Member Info for mavswf

I’m about £75k down here now having loaded up several times to average down and continued to catch the falling knife. It’s easily the worst investment I’ve ever made and a big lesson learned. The rank bad mismanagement by the BOD and mistakes piled on mistakes have really caught us all out and it’s almost like they’ve been actively working to destroy our share price. It’s basic incompetence but seems like it has been done with Machiavellian intent the way that things have played out. But the worm will eventually turn here and we’ll either get taken out or we’ll see a recovery in the price eventually as this is a crazy low price for this business today. Inflation and interest rates will drop, MCG can increase the prices on loss making routes or cancel them , and with some proper financial management there’s a solid long term business here. Barriers to entry are high and it’s not like they’re going to see multiple new competitors setting up to destroy their already wafer thin margins, it’s a business that can be turned around relatively quickly if the right people are running it. Like with RR.

I really appreciate the views and analysis of some of the posters on here as I get so annoyed and frustrated with the way this has panned out. It slightly helps my mood to read that the views of a lot of you in here are quite similar to mine which is that we need to be patient and not panic … as bad as things have been.

Why has Garat not fallen on his sword? Stamp’s incompetence is plain to see and he’ll be lucky to be put in charge of the books at his local KFC branch with his recent track record. Garat in the meantime has presided over the biggest share price collapse in the companies history, one of the worst performing on the FTSE250. Changing the name , cancelling the dividend, failing to give accurate guidance to shareholders and the market , getting contract prices wrong… the list goes on. I struggle to understand one thing that he’s actually successfully done as CEO that has been positive for stakeholders and a lot of us have lost a lot of money as a result. Why has he not been made to follow Stamp out of the door ? I don’t get it.

By a country mile the worst performing share in the FTSE250 this morning. I’m circa £80k down and curse the day that I bought into NEX rather than FGP on pretty much a toss of a coin for a recovery play. However it feels like the market for whatever reason is driving this one down to crazy levels now. Today’s news didn’t on the face of it seem that bad. Not better than expected but not worse and the sp has been battered already for months in the expectation ( or suspicion ) of something catastrophic lurking in the books. Which is not apparent. Unless MCG are about to go bust which seems unlikely this seems like a buying opportunity surely at these levels? Hopefully they’ve kitchen sinked this year’s accounts and will start to report more favourable results in updates to come , the inept CFO is going and at some point interest rates will reduce. Im not seeing any compelling reason why these are 10pc down again today but here we are again. What a frustration it’s been getting involved here , I bought a few thousand more this morning to average down a little because I think ( hope) that patience here will eventually pay off for lth’s. Even if it takes another year or more. What a dog this has been though !! Absolutely bloody painful.

I’m £70k down on circa 160k shares in MCG at an average circa £1 … it’s been easily the worst buy and hold that I’ve ever made in any share in 30 odd years. Made even worse by the fact that it was a coin toss between this and FGP when I first decided to invest in a transport recovery stock and FGP would've returned me 40 pc plus in the same period. The management team has been almost comically inept and the market has treated them accordingly but I still feel that the share price is going to recover here. Not quickly but with a change in sentiment. Public transport is a long term business and this is a solid and diversified business, of course the debt is dragging on profitability but interest rates will come down and I still believe that the Cosmens can’t be fools and have been buying for the long term. They know the long term plan better than we do surely ? It’s frustrating when you have money locked up like this and sat on heavy losses when the opportunity cost has been lost had it been invested elsewhere. However patience should have its rewards here , hopefully within the next 18 months when they learn how to use a calculator and some degree of faith has been restored. It will jump pretty quickly imo once sentiment changes. GLA.

This is the hardest to hold share that I’ve ever invested in… the football manager analogy JG68 made is a good one. We really shouldn’t be in a relegation fight with the size of the club , the history, the quality of the squad etc and yet we find ourselves sliding further down the table as every weekend passes. With inexplicably bad decisions made over and again by the manager and his team and poor communication to the fan base. In the end the table doesn’t lie , we are where we are because of terrible management and if MCG was a football business then Garat and Stamp would have been shown the door a long time ago. We’re all waiting on better times to come here but it’s hard keeping faith in the fortunes of this club for sure.

And just to rub salt in the ever deepening wounds I see that FGP is up over 18pc in the last month …. If only.

I’m sat on a very large loss here and thinking that I actually want the Cosmens to take it out , low ball offer or not , I’ve never held a share long term that has been so painful and so regularly disappointing. It sucks the joy out of investing when the penny drops that the PI’s have just been suckered by this inept/corrupt board. So when the lowball offer finally comes in it might do us all a favour and put an end to the misery of holding NEX/MCG. Crystallise the loss and move on , this truly has been a disaster of a company to have put your money into when there were so many better options out there. Eventually someone will make a fortune out of this given that they’ve destroyed shareholders short term value but it ain’t gonna be the PI’s is it ?

What’s the £24m in 24 then , surely not another skeleton falling out of the Garat / Stamp closet ?

JG68 - I really can't think of anything positive that's happened or been relayed to the market since Garat has been in post. Nor the CFO in his tenure.

I couldn’t agree with you more. And the market has judged them accordingly with the punishment dished out to long suffering shareholders so we are where we are now. I’m about £45k down on my investment here and have more or less written it off for the next 12-18 months. The CEO and CFO need to be replaced but despite everything I do still think that the share price will eventually recover at least to a level where most of us will see some kind of return on our investments. Unless there are further skeletons hidden away that are about to be unleashed on the market when the accounts are published. And if that happens again you need to wonder whether it’s more than just incompetent accounting or something more sinister like a planned destruction of the share price by vested interests looking to break up the company. We will see.

I see that First Group is up 7pc today … 58pc up over 12 months. If only…..

JG I feel your pain , this is a very tough investment to keep holding having seen the death by a thousand cuts on the share price and the Only Fools and Horses financial mismanagement from the BOD. However I do believe there is long term value here and the market is pricing in worst case scenario at the current levels. Interest rates will fall eventually, maybe significantly lower next year as the coming recession bites. The Cosmens have been buying at these prices and I’d assume that they would know more than us what might be going on behind the curtain. NA bus sale when it comes should pay off a big chunk of the debt and if we don’t believe in the long term future of public transport then we shouldn’t be investing in the shares in the first place. The painful thing at the moment is that many of us are sat on big paper losses here with money that could have been used much more productively elsewhere. Like in First Group as an easy comparison. But we’ve got to hope that the worm will eventually turn and we’ll see proper value for the money and heartache that we’ve had invested here. Finfers crossed that results day doesn’t bring another nasty shock though.

MCG … you’re not on your own here. I’m about £40k down now on circa £175k invested so it’s been the worst call that I’ve made in a single stock. I kept buying more to average down , foolishly as it turned out . Particularly galling that I went in heavy after the dividend was reinstated as that looked to be a turning point , little did we understand the ineptitude of the management and that hasn’t changed. We can’t any faith in them which is what tempts me to take the loss and run. I’m well ahead on RR and can in my mind offset the loss here against the profits I made on Rolls. You can’t win them all. However I still think that this will eventually come good or at least we’ll see well over £1. The market severely punished the management for not meeting its expectations that’s for sure. It’s probably being shorted even at this low level . The NA bus sale when it happens will clear a chunk of the debt and interest rates will drop later in the year. The main shareholders have been adding and the business is still EBITDA positive. Broken up it’d be worth a lot more than todays share price suggests it is. Which is probably where this is headed. Spain seems to be the key here to the future. Time will tell and these paper losses are so frustrating but all we’ve seen with this company is one lot of bad news after another. Unless it’s going bust ( unlikely ) some good news will eventually come through and it shouldn’t take long before the share price then recovers quickly. Whenever that may be. I was hoping for this year but we’re probably going to have to wait until 2025 now. We aren’t looking at a company producing obsolete products here. Demand is and always will be there for bus and public transport and as long as they can start to get the costs under control and fully accounted for they should be able to produce the revenue to make it investable again. Patience is needed but it’s been an awful investment up to now. This is the only share that I’ve ever had where I’m checking the price 5 or 6 times a day every day. It drives me mad. It’d be better for my health if I deleted my HL app and come back here in 6 months time.

I am a LTH here and rue the day that I made the choice of National Express over First Group as one of my big recovery punts. What a balls up that decision has proven to be as I'm now about £40k down having topped up several times on the way down thinking that the bottom was in. Not too much seems to have changed in their business model that I first invested in but it does seem to be in the hands of shockingly bad management and the market has certainly voted with its feet yet again yesterday in reaction to the nasty surprises that keep coming from the company. But I can't yet bring myself to take the losses and sell out because I do see some light at the end of a very long tunnel with this one. The fundamentals still look to be promising for a recovery play to me.

1/ Todays share price gives a market cap of £460m , circa 2.5x EBIT earnings...that seems very very cheap today right ?

2/ The biggest shareholders have been loading up heavily on their holdings of late . The Cosmens must have some idea about what they are putting their money into and whats going in in the business ( or a better look at it than any of us on here I'd guess ).

3/ Interest rates will eventually drop sometime this year , probably significantly by 2025.

4/ The company still has cash and headroom to run its business and is operating profitably. There is and always will be a demand for public transport and MCG have secure long term operating contracts which should be profitable as long as they start doing their financial housekeeping properly.

5/ The North America sale will at some point go through at whatever that might bring to shareholders. I've got absolutely no idea of a guesstimate on where this might end up but could easily see it doubling from todays price by the end of the year. Or am I continuing to look at this dog through deluded hope rather than expectation ? Any thoughts would be appreciated as its hard to keep the faith given the repeated screw ups by the CFO and CEO.

I do agree that some of the macro stuff is extremely worrying right now. Apart from the appalling situation on a human suffering level in Israel/Gaza right now you can see that the West are crapping themselves over the prospects of an all out war in ME and the fall out that will have on our economies with any resulting crisis in oil supplies and costs … the US and Europe have already maxed out the credit cards tackling the pandemic and just when it seemed that inflation had turned the corner Hamas attacks Israel. No wonder that Biden , Sunak and Macron are straight on their planes out there doing their best to support the Israelis publicly and I’d imagine at the same time begging the Saudis and Qataris to keep the oil out of the argument.

Don’t stress buddy , it’s the worst thing that you can do as an investor . I only asked because I share your pain and it hasn’t been a pleasant experience at all seeing your paper wealth shrink so quickly as this has done since the RNS … but it is only paper money and patience I’m sure will be rewarded here in the end. Not with the profits that we’d hoped for investing in this dog but I’m sure we’ll both recover our losses if we wait it out long enough. The feeling that I’ve had recently on MCG is reminding me a lot of what happened when we were in the first covid lockdown and I was literally catching a falling knife on oil shares , kept buying daily as the oil price was tanking and Putin and Saudi were going at one another. I went in balls deep on Premier Oil and Tullow Oil , far more than I would ever normally do but kept thinking the bottom was in till it fell again. Eventually stress and probably fear got the better of me and I capitulated, sold the lot and took a £45k loss on them all inside a couple of weeks … two days later Tullow Oil shares jumped 42pc in one day. I’d have recovered all of my losses and more and was totally gutted of course but it taught me not to make emotional decisions with shares and to remember that this is a long game and losses or profit are only on paper till you sell. This business has been around for donkeys years , it’s not going bust any time soon , people will always need buses and most companies have a share price that goes up and down… though not as extreme as this one has sunk. My gut feeling is that inside two years if not sooner we’ll be sitting on paper profits on this ( my average is circa £1.05 over 100,000 shares ).

JG68 … you’re down heavily on Mobico too right ?

Well I’m about £60k in the red today on this which is by some distance my worse performance ever on a share pick so I’m hoping that everything I see happening here is temporary and will turn around eventually… I do expect it will but it’s a long and painful journey now and a lot of patience is needed I suspect.

Rentokil announced they’re training up bed bug sniffer dogs and the share price still fell by 19pc today … you have to laugh….

Maybe a foolish strategy but I’m averaging down at these levels with a few thousand a couple of times a week and waiting for the eventual turnaround which surely will come in time unless MCG goes bust. Like others I’m heavily invested here and it’s painful looking at losses of over 50pc but this is no Cineworld and with better management should be fine in a 2-3 year timescale. I’m shocked at the cratering of the share price over the last week, 40pc down on the RNS is absolutely savage. I was thinking that it might be shorters at work again and possibly those with inside knowledge that more bad news will be dropping later.

However just watching Bloomberg today and totally non specific to MCG but they had an analyst commenting on the US market today and he said , to paraphrase, ‘ there’s nothing that the market today hates more than missed guidance and it will punish any company’s share prices severely that don’t meet guidance figures’…simply that’s what’s happening here. Complete lack of confidence in the management and will need a lot of time to recover lost credibility.

The CEO and CFO should have been sacked no question but this is not dead in the water , sentiment changes and things can turn around quickly if and when they can steady the ship. At todays valuation it’s looking well oversold.

Poker... Yep it does come back to the lack of credibility in what they say and what they do... sliding doors moment last year when I chose this one instead of First Group as a recovery play... feeling very stupid.