Member Info for Monkshood

I certainly hope so. I have been rather surprised that this has sat around the low 600's for so long especially as they flagged the strong start to the year and the potential for cost savings and synergies with the SDL takeover.
I have it pigeonholed as one of my longer term holdings but I still like to see it go up....

Krusty, I agree about the divi's . I dipped out for a few weeks as was not keen on them funding the divi's from debt. In some ways the argument is the same with the burden now being shifted to the fundraise.
It is the downside of investing in companies whose CEO's are major share holders and have a vested interest in paying a divi. However, there are also lots of advantages in these companies so on balance I generally view it as a positive when buying in to a company.
I have come back into Bks now. With no debt, some money for their product launch and for further acquisitions it looks a good bet for the next year.

Results tomorrow.
They have said they were making a 'moderate' loss with the shops closed (except for click and collect) and funding their own furlough payments. They have never been clear what 'moderate' actually means but I believe that the consensus is for around a 25M loss for the quarter.
It will be interesting to see how this goes down if it is the case- I have put aside a bit of cash for any potential drop as it will be short lived with the shops opening next week. I don't expect we will get such a strong bounce as after the first lockdown but with people unable to travel abroad and entertainment venues still restricted I can see spending on the home featuring strongly at least for the next quarter (it may be anecdotal, but Mrs Monk certainly seems very keen to recycle my profits from Dnlm back into this sector...)

After he sold 250k in March Myers then gained an extra 225,110 shares for a performance payment - he only sold 83,474 to cover tax- so he has started to accumulate again. The CFO also kept just over half (27k) of his performance shares at the same time.
Gary Booker sold all of his performance shares (12k) at the start of April .

Not sure what it means- Myres sold a comparable amount last summer but there was no subsequent bad news and if anything the company did fairly well, although the price has drifted lower since.
I am not expecting great results for the first quarter, France work wear is going to have been hit quite hard and the cold spell in the US would have meant a slow start to the pest season (they mentioned this after the last bad winter in the US, 2018, so I am expecting the same - there was also a brief mention about it in the Q&A after the Year End results). The plague of mice in Australia may help, but overall much will depend upon how the revenues from Hygiene can compensate for the loss of work in covid impacted areas.
At the year end presentation they noted, that in Australia, revenues from disinfection dropped off very quickly as they got covid under control. I am not so sure that this will be the case in countries that are doing it by vaccination, as there will be a residual level of susceptible people and so disinfection services will be needed for longer than where it was essentially eliminated.
Their fortunes this year are going to be dependent the interplay between businesses opening up and the continued need for disinfectant services. Will they be able to generate the same (or greater) revenues for the latter this year? It is easy to see how they picked up work last year, as a big name they would have been a first port of call. I think that now there will be more competition and tighter margins.
After this quarter I am expecting things should pick up and that they will get back the regular work plus still be pulling in extra revenue from disinfecting. So, not great first quarter, reasonable second then strong third and final quarters.

Rob Woodward, Non-executive Director and Chair, bought 41,759 Ordinary Shares at a price of £0.359 per share
Those on the inside certainly seem to be very confident of things going forward.

Developing supply links with ABcam can only be good news. There are many areas where Affimers would fit into ABcam's portfolio of products.
I am firmly of the belief, that if the diagnostics division of Avacta was ever sold off ABcam would be the most likely to take it over because the fit is so good.

Beinthelead- 'but AS has said in recent interviews that N is harder to collect via AN swabs, hence NP being the dominant N targeting test? This is one of the reasons why he’s chosen to target S for this test mechanism.'
This may or may not be the case, however when they first were talking about developing the test nearly a year ago, there was no discussion about nasopharyngeal or AN swabs - it was just saliva. So I find it hard to believe that this was the original reason.

GKB, I know my opinions are not always the most popular, but I just say what I think. This publication does backup what I said many months ago about targeting S making it harder to get the required sensitivity compared to using N. As there are multiple tests being sold that target N and none so far targeting S, it does not seem to have been an unreasonable view point.

We had this discussions way back.... Detection will only be affected if any of the affimer bindings are affected by the change. In the work described in the paper (Jaylarc's link), they use samples stored at 4c and they worked, so in this instance binding cannot be majorly affected. Whether their results for S (or N) would have been different on fresh samples is not known or discussed.
What I think the paper does question is the wisdom of Avacta only seeming to target S at the start.
Perhaps they should have gone for the sensitivity gain of using N (3--10x more abundant) and then utilised the abilities of the affimers to improve on the specificity of mAbs..... with a fixed number of targets gaining sensitivity is harder than improving specifity
From the final sentence of the paper the Israeli group are clearly looking to develop a S+N assay.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.16.423071v1.full

better link for ref-

N mutates at about half the rate of S1.
In practice the significance will depend upon where these mutations are relative to the binding of the epitopes that are being used, the details of which are generally not published.

https://www.biorxiv.org › 2020.12.16.423071v1.full

Is this the correct ref?
The link is to a very interesting paper though and the first time I have seen one comparing S/N detection.
There was a paper looking at the stability of S1 by EM, they showed if they were restored to 37C they reassembled - is this the one you were referring to?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-00547-5

Hotcopper is listing it as 44c at close -24.3p
The problem was not short term debt it is the need to find nearly 100m to go underground at Tabakoroni next year. The sale of Bibiani would have provided this money whist allowing them to reduce debt from normal operations.

At the moment it is a punt on if you think they will get the licence back, or they will get the VAT back from the Mali government.

You can see why they struggle to make a profit....$112M payed out last year.

Strong buys by the directors @>30p

Fairview. Their main markets are the UK and the US with some in Australia. All are reasonably good ,either with vaccinations, or low incidence. Key is the US and they will likely over take us with their vaccinations soon. The vaccines still give a good level of resistance to the new variants, these countries will pivot to vaccines which also cover the E484K over the summer.
As cminhinnet says it was all about cash for now. 300k does give them another 6 weeks headroom if they were getting low.
By the end of April they should have income from the Spring Break/Easter plus the full launch of Letsexplore in the US.

Thanks for that, I did not realise the information was publicly available. It has been rather interesting looking through the list.

An interesting snippet in SGC's trading statement -
'The Department for Transport ("DfT") has indicated that COVID-19 Bus Services Support Grant Restart ("CBSSG") for local bus services in England, excluding London, will continue to cover the period until when social distancing is no longer required on buses. Based on the current roadmap for the easing of COVID-19 restrictions in England, we would expect CBSSG or a similar arrangement to now continue until mid to late summer 2021'

There is some evidence for a boost for some shares on AIM which has been put down to the IHT tax break. There was talk that this may be scrapped, if so then expect some companies to switch to the main index. At their last agm the CEO of RWS said they would switch if the tax break was removed.

My day gain/loss has gone from 20% down to now being in the blue... In the end it has done better than most of my other small cap/aim stocks today.
Reassuring, as first thing I was beginning to wonder if I was missing something!