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Can anyone tell me who didn't want to sell to the Indians for $1.1 Billion, equivalent to £1.42 per share?

Also can anyone tell me who in the market/spreadbetting companies agreed to capitalise this at £480 million back in 2011/12?

It's a crazy world people live in and really just because interest rates went down did not mean that spreadbetting companies/the market should have quintupled the market capitalisations of companies - interest rates went down in 2009 because the economy was so bad - whoever though that company valuations needed to quintuple when nobody could afford even to have paid the original price (one fifth of the subsequent price) seems to think through issues in quite an unusual/unique manner - or perhaps I'm mistaken?

My own reasoning would of been that if the economy was so dire that interest rates needed to go from 5% to 0.5% then what the market needed to see was evidence that the new money (cheap financing) was actually having an effect on Merger and Acquisition before raising the asking prices of companies with the for-sale sign up. Otherwise unless you have verification, that is market verification based upon actual recent transactions, that companies are affordable to buyers then why on Earth would you then suddenly ask for fives times as much? Oh yeah - if you were greedy and narcissistic enough to believe that QE and zero-percent interest rates wasn't designed to boost the economy generally but was just designed to allow people to sell out at an artificially-induced market high.

Anyway it all seems ridiculous looking back - although as a trader who lived through it I think the mood at the time was that people could be forced into vastly over-paying for stuff if the share price was only set high enough with background of zero-percent rates.

Well in my opinion it backfired in numerous ways- I think people would of overpaid for companies but not by the amount that suddenly a wildly optimistic market was demanding. Hence instead of enabling deals to be done I actually think zero percent rates did the opposite - by making one side (the people wishing to sell) euphoric that central banks had come to their rescue it actually scuppered any chances of deals being done at fair prices - because it turned out the potential buyers couldn't be induced into overpaying, and instead they sat on their hands for ten years - waiting for those who had lost any sense of rational valuation to return to rational valuations once again (by a rational valuation I mean one which is set such that there is an element of risk both that the seller sold too cheap as well as that the buyer may have bought too expensive).

I do think if all the necessary permits are granted, and if the Chinese honour their contracts, and if Trump's sanctions don't impact their rigs/manpower, then a rational price to sell PVR for would be at £10 per barrel of oil in the ground - hence £3.5 Billion for the whole company. So who might come in an

I don't think that an individual would have the best chance of suing the government for breach of contract. However, given that the government broke its contract to 80,000 females who were approaching 60 then may a class-action lawsuit (and peaceful gatherings) stand a chance of succeeding?

See below -

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/cars-are-killing-us-within-10-years-we-must-phase-them-out/ar-BBUtBBm?ocid=spartandhp

Changing the rules is extremely galling indeed. I would really hope these women would launch a class-action lawsuit against the UK government and claim the £30,000 in lost pension contributions that they are owed. I think the solution is pretty easy ...first of all launch a legal action against the government over this matter … assuming they try and wriggly out of it then get as many of the affected women as possible to stage a peaceful sit in in all of the properties hat Theresa May owns …. I don't really think the police would be up for getting heavy-handed with a group of 60 year old women when anyone rational can see that they have a perfectly valid claim to the pensions which they were promised … and which the government reneged on with virtually no warning and no consultation.
Let's see how Theresa May likes it when the rules are suddenly changed so that until she pays the pensions which the government owes then her properties will be legally occupied in foriture of the government's broken promises...or until the pensions are paid (including being back dated).

On another matter it now seems that the government wants to ignore the benefits of cars and instead focus that (like any tool) they could do harm if misused.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/cars-are-killing-us-within-10-years-we-must-phase-them-out/ar-BBUtBBm?ocid=spartandhp

Also

Yep, I'm pretty sure Exxon will be pumping 750,000 bopd from Guyana by 2024. However, I'm not sure what volume Tullow will get from Guyana by 2024? There is normally one rule for Exxon and another rule for a non-American company like Tullow (i.e. Tullow could end up paying more for service costs than Exxon because in effect Exxon could afford to buy all the necessary equipment outright and then lease it, at a profit, to Tullow - hence increasing the financial returns to Exxon at the expense of Tullow).

Also I'm just thinking that Uganda didn't turn out too well did it? The oil was discovered there and appraised from 2006-2008 - and still no sign of it being developed any time soon. One does wonder whether people are rationally self-interested anymore - as surely if they were then the project would have got moving during the period of high oil prices from 2009-2014?

So yes, Guyana is potentially a plus - but having a partner like Exxon could be a plus or a negative really (it is so much more financially, economically and politically powerful that it makes the wishes of Tullow insignificant about how the development of Guyanese oil proceeds).

But, on the other hand, perhaps its good to have a partner like Exxon - because Tullow chose to farm-out to the Chinese in Uganda and they have been flippin' useless at getting the oil out of the ground (despite having a billion people they could train up to do oilfield jobs).

Hi Cereus,

I think you make a good point questioning whether the demand is there in the volumes which would be needed to make home delivery of M&S products a profitable long-term proposition.

M&S food is indeed quite expensive and they are a relatively niche market - hence the cost of the deliveries will be more per items than if the products were coming from Tescos/Sainsburys/Asda. Now really this higher delivery cost per product should be paid for by the customer (further increasing the price of the products) - however it could well end up being subsidised by the shareholders instead!!

But at the end of the day there has to be some application of rationality - otherwise how can these same people expect that other aspects of their lives will treat them rationally in future?

Rents are too high in the UK and it's bad for the economy - personally I believe that most rational people would see the situation this way. Hence why don't the Landlords just make life easier for themselves, as you can't fight the cosmos/rationality, and reduce the rents. If they don't they'll just end up going through the CVA process - which will reduce the rents anyway. It would have been far easier just to agree to a rent reduction a couple of years ago - let Debenhams get on with its businesses - and bow to rationality regarding rational expectations regarding rents (most people marked down commercial property by 30/40% in 2008 when it was clearly out of kilter with being sustainable in terms of its financial value being compatible with actual business being able to stay in business/make a profit). Hence rents should also have been negotiated downwards by 30/40% in 2008 to be in line with the fall in the value of commercial property. I guess the fact Debenhams didn't address the rent issue in a rational manner for a decade explains why the value of the company eventually plunged.

The dividend can always be cut (it was at BP, M&S, RBS, Lloyds, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Tullow Oil, Centrica, and whole host of other companies). But also the dividend could be increased.

Mostly share prices don't move based on what the dividend is - people with serious money are looking as to what they think will happen to the company over the next 5-10 (perhaps 20) years. The sad thing is with all of the political and central bank interference in markets it's almost impossible to come up with any rational medium-term predictions based on current financial forecasts - if the government doesn't like a company they will just get the regulator to dream up some excuse to fine it - if a company they like is struggling they will ask the central bank to loan it some more money at 0%. It's a mad-mad world ever since politicians/central banks started telling markets what to do - instead of letting the market price things based on tried-and-tested metrics/strategies going back hundreds of years.

But that is the world we all live in I suppose. However, does anyone else get the feeling that the structure of the financial markets changed more in 2008/09 than most citizens realised, or will ever realise?

For me at least I was surprised at how regulators started fining companies for perceived "wrong-doing" when the buyer of the securities/mortgages in question had been a willing buyer, using their own free-will, and it was their choice whether to buy the securities in question or not. The problem with fining the company is that ultimately the money comes from the shareholders ...as there is less money available for future dividends ...yet it was not the shareholders who did anything wrong (it was individuals within the company who decided the risk levels to assign to different securities/products/mortgages)....so it all seems rather perverse to humble little me at least.

Cheers Soder - I guess politicians just spout any old bullshit - your argument makes much more sense to me (that there simply wouldn't be enough electricity to have tens of millions of electric vehicles charging overnight - or would there?)

I guess people's behaviour could be influenced through pricing. People wouldn't charge their vehicles from 5:30pm-6:30pm if the price of electric was high during this time. I assume the grid has lots of spare electricity at night because many industries shut down at night and many people are asleep - so if people charged their electric cars overnight then perhaps the grid could in fact cope?

Also, you've got to remember that the objective of Conservative economic policy was to make the UK a low skills (the service sector is generally low skills) - low wage economy. Hence probably many people in society just won't be able to afford a car at all in the future - hence more electric available to those who can afford a Tesla or cheaper model

Yeah - the old argument that there isn't enough electric to switch all 30 million cars in the UK. Well this is the plan - they are developing autonomous cars not because they are safer (less accidents) but because they want multiple-people to be served by the same car. Hence an autonomous car can take someone to work and can then drive itself to another location, take someone else to work, and then it can work as a taxi during the day, then it can start picking people up from work and dropping them off at home. The number of cars in the UK will decrease from 30 million to around 6 million. Okay a lot of electric will still be needed and this is indeed a major hurdle. However policy makers could probably address this with a mix of new nuclear/gas/clean coal power plants as well as more windfarms. Clean coal technology has come on leaps and bounds and Germany opened up a couple of new coal-fired power plants within the last couple of years. Although nuclear does create a lot of awful waste, and some local contamination generally, it also produces a lot of power for a long-time - so no doubt the government will be looking at this. And the option which personally I think is best is more gas-fired power plants as they are far cleaner than coal, more reliable than wind, and not extremely hazardous like nuclear. Also gas should be fairly cheap if the government gets its act together - there is a 10 Trillion cubic foot gas field (Johnson) to the North of the Falkland and a 50 Trillrion cubic foot one to the South (discovered by FOGL during the last drilling campaign). Hence the UK could be self-sufficient in as as the Falklands is under-populated and an ideal place to Liquify the gas before shipping direct to the UK. And if we are self-sufficient in gas a s a country then that means we can buy/import from the US/Russia/Qatar without ever overpaying for it - because you can't jack up prices if the customer could just switch instead to their own supplies for the next 30 years!

Personally I'm not in favour of big-government and the deep-state imposing the wishes of the elite on all citizens in a timescale dictated entirely by the elite 0.1%. But I have to be honest that such a view is very much in the minority amongst the people whom I have worked with and still work with. They very much believe themselves that citizens can't be trusted to act rationally and therefore that gives themselves the right to impose a fully-electric economy - or if that doesn't work they want everyone to go back to cycling or to reduce their standard of living (they consider themselves to have the moral right to take decisions in the best interest of citizens even if citizens don't want to move away from an economy based on oil).

Anyway, I have tried to make the point to these people that they don't really know for sure the impact of climate change nor whether it is really much of a risk factor or not (so far the average global temperature has risen 0.8 degrees Celcius since 1920) which doesn't sound very worrying does it?

Anyway, these people won't have it that they don't necessarily know best - they want all petrol/diesel vehicles banned asap and for legislation to be passed limited the roads to be used by autonomous fully electric vehicles only. I really think if you hold oil shares you shouldn't be basing your investment on the financial metrics of the company you are investing in - oil companies no doubt could be profitable investments for the next 20-30 years at least. However, there are three main issues to solve for shareholders to see any positive financial returns and dividends

(1) Oil companies spend capital frivolently and not realising how cost-conscious the rest of society had become.
(2) The establishment/elite want an economy that doesn't require petrol/diesel cars - and they want it ideally by 2030 (not 2040 which was only mentioned, in my opinion, as a psychological tactic to get citizens used to the idea that petrol/diesel cars will be banned in the future)
(3) Tax rates on the oil sector are too hard - but in the current political environment what hope is there that VAT/tax on petrol at the pump (as well as tax on the oil companies themselves) will be reduced? Go on - put a percentage to the chances of this happening please.

And would you really want Kraken to produce for the next 30-40 years like the Captain heavy oilfield? You do know that governments really intend to move much faster than their initial ban of all petrol/diesel cars by 2040? I have been working on things...and with people ....that I can't really tell you about on here ...but lets just say the governments are not telling the people the truth currently about the pace of change to electrification that they would really like to see happen over the next 5-8 years.

I just hope that all of the Premier Oil Directors have read "It's a Mad World, My Masters" by John Simpson. This is an absolutely fantastic book and if people really take all of the information in it on board then it would surely encourage them to study psychology as well as statistics. Unfortunately (or fortunately) 99% of people on Earth are far less rational than people who trade share prices or the analysts who provide the big players/traders with up-to-date metrics - hence why the world is as it is - the lack of a common rationality amongst humans keeps global growth uneven and very unequal (which is both a curse and a blessing for that reason).

You are a sample of one indeed. Personally I can't see why people would want to keep bombarding themselves with information (via their phones) which is 95% pointless. Perhaps the future will be companies selling simplicity, relaxation and phone-free zones?

If you're a big-picture financial thinker then pleased to meet you. :-) Say hi back if you will please :-)

As I read these boards I try and figure out who makes sense and who doesn't. Only the people who make sense are worth keeping in my opinion. I guess most of you are short-term and therefore just focused on short-term price movements and if you trade on that basis then good luck to you. Good luck to everyone in fact. However, if you're more focused on a long-term strategy then it's key to be able to predict the political reaction to events like the DeepWater Horizon spill. For example if Haliburton or Anadarko were fined pro-rata as much as BP it would have had a far worse effect on the share-prices of those companies. So it was important to realise that it would not be "one law for all in the US". That in fact it was one law for BP (to screw them for as much as possible) and another law for Halliburton and Anadarko (to get them off as lightly as possibly regardless of who was really at fault).

All I'm saying is how can any long-term planning really be done when the Establishment always changes the rules to suit it's own financial interests - I guess bright people just won't accept that the rules can't be changed if doing so would suit themselves personally.

Anyway the financial impact on the share price of DeepWater Horizon dwarfs all other events over the past two decades regarding BP - just sayin'. But if you're only focused on the short-term then none of this matters to you I guess.

I know my comments might been seen by some as rather pointless (imagining that history was different, when it can't be anything other than what it was). However, I do feel if citizens highlight wherever a lack of love is shown (such as in times of strife such as 1939-1945 in Europe) then perhaps we can all try and love each other a little more from this day forwards.

I don't see why the UK ever delegated power to the EU. When Washington united the East of America the West was still unsettled. Yet the East didn't just hand over control of the entire land mass to the West did they? They didn't even let the West (California) establish their own sovereignty as an independent country. No, they kept the rule of both East and West based in Washington, under a "Federal System". Hence the UK was once the most powerful economy in Europe after we won the second world war, at a great cost, to prevent mass genocides in Europe (which sadly we could not fully prevent). Anyway - at that point in history the UK (having defeated Germany despite being the victims of an unprovoked military conquest aimed at subjugating all of Europe with the aim of establishing a centralised system of rule/law based in Berlin) - the UK surely had the moral right to establish a Federal Europe with its legal and economic centre in London. And then history would of been very different as the EU would have effectively begun in 1946, with its Parliament in London, instead of in 1972 with its Parliament in Strasbourg/Brussels. Oh well - a chance lost due to the UK politicians being useless following WWII despite Churchill having done well to defeat Germany when they had been preparing for war since 1935 - and really it's quite incredible that with such a military advantage (due to their increased preparedness and manufacturing base) they didn't succeed in ruling all of Europe from Berlin.

Hey Daniel H, the humour I need right now to express my feelings is like a bunch of stick men dancing on a mobile phone until it gives them so much information that they don't know why they invented the thing in the first place.

I'm not sure society is quite there yet ..... but one does wonder why people set up companies that increase complexity (basically all tech companies provide products which bombard people with information, most of which is not needed unlike food, drink, shelter and love) rather than aiming to sell simplicity and relaxation.

https://www.bikebiz.com/state-of-uk-roads-is-putting-lives-at-risk/

RBS - £20 Billion bailout ad fresh cash injection (as well as zero percent rates so nothing to pay to savers), 83% owned by the government, and yet the roads in this country aren't even getting repaired anymore. Greed anyone?