Member Info for reefles

"Following the proposed merger between Voyager Life plc and Northern Leaf plc, I wanted to write to you personally [Yes - this is an individual, personalised message, just to reefles] to set out why we believe that the combination of our two companies provides such a significant opportunity.

On completion we will have created only truly vertically integrated cannabis company in the British Isles, an “industry champion” covering the waterfront of cannabis activities from growing to manufacturing to retail and wholesale and, most importantly, our activities will encompass both the medical (THC) and over-the-counter (CBD) markets.

Voyager has been generating sales for over three years with petcare and contract manufacturing being our primary growth drivers. As you will know from communications from your board of directors, Northern Leaf is poised to accelerate sales during the course of this year and already has a confirmed sales pipeline for orders exceeding 500kg of product to be delivered per quarter from Q3 2024 onwards (representing in excess of £0.5m of revenues). Northern Leaf is also currently working with several additional suppliers to register its products for sale in New Zealand, Poland and the Czech Republic adding to the markets of UK, Germany and Australia which it already serves.

Factoring in a modest amount of merger synergies and efficiencies, we believe that the enlarged group is capable of being profitable within the next 12 months."

I'm a big fan of Ed's, but he's made life hard for himself by choosing to talk about what we're invested in.

He'd be much better to talk about how the only outgoings recently have been BoD costs, not investments, and the only value being created is from incoming cash not capital appreciation.

Given that more than 50% of the MCAP comes from £7m cash, he'd be better off talking through which bank account he's stuck it in. I'm getting 4.8% on a current account and 5.4% on a notice account for the dividends paid out of an endowment I manage. High street interest on £7m cash is a stronger performance than the holdings.

Err... that's bad enough, is it?? I'm directly invested in Northern Leaf.

I only invested in Seed as a hedge. I thought Northern Leaf would IPO really quickly, and my plan was to sell my stock in Seed just before the IPO, so if the IPO was unsuccessful I would have cashed out on Seed at a good point.

Several years later, with both at bargain basement prices, I don't think I can legitimately use the term "invested". Something like "spunked" would be more accurate.

(For anyone actually interested in this saga... I have given up on the dream of buying a boat, but I am now renting one. That's what Ed has done to me. I could have bought a boat and scuttled it, and been in the exact same position as today.)

Mbvb… there are some people on this BB who are jelly of Ed, because he’s out there living his best life rather than being some kind of nerd. Folk on here don’t appreciate that he’s a great guy, who’s into gaming and sports cars and banging. They’d rather have some shirt with a calculator and a blackberry and contacts in the market. You won’t hear these criticisms from me, though. I like to think that he’s my mate and is doing a great job.

Welcome, Mbvb2.

So... was that your £1,500 today? Or were you the £28.05? I assume you are a real person.

Hah! Good post. Yeah, I'm not sure it's really something that Ed should be proud about - that his buyback has effectively failed. It hasn't driven up the SP, and volume has been so low that they can't complete the buyback despite the SP being half what they'd budgeted for.

Longlad / Dags - sorry for the grumpy post yesterday. Appreciated the responses. All good points.

This BB just gets weirder. We get one sensible post from Takayama, then four more nonsense posts from Dags.

I do not understand how you can imply Ed is an idiot for failing to invest in Bitcoin.

Well done to Dags for making millions off crypto, or whatever, but these comments are like Longlad saying the other day: "How many of these 7 stocks has our fund managers put US into?" with Tesla and Meta on the list. Like... obviously none, because that isn't the purpose of Seed.

I'm still a yaysayer. I didn't mean it when I said Mr Ed was a horse... it was peer pressure.

SEED still has a whole heap of cash, and a big ol' Mellon on top, (who has been increasing his stake). That cash will need to be paid out / invested wisely at some point. Won't it?

...err... Ed's a horse.

And we're back!

...you may well ask.

Well, not that I got bored doing my tax return, but I thought I'd tot it up.

As of yesterday, Seed had bought back 9,361,000 shares at an average of 2.950p / share, i.e. £276,162. This is 44% of the target amount of shares, for 32% of the target budget.

Remaining budget is for 11,889,000 shares at an average of 4.827p (total £573,838)

So, in some ways that's really good... and in other ways it is not. Thanks all!!

Anyone got any more info on that big, weird transaction?? It does look like someone’s sold their shares to themselves for a fee of £300, 13 seconds later. It’s nearly 2.5% of Seed. I’d quite like to know what that’s about…

Always good to see DaP!

Has anyone kept track of the share buyback? The volume limit is frustrating, but we must have a decent average so far. As the deadline approaches (end of Feb?) shouldn’t the SP get pushed to 6p, the cap of the buyback? Because it looks like the budget will be underspent, the actual avg price will be under the target limit, and the share quota will still be short…? (Does that make sense?) If it weren’t for the volume limit, I’d have thought this would mean Ask would be bang on 6p by Feb 28th

I think people are too hard on Ed. Think back to the AGM… remember how nicely he’d had his hair done? You can’t just say the man does nothing and no one respects him. I think he looks great.

Northern Leaf has just agreed heads of terms with a European medical cannabis group, to allow vertical integration. SHs in NL will be offered shares in the resulting group. More news to follow next week.

J2O - it’s annoyingly difficult to get a quick answer to that. Feb 2021, per below?? Although, does it look like the RNS has been done wrong? Before that, looks like end of 2015 / early 2016, during the last buyback, through his IoM holding co. It looks like some options were converted as well, though…

https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/FFWD/holdings-in-company-r015v8qttsistjc.html

Really... still no comments on this??

Holdings:

17,194,590 8.08% Peter Saladino

14,783,722 6.95% Jim Mellon

7,943,687 3.73% Lloyd Leckerman

7,205,005 3.39% Norbert Teufelberger

6,355,460 2.99% Richard Hackett

..........

53,482,464 25.14% Sub total

4,680,000 2.20% Ed McDermott *

1,674,024 0.79% Ian Burns

3,950,000 1.86% Share buyback

17,300,000 8.13% Remaining buyback **

..........

81,086,488 38.11% Total known holdings

* at 2.549p average (although they may have been a bonus, not cash)

** if fully subscribed

Daily deals (oldest to newest):

600,000 @ 4.083 = £24,498

500,000 @ 3.814 = £19,070

650,000 @ 3.608 = £23,452

200,000 @ 3.650 = £ 7,300

300,000 @ 3.675 = £11,025

500,000 @ 3.525 = £17,625

100,000 @ 3.650 = £ 3,650

250,000 @ 3.590 = £ 8,975

200,000 @ 3.380 = £ 6,760

200,000 @ 3.100 = £ 6,200

100,000 @ 2.950 = £ 2,950

250,000 @ 2.863 = £ 7,158

100,000 @ 2.750 = £ 2,750

Total:

3,950,000 @ 3.580 = £141,413 (c. 18.5% of total buyback by shares / c. 16.6% by budget)

Remaining budget:

17,300,00 @ 4.096 = £708,587

It won’t drop much more. When you think that the buyback is restricted by volume (can it only trade 20% of daily volume?) all it takes it for some traders to cotton on to it. If someone buys today at 3.3p, they can sell at 25% profit in a couple of days - providing they’ve got some followers who tag along to boost the volume.

Share buy back reported so far, by day:

600,000 @ 4.083 = £24,498

500,000 @ 3.814 = £19,070

650,000 @ 3.608 = £23,452

200,000 @ 3.650 = £7,300

300,000 @ 3.675 = £11,025

500,000 @ 3.525 = £17,625

Total:

2,750,000 @ 3.744 = £102,970

Remaining budget:

18,500,00 @ 4.038 = £747,030

Why would anyone sell for less …?