rising outgoings. Regulators decided the best thing to do would be to freeze the fund.

The suspension has left £3.7bn stuck in the fund and thousands of ordinary investors unable to access their money.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/woodford-equity-income-fund-suspension-fca-andrew-bailey-140447394.html

Some comments I was reading on web forums on other sites. I quote a potentially pertinent one below:

"Britain never really took to the idea of Ombudsmen and regulatory bodies. After all most Organisations don't appreciate outsiders asking awkward questions. In the end of course we got regulators that actually work for the people they're supposed to be regulating. One of these days one of our political parties will make a manifesto issue of cleaning this lot up!" (Jack)

However, Woodford is currently at the centre of a controversy after one of his flagship funds was suspended earlier this month. Woodford had invested in a high level of unlisted companies, which created a mismatch between liquid assets he could sell to meet rising outgoings. Regulators decided the best thing to do would be to freeze the fund.

The suspension has left £3.7bn stuck in the fund and thousands of ordinary investors unable to access their money.

The issue for the government is that no government in the UK will be popular until it starts to address the ever increasing financial inequality which leads to so many injustices and social wrongs in the UK. Just my opinion.
However, money is okay in so far as it facilitates the trading of goods and services which is what has driven economies ever since money was invented.

However, money was only ever meant to facilitate trade or to facilitate the exchange of goods and services - but now that it has become something which many people seem to desire in its own right it causes many social and health problems

I can't help feeling that once more people remember that money only exists to facilitate the exchange of goods and services then society will become a more fun and helpful place to exist within.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/woodford-equity-income-fund-suspension-fca-andrew-bailey-140447394.html

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/the-10-countries-with-the-best-and-worst-quality-of-life-100249902.html

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/woodford-equity-income-fund-suspension-fca-andrew-bailey-140447394.html

However, Woodford is currently at the centre of a controversy after one of his flagship funds was suspended earlier this month. Woodford had invested in a high level of unlisted companies, which created a mismatch between liquid assets he could sell to meet rising outgoings. Regulators decided the best thing to do would be to freeze the fund.

The suspension has left £3.7bn stuck in the fund and thousands of ordinary investors unable to access their money.

The issue for the government is that no government in the UK will be popular until it starts to address the ever increasing financial inequality which leads to so many injustices and social wrongs in the UK. Just my opinion. However, money is okay in so far as it facilitates the trading of goods and services which is what has driven economies ever since money was invented. However, money was only ever meant to facilitate trade or to facilitate the exchange of services and good - but now it has become something which people desire in its own right then the social and health problems this is creating are enormous.

I can't help feeling that once more people remember that money only exists to facilitate the trade of goods and services then society will become more prosperous and a more fun and helpful place to exist within.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/woodford-equity-income-fund-suspension-fca-andrew-bailey-140447394.html

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/the-10-countries-with-the-best-and-worst-quality-of-life-100249902.html

However, as you've said yourself LEVIS you have had decades of experience of earning money from shares.

So one lesson for people thinking of investing in shares is that you need to think a LOT, AND AWFUL LOT, about how you are going to make money from shares before your commit your money to investing or trading.

Some of the questions you need to work out the answers to for yourself are:

(1) Is this a game of pure probability or what other factors are relevant.
(2) I can learn a lot from studying the past so therefore I need to study the past a lot.
(3) The market is full of smart people so what will enable me to make more money than the others?
(4) How will I know when I am wrong about a share and need to change my mind (i.e. to sell out at a loss).
(5) What are fundamentals and how to they relate to share price trends? You need to back-test a strategy based purely on fundamentals using past share-price data and see if such a strategy gives you a good return.
(6) What is technical analysis and how does it relate to predicting share price trends? You need to back-test a strategy based purely on technical analysis using past share-price data and see if such a strategy gives you a good return.
(7) Is there a better strategy employing a combination of both technical analysis and fundamental analysis?
(8) What is momentum trading?
(9) Given the typical psychology of most people as can be discovered from reading the scientific research does momentum trading actually make more sense that trading based on technical analysis or fundamental analysis?
(10) To make money I need to make more wins than losses. I also want my wins to quickly go into profit as otherwise how would I know I am not being played for a fool? I need to know when I am right about a trade and when I am wrong. Hence look up the concept of the "zone of validity" and understand how you can make a trading strategy based on this concept.

Good luck to people trying to make a living from investing/trading. It is not easy. However the global economy does need people who are good at allocating capital. Therefore it is no more "immoral" or "unethical" to be good at this game than it is to be good at any other sort of job. All jobs have pros and cons really - but shares are risky and therefore you need to have thought a lot about your strategy if you want to be successful at this game. Also it can be quite difficult to even stick to one's strategy if one starts off with a few losing hands - however, most successful strategies would dictate you have to stick to your strategy to become a winner eventually. But obviously if a few losing hands turn into even more losing hands then you are doing something wrong. So take a break and reassess things.

Be honest, who knows someone who bought into the RBS rights issue in 2008 at 200p per share (after the 10-for-1 consolidation the current RBS share price would need to reach 2,000p per share for them to break even).

I feel very sorry for the lies the average UK citizen gets told by the bankers, the media, and the politicians.

As Oxo42 said life is extremely complex and a lot of people think that they know far more than they really do. The world would be a far better place if people could become a little less arrogant. However, if anyone could convince Wayne Rooney to drop a few million into an overpriced right's issue then I don't think many people would shed a tear. What is Wayne Rooney doing for the national interest despite being paid £15 million per year?

Then again what does Bill Gates really contribute despite his net worth of $80 Billion? I mean Microsoft was an okay idea - but since then has he really made the world a better place? A lot of people I know don't really want to spend so much time at computers as they are required to by their employers. So Bill Gates is not a hero in the eyes of these people who would prefer to spend more time with their friends and family and less time stuck answering pointless emails for $12 per hour.

Yes this post is probably not going to make me massively popular. But better an honest person than everyone trying to sweep a few crumbs from the table for themselves whilst the rest of the castle burns.

A house is just a house guys (that don't impress me much). Unless you enjoy spending time in London there is no reason to pay London prices for somewhere to live. A house isn't more valuable because it costs £4 million rather than £40,000. A house is more valuable if it leads to a better/happier lifestyle for the owner. So unless living in London actually makes you happier I'm not impressed by your choice of where to live. Personally I think a converted airplane has a lot going for it. If I want to have fresh lobster in Canada I can be there in a few hours. If I want a massage in Bangkok I can be there in a few hours. If I want to go to the carnival in Rio I can be there in a few hours. If I want to drink vodka in a small town in Siberia I can be there in a few hours. If I want to go salmon fishing with the locals in Alaska I can be there in a few hours. And a decent sized aircraft is plenty enough room by my standards - what else does one really need other than a couple of double beds, a shower, a jacuzzi, a home cinema, a space for yoga, a small separate dining room, and a galley kitchen for the chef to cook meals. How else do you spend your time?

Wouldn't you say the banks are still committing fraudulent behaviour when once compares the dire state of the UK (millions of people using foodbanks, not enough houses, nimbies everywhere preventing people from building houses on land they own for their own children and grandchilden, councils not bothering to resurface roads, potholes everywhere, motor garages full of parked cars and yet millions of people driving 15 year old cars) to the pay/perks and lifestyle of the directors of large UK companies. It's a very strange country we live in when it is obvious that serious reform has been needed for about 18 years and very little of that reform has taken place as yet. I mean I'm not complaining too much ....I just think society could do so much better than this .... I feel that we should be doing more for the people less fortunate than ourselves ........ can you honestly look in the mirror as a director of UK plc and hand on heart not think that it is slightly selfish to be paid millions when perfectly decent people are struggling to earn £0.013 million per year? Or do some people believe they are superior and that therefore the existing system is just and needs no reform?

I think whether it was done in error or not does matter. Anyway people do have to make decisions under battlefield conditions and mistakes will inevitably be made such as when that airliner was shot down over Ukraine with the dreadful loss of life.