Member Info for romaron

The lenders would have been all over this with the proverbial comb. There was nothing there to frighten them. Kinda funny when you look at the share price.

I'd say they're raising money to form part of a deal. The pricing is encouraging. This isn't distress raising imo. The existing HYNs closed @ 102.50 144A and 102.00 Reg S.

"I am “the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer… in 800 years” she said, earning her an entirely unearned round of applause. The Tories have had three female PMs. You can’t boast about climbing Mount Snowdon when the opposition has already done Everest.

Did you know her parents were primary school teachers? That she went to a comprehensive school? The hall held its breath. For the rest of us, such things are quite normal; in the Labour imagination it’s akin to pulling yourself up from a rubbish tip in New Delhi."

Tim Stanley in fine form.

Https://www.tiktok.com/@metoffice/video/7416061828242918688?q=%40metoffice&t=1727092215048

The Met Office gets a lot of criticism but this deserves approbation. The TikTok by the Met got 2.2m views. The clickbait got a lot more. There is still work to be done.

"Corbyn always bought his own clothes. I’m sure every penny went to Oxfam." Tim Stanley Telegraph yesterday followed by

"For a snack I go to the bar, order tea and sandwiches and try my luck. “It’s on Lord Alli’s credit card,” I say. Blank faces. No sense of humour."

The earlier (11:14) piece was by Madeline Grant the Telegraph Parliamentary Sketchwriter.

"Finally – last and absolutely least – we came to international joke David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. “My job is to tell a new story about the United Kingdom abroad, a story of openness, of the future, of hope”, he said. I’d suggest that accidentally painting the ethnic cleansing of Armenians as “liberation” is more Lord Palmerston than Cool Britannia but there we are.

As always with Lammy, a man who is barely on nodding acquaintance with reality, there was a lot of brass neck here too. The Foreign Secretary lambasted the Conservatives for “handing out crony contracts to their mates”. It was as if all the speeches had been written pre-donorgate, and no one had thought to amend them.

His slow on-stage death reached its apogee when he got the crowd to chant back at him: “Britain is back!”. Buoyed by the modest success of this he tried to get them to do the same with the cry “Climate matters!” but to no avail. As embarrassing as it is to even type the words, David Lammy, Foreign Secretary, I suspect that we are going to get a lot more laughs from him and his hopelessly out-of-depth colleagues as the week progresses."

The FPS transports oil and gas. I'm no oilman but I'm guessing there is a lot of crossover regarding maintenance and costings. Only Ed and Lammy know how to unbake a cake.

Typo - last sentence - they can't dismantle the O&G industry on eBay.

I don't think any of the climate activists and Ed understand this.

Basically it is a share that is presently NOT traded. Purely indicative, a wet finger in the air. The market maker won't necessarily be in collusion with the only player in town (ML) but will be fully aware of the conditions and making a market when passing trade is virtually non-existent. We all know that nothing is going to happen until Labour give some firm indication (budget probably) and any deal on the boil will depend on that.

Even in a run down scenario we are one of the few remaining players in the NS and have a role to play. They can't dismantle the O&G on eBay.

Opening trade (UT) a SELL of three, yes 3, shares @10.80. I went out into the midday sun and bought some. Today's price bears no relationship to the intrinsic value. However, if the Labour party want to destroy what remains of the UK O&G industry they have an ideological mandate. They did better in the polls than Lenin did in 1917. You can see where Ed gets his inspiration from. The politicians know best.

In some ways the buyback is a distraction. The great game is afoot. The early prices are a joke. I bought 45,000 @11.2037

I got it from you KO. But seriously, I learned more about buybacks from a Serica presentation and their Chairman has been outspoken about the idiocy behind NZ. What has our old Etonian said or done?

I am cheered by two bits of news today. Well three actually but we already knew that electric cars were more expensive to run than ICE unless you have your own drive and access to electricity. I doubt Ed or many politicians drive through council estates that often. They certainly didn't grow up on one. My car gets me from A to B as quickly as an EV and depreciates far more slowly. My Lorus watch may not be as accurate as a Rolex but close enough for me.

The other news is more important imo. Equinor have ditched blue hydrogen. Backing up the Greg Jackson of Octopus claim that the production of hydrogen compared to "flushing the toilet with champagne".

The other news is not immediately obvious. ISG the Government builder (mainly prisons) is going bust. The largest failure in construction since Carillion. The main backer (Texan William Harrison) has refused to put in more money. Why should that interest us? He also lost a bucket load when he backed the Britishvolt fiasco.

The connection. Around 2010/11 EAGA was going bust because the Tory government reduced the Warm Front Scheme funding from £345m to £110m. As we all know subsidies aren't meant to be permanent and competition and economics are real. What remained of EAGA was rescued by a poorly run construction company called Carillion hoping to jump onto the gravy-train of energy saving works for public sector and commercial customers.

Now Ed may be working hard at widening the goal posts but even he will struggle to get them beyond the corner flags. It will be a very interesting run up to the budget.

*Registered interests Ed Miliband. No free clothes or glasses but a handy £233,600 to the central Labour Party to cover staffing costs for my frontbench role, paid in an initial instalment of £20,200 on 15 June 2023, then £19,400 a month thereafter until May 2024. The donor is Lisbet Rausing and expected to have continued until the election. All above board no doubt and evidence that “a workman is worthy of his hire”

It appears yesterday was a technical day with the triple witching. I looked at a few trades and UT’s with BP being a UT for £190m but HBR’s not being that different to the day before. So tying myself in knots I looked again at ENQ.

The larger than normal UT was followed by a similar amount of 2.429m shares timed @ 16:47:19 with a day’s total on London Stock Exchange of 7,641,774. This covers the most significant trading of the day – the 16:47 trade which could have been made at any time during trading hours and the UT. I have at the back of my mind that buybacks and 25% are part of the equation. So 25% of total day’s trades for the 16:47 amount to be buyback would need almost 10m shares so I’m probably up the wrong cul-de-sac there BUT I think ML was well aware of the triple witching and if there was any opportunity to increase buybacks they would use the technical opportunities available or maybe another party made the trade? In the scheme of things there were probably trades that could be anticipated but you need to be in the business – certainly not retail.

Most buybacks have been to Treasury. This means that they have no mathematical effect on the share price. The overall movement of UK O&G stocks appears to have been down since they started so we shouldn’t be surprised. There cannot have been a better time to buyback if you worked for EnQuest. The reason they went to Treasury is (I’m guessing the same reason SQZ did it) is to fund LTIP’s.

It is now time to think of the LTH’s and cancellation of share will help to a point but dividends are a more pressing requirement imo. Serica make them and they’re an AIM company. I don’t know about the rest of you but I am beginning to get impatient about the promised deals and using up our much vaunted tax credits. We don’t have much leverage as retail investors and we have received a poor return for our loyalty on rights issues in the past. The tax credits are actually OUR money. Maybe it is time to ask questions. I had one for the presentation but didn’t bother because it would have been ignored.

“What has Gareth Penny done since he became Chairman?”

I'm relaxed about today's share performance. Stocks overall were down and Lebanon is kicking off. I don't follow many stocks but SQZ and HBR also had a bad day and I think today being triple witching impacted negatively. If I had any free cash I'd have bought today and it is noticeable that our Directors haven't bought for sometime. Rules and other complications (budget, investment allowance etc.) can also mean their attention is on a bigger prize. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Typo - 'for renewables', not O&G.

Hi KO - I have no idea but pretty sure it'll be reported. I have asked Unite if they're attending. GMB and Unite alone represent around 1.8m members and their presence and input will not go unnoticed.

I will know more after the 7 October mass Lobby day in Parliament. I'll be there with Unite, the National Pensioners Convention and Scottish Pensioners Forum. There are always people that like to impress with inside knowledge and I may hear something. Of course something positive may come out of Labour's conference next week but they don't seem to be listening. They can carry on regardless but they'll eventually trigger a tripwire at some stage. I really feel that it is inching towards us. I think Lammy and Miliband are clinging to each other for support; both are out of their depth and we can help by throwing them an anvil. You don't really get Reeves or Rayner going out on a limb for O&G whilst Starmer can't take his eyes from the mirror.

"Next week, I’m hosting a discussion at the Labour conference asking if Ed Miliband’s 2030 grid decarbonisation target is realistic. A dangerous topic, it seems. Gary Smith, who runs the GMB union, has agreed to speak: he thinks this key pledge is laughably unworkable. An important point for discussion, surely? Not a single Labour MP is willing to debate him or defend the policy. Sponsors don’t seem wildly keen, either. It’s a shame. Party conferences should be a festival of political debate, not a domestic Davos."

Respect to Gary Smith - I'll try and find out if Unite are attending.

This interested me too from the same article in The Telegraph:

"When William Hague was Tory leader, a party that once had two million members was down on its luck with just 400,000. It now has less than half that. When Jeremy Corbyn deprived Theresa May of her majority in the 2017 snap election, Labour had 540,000 members. It’s now down by about a third: saner, but fewer. The 80,000 members that Reform UK claims to have is still small, but double the pre-election total. Farage intends to pass more power to the members so they will have the ability to remove him, hoping to make membership meaningful. And keep the momentum running."

.... and saw the low price. Then I looked at the volume. Abysmal. Could be like this up until the budget. Modestus made the right choice by going 'Jeremiah Johnson'. Just hope he didn't get pecked by a rabid penguin.

*Last known sighting Borgafjäll a few days ago.

They've got it in for me. I'm a persecuted minority (albeit a very large one).

https://x.com/john_toher/status/1836329676047847821/photo/1

They have handed those of us in the minority a gift in respect that we no longer get shouted down for being climate deniers. The climate threat is amazing in that it seems to extend our life spans. Fossil fuels provide dense cheap energy that doesn't appear to have done me any harm and I grew up with coal fires and paraffin heaters. I'm more concerned in the potential of being eaten by a polar bear that are becoming a pest.

Https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/iain-dale/cross-question-with-iain-dale-13-09-watch-again/

Since juststopoil won the election I wonder what one of their main backers, Dale Vince, thinks. Listen at 56:50 – he thinks ““bacon is more dangerous than North Korea”. I'm gonna try to get Rod Liddle's attention. Ridicule gets further than facts. Pass it on.