Member Info for phenomenonnick

"This David" is a successful VC, having run Origen Capital for many years. His recent and relatively short stint at Eqtec has made excellent returns for Riverfort, who are also the largest shareholder in Pires. Green Tech remains an attractive sector and I would certainly back his recommendations.

Oh dear. You seem to be rehearsing old ground GedW - obviously market cap increases if shares in issue rise. More importantly as a component of value growth here has been the share price performance, which has been spectacular. EQT's even more so, and hopefully David Palumbo will help Pires to further the continued excellent progress. Some investee companies have already performed spectacularly and none have failed yet. The evidence so far is that shareholders don't need faith - anyone who invested between 2016 and the start of 2021 is sitting on chunky profits. Let's hope it continues to be an outstanding investment and we can save our reserves of faith for the majority of AIM companies who have not been able to match the outstanding performance we have seen here.

Oh dear GW. How did you turn so pessimistic about a stock that has performed so well? And your comments just don't fit the facts. I've been here for five years and participated in all the placings. The last one was at 2p, yes a discount to the prevailinng price, but the associated warrants were at 4p, well over the prevailing price. The previous placing, a year or two earlier, was at 2.4p. For years a placing wasn't a way to profit at all, never mind "the main way to profit". John Mahtani arrived in the summer, and all his shares were bought in the market (or from me). He was picking them up at 4p five weeks ago. He's trebled his money. In five weeks! Yes the Pires investments are speculative, but there is a diverse portfolio of them. I am sure some will fail (though none have yet). We don't need to rely on your opinion, humble or otherwise, we have the news flow of fundraisings by investees at multiples of the price we invested at, and we have some highly profitable disposals (Artomatix and a chunk of the VRE stake) which have returned profit and cash to Pires. I agree it's hard to value, but this stock remains more than 50% of my portfolio and while that's a risky position, I love their spread of investments each of which has the potential for excellent returns. They're early stage but progress so far is highly encouraging. I might also add that Peter Redmond is a man of the highest integrity and I trust him and his board completely. The same cannot be said for many companies at the smaller cap end of the AIM market. This has been a tremendous investment over the past couple of months and while a short pause for breath might be in order there's every reason to believe this will continue to perform well.

Yes it's part of the Sure Valley Ventures portfolio. SVV sold a chunk (generating cash for PIRI) but still have 4.38%. PIRI have 13% of SVV so sbout 0.5% of VRE. About £150k or so. Not huge in the scheme of things but good to see it doing well - Pires is stuffed full of lots of small but intereting holdings in all sorts of tech.

On the warrants, bear in mind that over 60% are held by Chris Akers, Riverfort, me, and a couple of other long term holders. My plan is to exercise near to expiry next year and I guess the others will do the same. So although not many have been exercised, I think it'll probably only be dribs and drabs. Barring a few special situations (crystallising gains etc) you would surely only exercise warrants early if you have no shares left to sell. So I really don't think they're too much of a problem in Pires compared to other stocks.

Hi Terrier - speaking purely for myself, given how much of my portfolio is in Pires, I won't be adding unless my Pires stake falls to less than 50% of my portfolio. I doubt that will happen.

That said, you're right - I do know that large holders who have deeper pockets than me have taken advantage of the price weakness. The current price does seem a great opportunity. Think it's a mix of concerns about warrants and the value of Yop tokens falling back a bit - though still many mutliples of the launch price.

GK - thank you SO much for this post. Like an idiot I hadn’t thought to check Companies House. It would appear we have 10.3% of Pluto. With talk of a £50m float for Pluto next quarter, that’s £5m+ for Pires, and £1.6m for the Pires Yop tokens, plus what? Another £1m or £2m for the stake in DeTech? Pires is suddenly into crypto in a big way. What an incredible company this is shaping up to be. Congrats to the board, tremendous effort.

Yes the 14p broker note didn't take into account future investments, and since then there's been both the YOP crypto stake and the low6 investment.

Hehe I'm afraid I don't have much insight TT. The way it happened for me was, after about 25 years of investing on and off, I went TR1 in a small company (Feedback). A few years later a broker (not that company's broker) noticed and rang me up, took me to lunch, and explained how it works. Since then I've called a few brokers usually to say I'm particularly interested in company X who are clients of theirs, and would like to be able to support them in a future fundraising. This gets you on that broker's list and they call you up for fundraisings for other clients too. Worth looking at who a broker's clients are to find a selection you're interested in.

They need to be sure you can be trusted with being made inside, and that you understand your legal responsbilities, including being prepared to sit and lose money or allow others to do so if that's the way things go.

Contrary to Ged's experience, at the microcap level in which I tend to focus, placees are rarely institutions. They do focus on larger investors but only because if it's a £1m company, someone with 0.1% only has a grand invested and it's hard to reach them ecomically. Stuff like PrimaryBid seems to be trying to address this.

Good luck!

That was me. It wasn't over the ask yesterday! At least not when I bought it. Then today the spread narrowed significantly.

Hi there,

The trade was indeed me, my broker sold direct to the broker of another holder who I'm confident will be a long term holder. The TR1 was last night's position, this is a further sale but I'm now done selling until we're trading much higher, and I don't need to issue a new TR1 as I still own over 4%.

Having invested in 2016 and backed every fundraise since, I've reached a point where it was too big a holding. I remain hugely supportive - even after this sale and today's dip, Pires remains 60% of my portfolio, not including the warrants. Pires is taking off and has much further to go. I just need to recognise the reality that I can't continue to maintain a huge percentage as it grows.

Good luck all - let's get this back into double figures and hopefully see 20p before long.

Good stuff :)

You’re right to highlight section 10 of the RNS on 31 July. The relevant notes from it are these (remembering Vela’s Argo shares were Group 2 assets):

· the New Ordinary Shares will remain traded on AIM and will have the benefit of the Group 1 Assets following completion of the Proposals.

· the Special Deferred Shares and the shares of NewCo [BIXX] will not be admitted to trading, and are "stapled" to each other for transfer purposes; they will be held only by the Prior Shareholders, following completion of the Proposals, who will have the benefit of the Group 2 Assets and the Debt, to the extent that it is repaid and that a Special Dividend can be made.

NO NO NO Mister Positive. It’s like you aren’t reading before posting :)
“We” do not have any interest in Argo or in BIXX, the only people who do are people who held Vela shares prior to the August 2020 restructuring.

This has been extensively covered here previously but I appreciate when boards are popular it’s easy to lose track. RNS of 31 July explains it all. Vela’s Argo stake and other Group 2 assets were demerged, they’re owned by BIXX Ltd which is owned by the people who held Vela shares at the time. BIXX bought the assets with a loan from Vela. When it repays that loan, the proceeds go to the Vela Special Deferred shares, which are also owned by the people who held Vela shares at the point of the reconstruction.

As others have noted Vela today has other exposure to crypto though.

Majorboy - my read of the RNS is that Tennyson has replaced Mirabaud, so Tennyson is joint broker with Peterhouse. It’s Peterhouse who did the last placing that brought AAA investors in, and who were previously sole brokers for very many years.

Pablo as the RNS makes clear, the change of joint broker is just because the team at Mirabaud, who were only fairly recently appointed, are now Tennyson.

That said, having been here for many years, the placing in April last year (which brought AAA investors on board) showed that placings can be positives for investment companies. AAA similarly managed to use placings to underpin frothy rises and solidify a rise as a new base from which further heights could be tackled.

Yes that could be amazing GK! We can but hope. Excellent start to the year for Pires as people wake up to the potential in its investments, and start looking forwards rather than back.

Couldn't resist at these prices!

Yes that's a decent summary. In addition they have made further investments into SVV (but not disclosed precise timings and amounts - from memory the total commitment was c£2m in addition to the initial investment. They've also got some legacy investments (including about a quarter of their peak Eco Atlantic stake and some Portage Biotech shares which are quoted in the US) - I guess worth about £500k if not yet sold). They also have a fair bit of cash, and about £2m to come in over the next 18 months from warrants at 4p per share, which will add 50m to the number of shares in issue. Sure Valley plc (SURE) has a bigger chunk of SVV and is an alternative place to look for news on their portfolio. Also see the Mirabaud broker note on Pires which has an indicative price of 14p per share (though with no proper attempt at analysis). I'm confident it'll beat 10p in 2021 and multiples of that in the years ahead, with fairly limited downside.

Hi TT, yes as I've said here previously I hold far more of these than is healty for my portfolio size. Last week I sold 1m of the 2m "extra" shares that I bought in the autumn when the price seemed crazily cheap. I don't intend selling the other 1m at these new levels but will offload them before 10p. The remaining 5m or so I was planning on selling at 10p as that fills my pension pot, but I've been persuaded I should just accept my responsibility to society and pay the tax.

Happy to answer questions about warrants on here or the TRAF board, though in the limited time I have for chat with other investors I mainly use Twitter rather than LSE. You can track me down on Twitter as BrightGrow SSAS (the other fund I manage) and send me a message there. Not ruling out a call but I don't have huge amounts of time - I have a full on job as a CEO and I have a young family so in the precious moments when I'm not working I'm focused on them.

Meanwhile yes Good Luck All here, high hopes for Pires in 2021.