Member Info for Nobull

"How did you arrive at these figures and time lines?"

I expect BlueSquare arrived at those targets the same way investment analysts do. Do you have a problem with that? What EV are you, JMAX, forecasting? How much of the debt component do you expect to be repaid? How many shares are you forecasting to be in issue, what oil price are you assuming, and what level of production are you forecasting (both oil and gas)?

The uncertainty on the outcome of the Ghana arbitration casts doubt on any price target, whether it is a professional analyst's, yours or anybody else's.

Yes, I still hold MCB, but I may have to leave the UK for good to get my profits out of it. I am locked in. No point paying CGT when you are elderly because with IHT on top, there is no point taking any risk, unless you want to be an HMRC slave, and it is not good to die during the xd period, because the dividend gets taxed twice (IHT and Income tax).

RogueRiver, maybe things are not as bad as you think. The idea maybe is to pick up multiple rewards for multiple risks all de-risking at once (because they are linked) but only have to predict the outcome of one risk, the driver risk, the one that drives the outcome of all the others. Organic debt reduction drives reduction in liquidity risk and dilution risk, for example.

The BoD do seem to be doing what they said after the full year results "trying to get more of the revenue growth to drop down to the bottom line".

A hindrance to this is the excessive debt levels (nothing wrong with the business model; it is maybe just the capital structure that is wrong, I wonder?). Marketscreener shows the debt levels dropping, far too slowly for my liking, through to 2026, but if they do manage to sell the School bus business (very capital intensive and not a lot of EBITDA) that could just transform the whole business. Well, that is what I am hoping. Yes, Stockopedia agrees with you and terms this a "value trap", but my experience is its investment styles (falling star, sucker stock, high flyer, contrarian, turnaround, value trap, etc.) are lagging indicators, not leading ones. As a new holder here, I do not know as much as you do about this company's past, but I do not think things are as bad going forward, despite your bad experience here. AIMO. DYOR. And of course, I can be wrong.

P.S. I was impressed with the new CFO.

"I'll be happy to suspend my scepticism if and when most of the debt pile has gone and a decent dividend is being paid."

Fine. Be happy to pay treble the current share price then. Sure, they are risky now, and not to everyone's taste. An 83% loser is a 5.9 bagger just to get your money back.

"we might get a small tick up on reality hitting home" re hope that Labour does not increase the fossil fuel levy to 78%.

Sorry if this has been posted before: the clip is a Spectator TV interview with Lionel Shriver, the American novelist, who, remarrkably, for a novelist, has an exceptionally good understanding of the lunacy of Ed Miliband's energy policies. She has lived in the UK but recently moved to Portugal, probably for inheritance tax reasons, the better climate and the lower cost of living, I wonder? I cannot commend the clip highly enough - it is almost as good as David Latin's (of Serica) RNS about his AGM presentation drawing attention to the madness of our government's policy of taxing North Sea oilers to death and ceasing to issue new licenses. Like you, AimOilKing, she is optimistic Labour will have to row back on this madness.

From the 3 minute 40 seconds mark:

"North Sea oil ban: Lionel Shriver on Labour's net zero madness"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSZ1rKRoBE

Https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/08/labour-must-consider-pay-per-mile-road-tax/

"Shows you how much the equity value has been. Smashed in this thing"

Probably because the leverage covenant is 3.1X and is very close to the 3.5x figure that gives huge amounts of power to the lenders. All it needs is the sale (in H2) of the capital intensive school bus business that contributes very little EBITDA but which requires a lot debt finance, and then the leverage covenant can fall a decent amount in H2, the share price can rise to reflect less bankruptcy risk, and in the process burn a few shorters, and then our BoD can concentrate on getting more of the revenue to flow to the bottom line: they seem to have no problem with top line growth but there is with the bottom line, probably because there is a lag between input cost rises and pricing recovery actions.

The long term is very bright: in Puritan Britain, where the government wants to stamp out all kinds of pleasure, like driving where you want when you want, National Express should thrive, for a Labour government will be unable to resist the lure of tonnes of tax revenue, the lure of extending state control over every aspect of your life, the lure of grabbing every bit of virtue from promoting net zero carbon, the pleasure of leveling down everybody except themselves, turning us all into plebs controlled by the State, for all they have to do is legislate that every new car must have a camera installed, and that the car must be connected to the internet, so then they can bill you monthly with speeding fines, number of miles driven at an exorbitant price per mile, and fines for using your mobile phone while driving, and credit you monthly with points on your license: who will not want to use National Express for all journeys in that sort of environment? I bought a few Mobico today for the first time.

"So we can put to bed whether they are held in treasurer or elsewhere. Every share that is cancelled will mean existing shareholders will own a higher percentage of the company (albeit small) than they did before the cancellation. This, all thing being equal, should result in the share price rising."

Yes, except in the context of staff costs that constantly require remuneration in payment of shares (why cannot they be paid in cash?), the share count is likely to rise given the amount of shares bought back is less than the rise in the amount of awards of nil cost options. In this situation the bought back shares help cap the staff cost, but not entirely as the more dividends are paid between award and vesting date, the more shares have to eventually be issued to pay for the dividends not collected between award and vesting date, if I have understood it right. The buy backs do not seem to be sufficient to get the share count to drop over the long term, which is what I care about as a long term shareholder who does not trade his stock. It is outside my competence to understand what the correct rate of remuneration is for risk-taking, for performance that meets targets and for work done, so I voted in favour of all the resolutions, but I do not like seeing the share count rise over the long term to my detriment. The dividend is nice to receive but no good if it results in a loss to me through dilution from having to issue more shares to pay for the dividends missed out on by those having awards vest three years later.

Some people here still do not understand buybacks need to be done below intrinsic value otherwise they are at best value-neutral or value-destructive (never pay £1.20 for £1 of present value of an expected profit stream). Pleasingly, our current CEO seems to understand this - he used the correct form of wording last time. The problem arises with some posters failing to understand what a share is: yes, they know how to subtract shares (in the ways accounting rules dictate) but have forgotten what a share actually is, an entitlement to an expected profit stream, so one should take care not to overpay when doing buybacks.

"I'm unsure why buybacks are causing concern, whether cancelled or not? Won't the buying of shares contribute to buying volume and potentially an increase in share price?"

The buybacks may effectively be just cash expended on extra cost on staff: the company probably awards more shares than it buys back, so the removal of shares from the share count (by putting them into Treasury) is maybe only temporary if the vesting conditions are eventually met, as the shares then get re-issued. I just see the buybacks as advance payment of staff cost, so I am not terribly excited by them, but I am pleased by the dividend, even if it just goes straight out again on the next installment of IHT. I voted in favour of all the resolutions yesterday even though I dislike the generosity of the LTIP and DBP. I blame the Iraqis for increasing the salary-bargaining power of our CEO (the retention payment). I remain disgusted by the way free shares are issued to people who do not work at the coal face: the share count has risen by about 12m shares since I bought in April/May 2021 for the relative that has caused the IHT problem. I do not like being diluted out.

"Buybacks are simply a distribution of cash. Nothing more. Nothing less. "

Still suffering from buyback syphilis, a disease where the sufferer is confused by the accounting treatment of buybacks, the problem being the disease is highly infectious and can even spread to intelligent posters. Yes, they are a distribution, but there is more to it than that, as you know damn well: the cancelled shares are an exchange of cash for an expected income stream that has a present value. If the cash expended is less than the present value, the buyback is value-accretive; if it is more, then it is value-destructive; if they are the same, then you are correct: it is a value-neutral distribution. Your other posts are good, but you have a problem grasping this point. The problem of the expected return not turning out to be the same of the actual return is a different one.

Yes, it would have been better if Israel had killed the two Iranian generals elsewhere, but if Iran is financing and supplying weapons to its proxies, who are attacking Israel and disrupting trade through the Suez canal, I see no problem killing two Iranian generals, who were probably up to no good – they were not exactly in Syria for a military ceremony, were they?

Your resort to ad hominem does your arguments no favours. Bolton probably stands for freedom, dignity, capitalism and democracy, including for the Iranian people, and that is probably no bad thing. He is probably smart enough to understand we cannot do regime change anymore – the Iranians have to do it themselves. Meanwhile we keep broadcasting information about the West that the mullahs do not want their people to hear.

Standing up to aggressors portraying themselves as victims is a good thing. JMV.

Andy1022,

John Bolton is Yale educated and simply responds forcefully (something you seem to object to strongly) to Iran's non-rules based behaviour (you might wish to recall some of Iran's extra judicial killings of Iranian exiles abroad e.g. the TV talk-show host and singer, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, murdered in Germany; the brutal murder of former prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, in his own home in Paris; and then there has been the regime's harassment of Iranian journalists working for the BBC Persian service, also the recent attack on an Iranian journalist in Wimbledon, and if you wander down Kensington High Street you might notice the Italian restaurant (Cobella?) in a new-build opposite the Royal Garden Hotel where a Persian video cassette store once stood, at least before the entire building was blown up and destroyed, killing the pro-monarchist Iranian owner (or his son?). And you might recall the seizure of the American embassy and its diplomats in Teheran, an event that happened a few months after I left Iran. None of these things were rules-based.

The truth is, there are some people you cannot reason with (ISIS, Hamas, the WWII Nazi regime, Putin, extremist Jewish settlers hell-bent on expanding Israel's footprint into formerly Palestinian-occupied areas, presumably to take back land occupied by the Jews 2,000 years ago); and in these limited circumstances, the Christian concept of a 'just war' seems appropriate.

It is a moot point whether the mullahs in Iran can be reasoned with (they like to portray themselves as victims of colonial overreach, while at the same time expanding Iran's influence throughout the Middle East. Jack Straw, as Foreign Secretary, even agreed with the regime's misreading of history, particularly on whether Britain ripped off the Iranians, paying $4 a barrel for oil, indulging their false sense of victimhood.

Netanyahu's failure to stop illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas, and the annexing of East Jerusalem, have probably been a contributory factor to Hamas' terrorist activity, so some of Hamas' terrorist behaviour is, to a small extent, Netanyahu's fault, I wonder?

In the context of all of the above (especially Iran's disrespect for rules-based order), Israel's disregard for diplomatic convention does not seem anything like as bad as you make out.

Sure, the West is no saint when it comes to rules-based order (Abu Ghraib, the East India Company, the slave trade, the Bay of Pigs) but some push back on Iran's malign behaviour is probably a good thing. If you haven't lived in Iran, it is maybe difficult to understand how normalised lying is even when they want to be nice to you.

Continued...

"got an inside line into those high level iranian conversations have we dumgrano?"

Andy1022, I do not think Belgrano needs to have inside knowledge of the Iranian regime - you can get that from reading the informed comments of expert commentators on Iran - former British ambassadors/charge d'affaires, specialists at our universities that have decent Persian Studies departments (Oxford, St Andrews, Exeter, Durham, SOAS, etc.) and from Iranian specialists working at think-tanks that advise Western governments: Carnegie Endowment, RUSI, etc.

The best theories about the behaviour of the Iranian regime are the ones that join up the most dots. Common sense tells you the regime is brutal, is concerned about its legitimacy being undermined, is dependent on exploiting difference with the West to unite its people and is hellbent on projecting power throughout the region in preference to lifting the living standards of its citizens. It also invokes religion to bolster the power of the government. The regime is stable until it collapses, and it is probably foolish to try to predict when that will be.

Suffice it to say, the regime is intent on eradicating Western influence on its citizens (does not want to compete with seemingly more attractive value systems) so it will spend its vast natural resource wealth, on among other things, buying Iraqi politicians to try to get rid of us out of the Middle East altogether. Belgrano's posts are spot on.

Pepe Escobar sounds like a conspiracy theorist claiming Israel launched a plane carrying an atomic bomb that was shot out the sky by the Russians before it reached Iran (Aliens built the pyramids and conveniently left no trace and all that stuff). Israel's interest in retaliation on the Isfahan region was probably designed to give the Iranian regime a reality check about Israel's capabilities without escalating the conflict, a small enough retaliation not to rile Israel's allies who had urged restraint.

Although I cannot stand Netanyahu (Sarkozy called him a liar, which sounds right), I have no problem with them attacking Iran's consulate in Damascus to kill one of the people orchestrating trouble throughout the Middle East. John Bolton seems to me to be one of the few Americans who gets Iran right, and I have lived and worked in Iran. I think Belgrano's posts are excellent. Also Investrat's posts demonstrate more realism about the region than anyone else's. JMV.

"Not all KRI produced crude will find its way into the export pipeline"

That may be true, but there comes a point where the actions of the FGI against us amount to creeping expropriation, something we ought to have some legal protection against; otherwise, we would not invest there.

"How laughable is broad fords comments that GKP oil is not wanted !!!!

He never has had a good word or comment on the GKP board since his pal Tony left

GLA LTH the Guy is pure comedy"

Opulentia, if you cannot take the price volatility that comes with being invested in a stock that has a speculative risk rating, why don̛'t you invest in lower risk stocks with less share price volatility e.g. Unilever, a large cap stock with pricing power from owning branded, arguably ,must-have unhealthy ultra processsed foods? We are a price-taker in a host country that does not pay on time and which controls everything we can do. What is wrong with Broadford̛'s posts? He is one of the more knowledgeable posters. You seem to want to shut down all bearish posters. I have not sold a single share since all the purchases I made for a relative in April and May 2020, although I have a book loss due to inheriting from that relative at a later higher death price, and have recently added more for a different relative at 99.9 something pence. I have no idea if this will double on a favourable outcome from the pipeline reopening or will plummet on becoming a binary litigation play dependent on shareholders for funds. All outcomes seem within the realms of possibility. I hope for a favourable one though. Why don̛'t you stick to safer stocks instead of trying to shut down posts you don̛'t like?

Dumbly, all your points are spot on. But I cannot vote Conservative if it rewards economic illiteracy even if it is politically the right thing to remove a source of taxation that Rachel Reeves could claim credit for. It is all putting Britain in a doom loop, what with its TWO Labour parties, one of them being the Conservatives. Nobody is arguing the benefits of greater inequality, just wealth redistribution (sometimes under the guise of going for net zero quickly without any regard for the economic cost as long as the rich are paying for it).

I think it was a Nobel prize winning economist (and son of a Yorkshire miner), who now teaches at Princeton, said that a certain amount of inequality was needed for economic growth (or that there was a trade-off between the two?).

The point of taxation is to do it with the least squawking (like pulling feathers off a goose), but destroying wealth many times the amount of tax raised is simply despicable, especially on a false premise, so it is maybe time to declutter, sell up and get out of the UK for ever for me - there is no hope under Labour policies, under whichever Labour party is in power (Conservatives or Labour).

I have nearly recovered my loss on my initial investment here (18.5p entry price?) and the shares I got my daughter (3 timesed my initial holding at around 12.8p?) have done well. Amjad is right that the UK is a fiscally unstable jurisdiction. So maybe it is time to get fried daily in a tropical steam bath and put up with a noisy insect life, but save on CGT, VAT, and 80% on potential dementia care costs and benefit from a lower cost of living (no second home punitive taxes either, taxes designed to redistribute wealth to first time buyers). What's not to like from a tax point of view? It makes no sense to remain here.

Excellent post AimOilKing. The EPL is discriminatory, unfair (particularly in the context of the commodity price cycle where the government failed to help us when Brent crude was $20 a barrel and we were badly loss-making), wasteful of otherwise economically recoverable oil resources (we keep having those remeasurement losses that make our marginal tax rate over 100%), destructive of good jobs (and the associated tax revenue), bad for the balance of payments in so far as we have to import oil earlier than we otherwise would, destructive of our wealth by many times more than the tax raised due to its pernicious effect on our other costs (debt interest and hedging costs), and lastly it converts our loss of wealth into the Chancellor's ill-gotten virtue, ill-gotten because the aggrieved electorate (over their electricity bills) cannot be expected to understand all the issues unless Jeremy Hunt tells them the truth why the EPL needs to be scrapped, why we are not making the huge profits the electorate think we are out of the North Sea, why trying to do net zero too quickly pushes up the cost of renewables (probably to 9x the cost of fossil fuels if every country does it all together - we need huge amounts of copper, lithium, nickel, etc. and the prices of those materials need to rocket due to inelastic supply) and how fossil fuel producers will not be net contributors of CO2 in the future if they are allowed to keep the EPL money to invest in carbon capture.

I will not be voting Conservative at the next General Election, and if Labour get in I will probably move abroad permanently (deprive them of VAT and CGT). I do not wish to live in a country where taxes have to be raised constantly to plug falling tax revenues from a stampede of rich people leaving the country. JH knows all about the Laffer curve effect - he mentioned it in the last budget, but still extended the EPL instead of scrapping it. Not a stupid man, but a stupid Chancellor.

Yes, Co ckeye, it is the deeds, not the words that count in this part of the world, so maybe the ICG will deny the Kurds the use of the export pipeline. Thursday's Finals may have some more info on this. Fingers crossed.

"Is the suggestion that the Turkish pipeline will be used (avoiding non-use fees) but that ICG will supply the Turkish pipe by circumventing KRG?"

No idea, but taking oil south from Kirkuk, then across the Syrian border and up to Turkey to avoid Faysh Khabour seems a bit daft. Maybe I have not understood it right.

"This message has been filtered, please adjust your filters to view."

Deaf, dumb, blind, and delusional, the tertiary stages of buyback syphilis, a disease where the fact that the drop in net assets from a buyback is the same as that for an equivalent dividend being paid out causes the sufferer to think a buyback is just a distribution and nothing more.

There is a related disorder, buyback gonorrhea, where the sufferer calls the buyback "value-accretive" in the annual report and accounts at a time when the share price is more than 60% below the average buyback price. (Our former Chairman in March 2021)