Member Info for mavswf

I wonder if the share price will even get a mention at the AGM tomorrow ? Garat has to go , it’s a matter of necessity for this company that they appoint a competent CEO.

I’m in exactly the same position as you JG and probably up towards £80k loss on paper as things stand today. I’ve made all the same mistakes here that you have … amassing a huge number of shares by continuing to average down catching a falling knife and getting it wrong every time. It’s been hurting me in more ways than one to be honest but we are where we are. I still feel like the share price will improve here one day , very quickly probably, but obviously much depends upon the NA bus sale. Which I suspect will then be followed by a Cosmens bid for ALSA otherwise why have they been buying shares in the millions on the way down ? A lot can happen with this company and having seen so much negative stuff and management incompetence and mistakes that surely has to change sometime soon with some better news. A long term decent business like it was for years can’t be in a death spiral here surely not ? Interest rates will fall , that’s a certainty and a good price for the NA bus business with a big reduction in debt would change the direction very rapidly.

On the other hand if there’s no buyer interest or at very lowball numbers then the really bad scenarios could come into play. A couple of years ago I held Rolls Royce shares which were being shorted and constantly kept dropping with sentiment in the market just as bad as it has been here. Look what’s happened there now. This could turn very quickly in a similar way to RR and I keep reminding myself that I sold out of Tullow Oil a few years ago and took a very large loss …I was stressed , not sleeping and checking it every 5 minutes. In fear of losing the lot I sold everything and took the loss … to see it rocket 44pc two days later. Every time that I’m tempted to trim my holdings here I look back at that one. We might be having a very different chat on here in 6 months time, let’s hope for and expect things to improve here eventually. Getting rid of Garat after the AGM next week will be a good start. We must be getting some news on NA soon too I’d guess so fingers crossed that it’s decent.

Sale of NA bus at a fair market price and removal of Garat to be replaced by someone competent will sort this issue out… sum of the parts is still a lot higher than todays share price and this can be turned around. The main problem here is that the market has totally lost credibility in the management and the NA bus sale might be facing lowball interest if we are seen as distressed sellers. Getting Garat out next week would be a great start in the unlikely event that the main shareholders are thinking the same way as most of us on here.

I’ve just been reading the Fitch report and to me it looks a lot more positive than the headlines suggest … but Im just a little curious as to why it gets downgraded now when this was all reported in the group accounts weeks ago. A bit like the timing of the Berenberg forecast downgrade earlier, it makes you wonder if the shorters are being given a bit of a helping hand ?

I voted both Garat and Weir out … if enough of us have sent the same message let’s hope that someone at Mobico is listening. Garat needs to go , the Liz Truss level of incompetence shown under his watch is the main reason why the share price continues to take a kicking. Get someone serious and credible in place and surely we will see a quick reversal of the trend here.

Not even his Mum could claim that Garat has done a good job as CEO. He’s been an absolute disaster and the performance under his tenure has been awful both for financials and very notably for shareholders. I don’t understand how he has survived… from the rebranding, the reinstatement and cancellation of the dividend, the missed targets , the profit warnings, the late filing of accounts, 20pc backdated pay rises to drivers in a loss making business… has he actually done one thing that could be considered as a success ?

He needs to be replaced before we are going to see sentiment change here , the incompetence of the BOD are a large part of the reason that the shorts are in here.

As Warren Buffett said if you’re not prepared to own a stock for ten years you shouldn’t be holding it for ten minutes… be greedy when others are fearful … it’s going to be the story with this one eventually though MCG is a hard one to hold onto positive thoughts about. And Warren Buffett wouldn’t be as stupid as we’ve been investing in this dog .

JG68 … you are not on your own in this crappy company, I’m north of £70k down on my investment as the share price today which is probably going to worsen as we are getting targeted by the shorts and just waiting for the next broker downgrade to come from another of their friends. I don’t know if stressed is the right word to sum up the way I’m feeling but I’m certainly checking the share price way more often than I should be doing and it inevitably makes me feel worse about it most times I do that . However I’m also thinking that this is exactly how the shorters take advantage of us PI’s when sentiment is so negative and people are fearful of losing more money. The company isn’t going bust anytime soon. There’s a decent business there if they start pricing fares right and get their overheads under control. A decent CFO doing the basics should soon get a handle on things and hopefully we now have one. The main shareholders have been buying and you’d have thought that the worst of it is priced in here now. The sum of the parts of MCG must be multiples of today’s joke of a share price surely? So value should eventually return here though we might be locked in for a long time yet to realise it. Every time I think about selling here I keep remembering Tullow Oil who were under attack from the shorts at the time . I took a big loss . , sold in despair at watching my money disappear every day. Two days after I sold the lot it went up 44pc in one day. Lesson learnt the hard way.

From end of April 2024 ( 5 weeks ago )

Encouraging” first-quarter trading should to aid its valuation, Jefferies said, with route recovery from new contracts slightly ahead of expectations, according to Mobico

“We continue to expect the disposal to prove a material positive catalyst, kick-starting a debt-to-equity value transfer, followed by a deleverage-driven re-rating journey,” analysts added.

A 100p share price target was laid out as a result, marking a 67% upside on Friday’s close.

Apart from the fact that MCG has attracted the interest of shorts of late and the Berenberg kick in the nuts this week ( probably hand in glove with their clients who are short) I’m not really understanding where this talk of insolvency and rights issues is suddenly coming from on here this week? The pullback on the sp is predictable given that it’s being targeted by shorts and in the absence of any news or updates it’s probably going lower in the short term. But to say that the company is about to go bust and that we’re all getting wiped out by the BOD working with the Cosmens. I’ve been spectacularly wrong with this company and it’s cost me a small paper fortune but I’m not seeing how/why we’re heading for administration… far more likely a break up sale of the units if it’s that bad surely?

Forward thoughts that’s the most sensible post that I’ve seen on here today. I’ll vote on the HL site myself. The constant bleed on the share on the share price is infuriating and I’m as underwater as anyone on here but I don’t think that there’s a conspiracy at play here between Garat and the Cosmens to take it to administration or a RI and wipe out the PI’s. Garat should have been fired , the company has been badly managed and the market has lost trust. But not so long ago the analysts had this at £2 or more and surely if it was to be broken up and sold off in its parts it’s still worth a long way north of todays share price? There’s a hint panic and fear on some of the posts on here this week that the shorts will be loving , they feed on it. Give it time and sentiment will change here.

Oh well. We are only 0.09pc down in the last month according to the charts… stopped the rot then !!!

As for asking the CEO to resign I think quite a few of us would support that … sign me up !

I’m resigning myself to the expectation that things are going to get worse here for the share price before it gets better as too much negative stuff has happened. If it wasn’t so painful it’d be farcical the way the bad news comes at us one after another , shorters start to increase then a broker downgrades significantly from an already battered position. Conspiracy theory maybe but it would not surprise me if they work together. Anyway unless you want to sell out at an historical low when the macro stuff has hardly changed from the last set of broker forecasts ( Jeffries had us at £1 just a couple of weeks ago after published accounts) then we need to bear the pain and wait for the re rate. We just need some better information from the company. A decent half year set of results would help. Keep the faith, we will see our investment coming back here eventually.

The broker forecasts are irrelevant to the long term price of the share and they’re probably working with their mates who are shorting it. I really wish that I’d never bought into Mobico/ NEX , I’m down an eye watering sum of money and have foolishly kept buying to average down. It’s an absolute disaster of an investment. But thinking back to my original investment in NEX I went in heavily to begin with based on broker forecasts that the stock was undervalued and I was buying in at a bargain price. Berenberg at the time ( Owen Shirley analyst) had put a target of £2.20 on it , and 6 or 7 other analysts had it at £1.80 average. That was when we were back at something like £1.20 less than 18 months ago. It’s so easy to get despondent with this absolute dog of an investment. The CEO should have gone with Stamp , it’s a disgrace that he’s still there pulling a massive salary out whilst presiding over this mess. But I still think that the business can be turned around, interest rates are going to come down, surely there can’t be any more skeletons to pop out and more significantly the Cosmens have been building their stake. They understand the business from the inside better than we do. As bad as it looks today the business isn’t going bust and we are going to be above £1 again one day… though perhaps we will need to wait till next year. We just need a bit of positive news , the bad stuff we get every time here is so draining.

Pedro , I totally agree… the market cap does make this share price look like one of the biggest bargains on the FTSE today. And yet we are still trending down. I’m really hoping that this is sentiment driven and the view towards the poor management of the company. That can change quickly if we get some good news eventually. But we dropped circa 20pc this week with nothing really too much going on. When did we last see a similar rise ? It’s a hard one to hold that’s for sure.

We need to start seeing some positive updates from the company. News of backdated 20pc pay rises to bus drivers , though great news for them and their families, isn’t going to do anything good for shareholders. Especially when that business is already running at a loss and the stock is under attack by shorts. Garat really needs to follow Stamp out of the door, he’s been a disaster. And to think they re instated dividends just last year !!

I’ve only just seen today’s drop , does anyone have any idea what has triggered it ? My thoughts were that the worst was behind us after they had got all the crappy news out of the way in the published accounts. I thought wrongly that with the interest rates about to reduce, the Cosmens and Mobico directors also buying shares , that we might see a slow creeping improvement in the share price until the next RNS or some news on the NA bus sale. Then today we get one of the biggest drops in the FTSE 250 based on nothing that we can see … wtf. I can’t see that any fundamentals have changed, we know the reasons for the decline in share prices but we have a new CFO coming in and the impairments that have hit the company hard are now accounted for and behind us in a financial sense. And still the shorters are buzzing around with prices dropping. Is today the result of shorters squeezing the price down on small volumes or does anyone have any insight into what might be behind it ? It’s just an absolute shocker to hold this share , every time you feel that the worst is over and we’re on the road to share price recovery, something like this happens out of the blue - and I don’t actually understand why this time ,does an have any good ideas ?

If those estimates are anywhere close to accurate on the NA bus sale then surely the share price for what’s left should eventually be multiples of where it stands today ? Maybe that’s a too simplistic view but it does seem a no brainer that these are a longer term hold rather than a panic sell today …

Any guesses on what the NA schools business is actually worth assuming that it’s not a distressed sale situation?

Unless they’ve got any more nasty surprises to unveil over the coming months you’d reasonably expect there to be a decent recovery in the share price by end of the year to reflect the long term value in the business. Interest rates should slowly reduce and unless there’s some catastrophic wider market event you’d have thought that most of the worst case scenario is already priced in at these levels. We were in the 90’s only a few months ago and thanks to the ineptitude of Stamp find ourselves 40pc off that level when none of the metrics have really changed apart from the issue in Germany. Sentiment rather than numbers has dropped us to these levels and once trust in management was gone in hindsight it was inevitable that the price would crash. But sentiment can change as long as they start to perform to guidance and the change of CFO in that respect is crucial though personally I’d have liked to have seen Garat out the door too for his part in this fiasco. I still see a good business here , bus transport will grow and it can’t be beyond imagination to think that they either cut / sell loss making parts of the business or they will increase fares to restore profitability. As has been said MCG isn’t a charity and as shareholders invested here why should we accept that OUR money is being wasted on supporting loss making routes such as WMB ? The new CEO at RR would surely sort this mess out very quickly were he in charge here, it’s not rocket science to get the sums right . I said it the other day but I’m grateful to some of the posters on this forum who consider the bigger picture and are thoughtful about their views and analysis on this company. It’s been an absolute dog of an investment for me and paper losses are sickening today and there are times that I’ve been very upset with myself for calling it wrong. And on more than one occasion I’ve been sorely tempted to sell the lot , accept the losses and chalk this down to a bad experience. You can’t win every time. But like others have said we are perhaps at a bottom , or near to anyway, and eventually patience will be rewarded. I’m feeling that this could turn big once sentiment changes or we get a bid and that’s what keeps me here. It’s the hope that kills !!