Member Info for onlyagame

It does look as though it will take a significant increase in market activity to get Countrywide moving. As my friend in agency says there are times in the housing cycle when any idiot can be successful and sell houses, but when the number of instructions declines or in the early stages of the recovery it is the good agents who succeed.
By good agents, in the main, he means the independents who will have been far more proactive in the difficult times and where success or failure means survival.
Interestingly the on-line agents still have not taken off, and like Countrywide have a relatively static market share. This is opportunity for management to make their mark and drive an increase in market share. How? I can only think by significant incentives to staff. We shall see.

An increase in house prices is important as this is often the catalyst that spurs people into action to market their property, however for Countrywide the more important factor is any increase in the volume of transactions as this benefits other parts of the group such as conveyancing and surveying. It does seem slightly counter-intuitive to carry on closing branches as the physical presence on the High Street seems to be the dominant driver of instructions.

There is a General Election in 2024 - Boris will be able to say he is connecting the North, stimulating growth in the North, as promised in 2019....

Predictions. What I was getting at was just how many predictions are wrong. Of course we all look for guidance and it is comforting to find a prediction that supports our views but is any prediction worth anything financially. If you predict often enough of course you will be right some of the time. Even supposed knowledgeable people get it wrong, I have a memory of a fund manager at a well known corporate advising that we sell Tesco at £1.72.....which just shows you should always follow your own advice because many of us outperform the experts as it is our own money at stake.

Predictions......remember Al Gore predicting the polar ice caps could disappear as early as 2013.....

Trouts, don't loose sight of the fact the EU export large quantities of goods to the UK so will want a trade agreement.
The serious analysis could be correct, but serious analysis also forecast the loss of 1 million jobs and financial meltdown if we voted to leave the EU in 2016.
Also either party can ask for an extension for up to two years to complete trade talks, so BJ is adopting a negotiating position to try to exert some pressure on the negotiations.
In theory increasing investment wealth is simply, sell high - buy low, and the performance of individual shares is not tied to UK economic growth per se, although of course it helps. I bought BARC earlier this year at £1.50 and sold at £1.80. I intend to stay in cash until BARC drops back to £1.60 and that is my gamble. I tend to ignore strategic plans and watch the market.
Good luck and prosperity to all in 2020.

I hope you have as much fun with this share as a lot of posters here have had. I have held for several years buying in at well over £2.50 and following the fall down to 3.3p. Spectacular!
Rather than writing off my losses I convinced myself that CWD were not going bust so invested heavily (for me) at 5.17p, 4.12p, 3.86p and 3.46p and have sold most of these for between 7p and 7.5p. Great fun as a penny share and greatly reducing my losses.
As a penny share CWD was great fun, but after consolidation with a share price circa £3.75 this becomes a proper share (£5 looks a long way off) and I fear future growth may be limited until the dividend is restored.
Happy Christmas to all and good luck for a prosperous 2020. Viva CWD!

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."
The greatest trick Gordon Brown ever pulled was convincing the world that the credit crunch in 2007 was all the fault of the banks and that he saved the world from financial meltdown.

Please bear in mind that I'm not an expert but an amateur investor. The reason the share price does not always go up after large buys, and seemingly counter to the laws of supply and demand, is that buys and sells are not matched. A body/broker will hold a number of shares to enable instant buys and if they are overstocked they will be reducing their stock at a relatively stable price, rather than risk damaging demand by increasing the share price.
If this is incorrect I invite anyone to post another explanation.

Its very hard to tell whether consolidation is good or bad. In the medium/long term it makes no difference but in my limited experience there is often a fall in the share price immediately afterwards. I am a long term holder so this does not impact on me, I will just be interested to watch and see what happens.

We are only a couple of weeks away from the 50 : 1 consolidation. Any thoughts on the possible impact on the share price as £3.50 per share (already up from £2.48 per share) would appear to be a possible brake on future growth in the share price.

As Mr Corbyn said, his policies were very popular with the electorate.
These included;
FREE Broadband for all, FREE childcare, FREE social care, Cutting rail fares, FREE tuition fees wiping out student debt, Huge increases of expenditure on the NHS, a FOUR day week.
Its hard to see what was hard not to like, and all for the cost of 5p on the top rate of income tax for the top 5% of earners. Just think what he could have done with 6p on income tax.

Obviously you must do your own research and make your owns decisions.
In my humble opinion I believe you should take your handsome profit. I think this share is more likely to fall back to circa the 5p level with any significant growth coming in 2021 at the earlist.

On a different tack; I reported here that CWD has closed 3 offices locally and merged the businesses under a new brand name (with a predicted drop in turnover). Over recent months 3 new estate agency businesses have opened in the local area. Something about nature (and enterprise) abhors a vacuum.....

SAIN; You remain much better informed than most and I always enjoy your posts. I worked in commercial property in London for most of my career and worked for a commercial agent in the City for about 18 months (a long time ago). In my experience commercial property and residential property are as different as chalk and cheese and there is very little synergy between the businesses. Commercial agency is about the client contacts which are largely personal and growth in the business was dependent on attracting top individuals. The problem was that CWD did not realise this and did not realise that most of the stars that CWD would need to attract are equity partners in the top agencies and completely out of play. This is why I believe selling LSH was the best move. As you say, they are a stand alone business.
Looking again at the half year figures, Extraordinary Items remain the problem. £200m plus in 2018, and now £40m plus in 2019 so far. Once these are cleared from the accounts CWD can set about the debt.
These shares remain a long term hold for me and I hope that by 2021 we will be seeing a significant improvement in the share price.

Beware of describing yourself as honourable, Prince Andrew has justified his recent behaviour and actions because he is just "too honourable".

The only real management influence is the battle to maintain market share and even grow market share and this is where all the energy should now be focused while an upturn is awaited.
The share price has fluctuated as we know over the past 18 months or so and there is an opportunity for the traders to make money. This looked more interesting as a penny share. I fear the share price will fall after the consolidation until such time as a dividend is restored.

In my opinion LSH never sat well in a company that is residential property based. There was never a strategy to grow a commercial business, I think they bought LSH "because they could" at a time when they were throwing money around with their dreams of becoming a FTSE100 company.
The sale appears part of back to basics, ie residential property only.
As a business they are dependent on the residential property market and success or failure depends on a market over which they have no control. If we get brexit and the certainty that follows, we could well see a bounce in residential property transactions and CWD will benefit from this. CWD cannot influence the market, ie create or drive more residential property transactions, they just benefit when the market is buoyant and have to sit quietly when the market is slow.

Just re-reading my post of 12 August, 2018 setting out the CWD recovery plan.
1. Clean up the accounts by declaring a huge loss - Done.
2. Re-finance - Done.
3.Consolidation 10-1, they have just gone 50-1.
4. Sell LSH - Done.
5. Post a profit - waiting for the year end.
6. Resume the dividend - probably another year away.
7. Bonuses all round - I am sure this will happen.
Its called running a company by numbers, although I would not be surprised to see the share price back down to 5p in a couple of years.

Well that should keep the fossil fuelled power stations being built or programmed to be built in China and India going.....but they have enough coal anyway. The combined new fossil fuelled power stations proposed by those two countries will produce 4 x more fossil fuelled energy than the whole of the uk currently uses, in addition to their current production. Perhaps extinction rebellion are targeting the wrong country.