Member Info for MrMagic

Sftips bought millions at 0.72p? SP is now 0.63p That's a loss of 12%_ !

Market Cap = £2m Shares in issue = 317m 2/317 = 0.0063 or 0.63p SP is exactly where is should be. Unless you;re increasing your market capital soon then SP is going nowhere.

So popped my head in here after someone mentioned RIIG elsewhere. Scanned through the past 10-15 pages and to be honest, all I see here really is one huge site shill (aka Harold) who is constantly and repetitively posting the same "propagana" posting. Have to say that makes RIIG sound utterly desperate. If that's not the case then it has to be said Harold that you;re not doing this share any favours. Massive stay clear here AFAICS.

As you will have seen, Carnival CEO put out a statement yesterday in an attempt to pacify shareholders suggesting that the loss in revenue for 2012 would be about $0.11 per share. The statement was very much around the lines "Don't worry, it's all insured". I personall find it hard to see the reality of that at this stage. The Carnival statement included this: "The company has insurance coverage for damage to the vessel with a deductible of approximately $30 million as well as insurance for third party personal injury liability subject to an additional deductible of approximately $10 million for this incident. The company self-insures for loss of use of the vessel." I'm assuming the word "deductible" is the same as an "excess", i.e. they have to pay this before any insurance claim will pay out. The bigger problem I foresee with all of this is that any insurnace company worth it's salt, WOULD NOT pay out on a claim for this event. Reason being it looks increasingly like negligence on behalf of the captain in talking the vessel off course. If you try to claim on your car insurance when you are driving under the influence you'll have a hard time getting any claim through. If CCL have been negligent I can't see any company paying for the damage to the ship nor for any injuries sustained. If it had been a storm, or a genuine accidental collision with say another ship then no problem, but when you deliberately steer a ship onto a reef then that's negligence. Thus overall I think this is going to cost Carnival somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion by the end of it all. That's just my guess. I could be totally wrong about how the insurance works for shipping. Time will tell. Luckily I cashed in all my CCL shares before Xmas in favour of a much more exciting prospect :-)

Hi Ypres Most P&O cruisers have been aware of declining standards for some years, in fact ever since the bean counters at Carnival took over. It's not going to change I'm afraid. However the P&O experience is still better than Ocean Village, Thompson etc, but Celebrity and Princess of course tend to be better. Owning CCL shares gets you free on board credit on EVERY P&O cruise you take so long as you own at least 100 shares. For that reason it's a no-brainer to keep them if you will keep cruising with them. Carnival will succeed through the recession because its customers are mostly retirees. In terms of your Arcadia experience my advice is that it's important to know your ships in the fleet. Arcadia IS and ALWAYS has been the favourite of the older folk. If you do pretty much any 1 week trip on Arcadia may well seem like an old folks home at times because the old folks love the quick, hop on, 1 week trips. A full 2-3 weeker in summer is a completely different experience. That's how I cruise on her and she is, as a result, my 2nd fav ship in the fleet after the brilliant Aurora. Ventura/Oceana are for the less formal, party cruise market. Take it or leave it. Oriana is still well loved by many and sits alongside Aurora, formal and reasonably glam. The fuel situation will change in the coming 1-2 years because new sources of fuel have been discovered. So for now I'm keeping my CCL shares and regardless I will always keep the original 100 shares I have whilst I continue to cruise with P&O as the OBC earns me way more than share profits will.

Fair points there Rudy. We will see what transpires. I think in life people make priorities for the things they feel are important and they save up for them. People who have experienced a cruise (a good cruise such as P&O, Princess, Celebrity etc) don't ever want to go back to the old style holidays of 2 weeks in one place on a beach. The Carnival customer base is not "super rich" in the slightest. It contains a wide mix of pensioners/retirees, professional working couples, low income couples and so on. The majority are certainly the former of these but the mix exists. P&O have changed direction from their traditional crusing experience to try to cater more for the latter groups, i.e. the lower income untraditional, party time crowd. The usual analogy for this is the Ocean Village cruiseline (basically club 18-30 at sea). It's everything the traditional cruisers hate . . . loud people, discourteous people, booze cruise pundits, drunkards, out for themselves brigade. This is what happenbed with Ventura. Carnival lowered the ticket prices and attracted this clientele. The consequences were very predictable. The core customer base were instantly hacked off, lost faith in the P&O brand and many headed off to other cruiselines. Their values are . . . formality, smart informality, collective responsibility for everyone's enjoyment of their holiday, looking out for one's fellow passenger, controlled moderation in all things, peaceful places to sit, read, sun bathe, excellent food and service and so on. So it is with Carnival. The various cruiselines each have their own styles. Cunard is very formal and class oriented (5 star), Princess and P&O are also traditional, fairly formal (4 star), Ocean Village is very casual, party cruise oriented (2-3 star). To date, people chose the line that suited them. Now Carnival financiers and stupid marketing directors are meddling with the established formulas in order to find ways to generate money. The cruise lines (particularly P&O) stand on a knife-edge all the time now. They have meddled with the dress codes, service levels and overall ticket prices. They came close to losing it all with Ventura. Waves of feedback from annoyed customers gave Carnival a smart "slap" and forced them to try to mend their ways with Azura. But they are now left with a "dead" ship, Ventura, which a large proportion of the customer base having tried once, will never return to. This cock-up could be a rolling juggernaut that they can't stop and if so, the SP will plummet quickly. So, we wait and watch carefully to see what further changes (if any) are being proposed and implemented by Carnival execs.

If the resistance holds it will only be temporary. Carnival are doing well and as I iterated before, their customer base is largely made up of retired couples who have money to spend with them. Whatever happens in our Global Finanacial Crisis and depression, these old fogies are still getting paid their pensions and benefits and they continue to want to get away on cruises. The only way the CCL share will ever really plummet permanently is if some corporate ******* in the US decides to change the cruising traditions and feel/style of the various Cranival cruise lines. We started to see this in the P&O Cruising brand with Ventura which has been an almighty cock up, but Carnival realised I think and quickly tried to turn things around for the newer sister ship Azura. However Carnival greatly pee'd off a lot of loyal customers with the Ventura debarcle and with their other attempts to dumb down the tradition cruising experience. They tread on very thin ice. For now they have a good thing going, but the house of cards can easily come tumbling down if they mess with a good thing. For now I'm happy to keep investing in the share because things are ok and the future should be sound. I believe the SP will continue to rise up to £26-£27 and then plateau. I don't think we will return to the lovely SP of £32 we had last December.

So, I did my best to tell everyone that the CCL share was a bargain prior to Aug and if you failed to invest in this you missed a treat. At the start of the year CCL shares were up at £32. Then the markets crashed and it plummeted to £24. I bought a bunch of shares at that point as the price was relatively good. But the global crisis took another turn and the price plummeted again down to £18-19 per share. This was a REAL bargain so I bought another 2 bunches of shares to cater for the temporary loss of the £24 shares. It was a no brainer. Carnival are doing well, the fleet is increasng and its business is propped up by huge numbers of retired people who aren't affected by the global credit crunches in teh same way as working people. A few months later and here we are ! Share price just about to hit £24 again and likely to sail past that level and head back up to £30. So I already made a nice £5 profit per share from my last 2 bunches and then it's profit all the way up and beyond £24 level. If you failed to buy at £19 per share friends then you literally missed the boat ! :-)

Why has the CCL SP dropped so far? Is this really all about the cost of fuel and the impact this will have on Carnival in the next few years? Why would they be building more and more ships if there is such "doom and gloom" about fuel? Surely this SP has to bounce back up?!

This share is slowly creeping up. I'm confident it will breach the 50p barrier pretty soon, but it's a slow trade. Doesn't seem to be that much interest in it, not many trades, but it IS moving in the right direction. I'm holding out for more on this. Might regret it later, having bought at 43.75p I've made 10% already so perhaps I shouldn't be greedy?

It's just crazy how this share is managing to look so poor given the value of gold. It can only be the result of corporate shinanigans and dodgey traders who are deliberately manipulating it for their own ends. Either the SP finally takes off again or someone is going to be in court facing a lawsuit for fixing the price!

SP is now £22 ish This has got to be a great buy-in price. I think that target is way low. This share will climb steadily back up to £27-28 IMO. There's a lot of demand for the cruising sector and there will be lots of people wanting to try out the new P&O ship when it is launched.

"The company added that softness in bookings in Southern Europe and Britain will hit revenues by another $0.05 a share. " Nice statement from Carnival !! Let's be mindful of the fact that Carnival recently and drastically reduced the brochure discount it previously offered to the travel agents. Thus the agents are now forced to do one of two things, eithre: 1. Sell cruises at increased prices to the customer to maintain their profit margins or 2. Sell cruises at the previous customer prices and thus shoulder a significant loss in profit margin No surprisingly this dilemma results in a tense bidding war between agents, none of whom want to go out of business but none of whom want to shoulder that loss of profit margin. No wonder then that bookings are "soft" as they put it. Add to this the fact that Carnival's Bean Counters repeatedly make the faux pas of selling late cruises cheaply (thus completely undermining the loyal customer base who booked a year or more in advance) and you have the start of a financial forecasting nightmare. My prediction is that we are seeing the first stages of the complete removal of the travel agency element of booking cruises. Carnival would prefer you to book direct with them. The market is strong in their view so they really don't need agents. Removing the agent discount sets the ball rolling. I predict that a year or 2 from now it won't be worth an agent's time and effort to handle cruise bookings. We'll all pay higher prices once we are forced to go direct. Moving forward further still it's not too difficult to see that this would result in cruising coming full circle and being the privvy of the rich and elite again. To counteract that Carnival will have to yet again, reduce the levels of quality, service and overall cruising tradition in order to make it affordable to the masses. The end result of all of this is a lesser crusing experience for us all for an increased ticket price :-( Hence I can see the CCL share losing it's up/down swinginess and starting to even out long term.

Yep I got in with these at £43.75 and I think the company has "plenty of legs" as it were ! Tristel has a number of products that do regular healthcare tasks quicker and cheaper than current processes so I expect more and more companies and countries to buy into their products. The share has started to rise now after the previous dip. I think it's a good punt. The frustrating thing with this share is the relatively large buy-sell spread being offered. Still a good punt tho :-)

For those who cruise with P&O regularly, having 100 CCL shares is a total no-brainer. I've cruised with them for 7 years now and originally bought 100 shares at about £24 each. 17 cruises later we must have had something like £1500-£2000 in on-board credit so they pay for themselves easily. On top of that we've often also received a quarterly dividend of about £20-£40 (though that isn't a guaranteed perk) and of course we still have the shares themselves. It's a win-win situation if you intend to cruise with the Carnival brands. Please note that if you buy CCL shares you DO NOT automatically get the extra on-board credit added to your ship account. You have to email Karen Hawkins at pocruises.co.uk informing her of your shares and (one time) sending a copy of your share certificate or nominee acct statement and she then added the credit. You have to do this every cruise. The shares themselves are a pretty safe investment IMO. They've been regularly up and down but the market is strong and there's plenty of demand for cruising. The share price always drops before year end as it has just done so this is a great time to buy in. I've bought additional shares 2-3 times over and above the required 100 just to scrape nice profits of the up/down price swings netting £200-£300 each time. One of the reasons CCL will do well in the global financial crisis is that it's customer base has been predominently older generation retirees. The global crisis has not affected those people in teh same way as it has the younger working population. Pensioners are still pulling their pensions regardless. Carnival's main risk (and it's significant IMO) is that it has changed it's strategy in the last 2-3 years to try to become "all things to all men". It has 7+ ships in the fleet and it tried to target Ventura and Oceana to the "Ocean Village" type market (e.g. cheap tack tickets, low formailty, boose cruise mentality) obviously in an attempt to grab the Ocean Village market when the 2 OV ships departed recently. Overall it was a catastrophe which partly destroyed the P&O Brand which previously stood for good British style relatively formal and traditional cruising. Sure 2-3 years ago a younger audience swarmed to these low budget ships for cheap cruises in the sun. The loyal traditional base however pretty much all held the view of "I tried Ventura once, but won't go back!". In the aftermath (or is it full swing?!) of the global financial crisis who now are the regular loyal P&O customers? It's the older retirees who are still drawing their pensions thak you very much. The youngsters are now tightening belts as they prepare for a life of endless work with little hope of retiring early (if ever!!!). With the new ship coming P&O have to really get this one right. If they continue to try to be both a Michelin Star Restaurant and MacDonalds in the same space th