Member Info for RWT2

If you only invested in companies whose business workings you knew inside out, then you would probably end up investing in the same industry as you work in. That would be putting all your eggs in one basket as in the event of a downturn in your industry you would be at risk of losing your job and your investment wealth.

I fully agree that this stock is driven by news, hope and hype and to an extent so what? As long as you know this is high risk, just embrace it. Yes, you might lose your shirt, but you might also back a winning horse.

Pre-2008, everyone thought they knew that banks were boring and solid and these "safe-ish" assets formed the bedrock of many a portfolio. Turned out nobody understood the risks and investors got the shock of their lives to find out the level of risk they had taken on and were dismayed when the house of cards came tumbling down. At least with this stock, unless you are a complete fool you go into it with your eyes open knowing that it's risky (and OK, there may be a few fools who post on this board - hahahaha). I personally think this visibility of risk is better.

OWLS - I don't usually post on this board. All my posts have been on Agronomics (ANIC) but I am an SMT holder and saw your post and couldn't help myself commenting. My apologies if this comes across as being facetious - I can assure you it is not meant to be and my comments are genuine.

If I have understood you correctly, your investment strategy is as follows:
Step 1 - Purchase share
Step 2 - Ignore share for 12 months
Step 3 - Sell share irrespective of performance

If I have picked you up correctly, that is absolutely brilliant. It truly makes me smile that 2/3 of your investments make money via this strategy and calls into question the value of any active fund manager (I am almost certain most active fund managers won't make money on 2/3 of their investments).

Is this a recognized strategy? How did you come up with it? Can you logically account for why it appears to be as successful as it is? Is there specific types of stock where you think this is more likely to work or can you more or less take a dartboard approach to it (if I was brave enough i would be minded to take the dartboard approach).

Agree that is an interesting article. To some extents it is reassuring that this is difficult stuff. If it was easy then the barriers to entry would be low and every man and their dog could get in on the act. I would assume that would mean that although cultured meat could grab a bigger section of the market more quickly, the individual companies would be valued at lower multiples of their earnings because the industry would be overly competitive. So my logic would be difficult = high tech = high barrier to entry = higher company valuations so you can get a higher valued company on a smaller share of the overall market. This is probably a good thing, but won't last for long. My biggest fear is the comments re. having to resort to GM which may well make access to the EU market much more difficult. Probably not a problem for the US though which is a worthwhile market even if that was the entirety of the market.

idg69 - you have a genuinely interesting view that this is not a high risk stock. I am invested in this precisely because I think it is high risk. If it was low risk, then I would assume that would result in a high chance of low returns. If it's high risk, that implies a high chance of losing it all but a small chance of astronomical gains. It's the latter I'm after! The acknowledged long timescale of this stock would almost seem to go hand in hand with it being high risk - the further out you push the prospect of market success (and for this stock it might be 10 years+), then does the passage of time not automatically increase the risk as predictions become less and less valid because you have no idea what disruptive events might occur which will blow the investment case out the water. Think of your 2011 self - did you think this would be what the world was like in 2021? I didn't! So I am genuinely interested in a well thought out justification for this stock being low risk, as that may force me to adjust my position.

DeuceJaxon - your view on shorters is too simplistic. If this stock is being meaningfully shorted and the share price is therefore artificially held back, then you are unequivocally benefiting from this. The consensus view on this board is that ANIC is one for the long term - at least 5 years and probably closer to 10 years. I'm going out on a limb and assuming you share this consensus view and are holding for the long term. So if the share price is driven down now, this is giving you the opportunity to buy at an undervalued price and when the re-rating comes due to news flow of portfolio companies achieving market success, you will re-rate from a lower starting point and thus make bigger gains. Conversely, if the shorters are right then this is keeping the price low right now and if the market collapses, you will fall from a lower starting point, thus your losses are limited. Either way, you win and what's not to like. You just have to see things from a view point that does not stop at the tip of your nose.

100Cups - your entry point doesn't matter. Drip feed money in to this every month without really looking at the share price. Some months you'll buy high, others you'll buy low and it will even out in the end. I don't think anyone is buying this share because they are particularly fussed about the market valuation right now (unless you are a trader nipping in and out of this stock). This is an industry in its infancy that doesn't currently have any meaningful presence in its target market. The market potential is enormous (literally trillions) so the hope is that the share price trades on several multiples of its current price in say 10 years time. Does it really matter if that is several multiples of 25p, slightly fewer multiples of 35p or fewer multiples again of 50p? To me, not really. In 10-15 years time, ANIC's market cap could easily be several billion. However, and you are only allowed to whisper it on this bulletin board, it might not! You have to accept that it might be worth zero. Most companies fail, and I have no doubt that many/most of the companies in ANIC's portfolio will not succeed, but there is indeed a whiff of a chance that one or two of them might just be spectacular winners. You can't know which ones will succeed and you can't know over what time period but it should be clearer in 10 years if you can wait that long by which time you'll either have lost the lot or possibly made enough to retire. Today's share price is practically irrelevant though as can be seen by the disconnect between NAV and share price.

Ryesloan - I think in my fag packet calculation I did assign more than the book price to ANIC of BluNalu by a few multiples and arrived at a valuation of BluNalu which is less than 1/15th of the market valuation of Oatly, so I was merely observing that it is optimistic to look at the market value of Oatly and then make any statement to suggest that BluNalu could be anything like that. Anyway, we will need to agree to disagree.

RyeSloan - I think we are missing each others points here and this is in danger of becoming a bit shouty. I'll have one last bite at the cherry to explain my point. A previous poster highlighted the market value of Oatly with the question being how much are BluNalu worth. The clear inference was that it could be the same order of magnitude. I am pointing out that this is exceptionally unlikely to be the case right now and the wider market would seem to agree with my interpretation. It is public information that ANIC hold about 5% of BluNalu and there is widespread speculation that BluNalu will IPO within the year. It's also public information that ANIC hold about 15 or 16 other investments. So if you very optimistically say that the market assigns about 25% of ANIC's total market value (currently £141M) to being purely due to it's 5% holding in BluNalu and that this is one of the few ways to gain pre-IPO exposure to BluNalu, then that means ANIC's holding in BluNalu is optimistically worth £35 million and if £35 million is 5% of BluNalu market cap, then BluNalu is currently worth £705 million give or take. It can't currently be worth anything like Oatly so it is unreasonable and misleading to other potential investors to draw that parallel. I note that Desmond45 has put me on "filter" - he clearly believes the alternative to this that I am an incredibly influential shorter who is single handedly holding back this stock by posting mildly questioning comments on an inconsequential bulletin board. Which of these do you think is more plausible?

RyeSloan - you have missed my point. The direct parallel was drawn by others between the Oatly IPO value and the potential value of the BluNalu IPO. There is no direct read across. The Tom Brady comment was tongue in cheek (I thought that was reasonably obvious) - the main point there was that Oatly's valuation seems partly tied to popular and influential backers. You have also missed that I have stated quite a few times that I hope ANIC do spectacularly well - for what it's worth, I actually believe they have a potential market value of > 100x current price, but I also accept the likelihood of that is < 5% and the timescale for them to achieve that even if they did could be beyond my investment horizon. You don't appear to want to hear any potential downside either - refer to my previous post and Google/AltaVista "confirmation bias".

Deucejaxon - Just.......aaaaaaaaaarghhhhh!!! Why is presenting an alternative viewpoint "trolling"? Someone highlights the exceptional IPO of Oatly and draws a direct parallel with BluNalu. I highlight why there are key differences between the companies and try to inject some mild humour to emphasize the selling points of these products are very different. This is trolling? Why?

As I have said before, I am not clear why anyone invested in ANIC only wants to hear the rose tinted spectacles version of the investment case and doesn't want to consider that it just might not work out. I think you should Google "confirmation bias" - or you could try "AltaVista-ing" it instead - oh no, you can't, because in spite of AltaVista being the market leading search engine of it's day with the world at it's feet, they fell by the wayside, got bought out by Yahoo and are now proverbial nobodies. You don't know and I don't know that the same fate could not befall BluNalu for any number of reasons. If you don't accept that it is worthwhile to hear that side of the argument then you could lose your shirt on this or indeed any other investment.

As you have probably guessed by now, I see some challenges to the assumption that the valuation of Oatly has any read across to BluNalu.

1 - Oatly have been around since the 90's - it's taken then 20+ years to get to the position they are in.
2 - Oatly sell a product for which there is a proven market - people are actively seeking non-dairy alternatives for dietary/health/ethical reasons + they get to jump on the no cow farts bandwagon. BluNalu have a theoretical market and people are not actively seeking a lab grown fish alternative. It's an entirely different marketing story and almost certainly a more difficult sell.
3 - Oatly product is sold from 90000+ outlets across 20 countries. BluNalu currently sells nothing to no-one.
4 - The celebrity backing probably matters. Almost every Oatly article s accompanied by the comment that it is backed by Oprah, Jay-Z and Natalie Portman. Getting a heavy hitting social influencer onboard is likely to be worth something. Perhaps we could get NFL star Tom Brady on board with a quote like "Hi, I am multi-superbowl winning Tom Brady and I won't eat fish unless it's grown in the finest quality bioreactor. And by golly, that bioreactor had better be made from nothing but the best ASTM A182 dual certified grade 316/316L stainless steel, sourced from an American steel mill and powered by nothing but the fumes of Euphoria"!
5 - If you believe efficient market theory, the current value of BluNalu should already be priced into ANIC's share price.

These companies are at entirely different stages with different proven markets. I admire BluNalu, but they just won't be valued the same as Oatly (yet). Hopefully in 5-10 years time that could be a different story, but I would rein in expectations for such a mega-IPO.

Re. market approval in Singapore, I think the article I posted showed that Singapore should perhaps be considered an outlier as they import 90% of their food and have a government with a commitment to change this and improve food security/availability. Cracking the US and EU will be more difficult.

I quote from the article re. genetic modifications: "there are some suggestions that it will be very difficult to create a commercially viable product without some form of genetic modification". I don't know what is the basis of this statement, so just putting it out there. With regard to why we won't be able to call it meat, well it looks like some states in the US already have this legislation in place and there is an enormous incumbent industry with a very loud voice and deep pockets to lobby government to prevent market disruptors like CellAg from gaining a foothold. As I keep saying on this site (but I don't think most of you believe me!) - this is not going to be easy.

See link below to interesting article talking about regulatory approval for EU and US and possible market challenges. Unfortunately access to the full report costs about $6K so I am going to pass on that.

https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/idtechex-discusses-which-country-will-be-next-to-approve-cultured-meat-825536096.html

Some takes:
1 - Does anyone know if the process requires the use of genetically modified materials? If so, then EU approval is going to be challenging.
2 - Does anyone know anything about Wildtype or Finless Foods who may be competitors to BluNalu?
3 - Significant marketing challenges ahead relate to product labelling if you are not allowed to call your product "meat" or "milk" or "fish" etc. or even allude to the fact that these are alternatives to said products. Who wants to buy something called "solid, flesh-like protein, but definitely not meat......"

RyeSloan - You've got me on a roll now! As further examples, a poster previously provided a link to an article where someone estimated the value of BluNalu could be up to $12.8 billion over some undefined timescale. The estimate was based on an assumed price of product of $5/lb. With a 2 minute Google search I can find the average price that Mowi (world's largest salmon producer) achieved for their product which is about 2/3 of that - do you really think cultured fish of any random species will sell at a premium to a premium product? That should at least raise an eyebrow as to the thoroughness of the valuation. They had also used the same valuation metrics as the semiconductor industry ....just because? The Citywire article also previously posted quoted some fund manager as saying ANIC should benefit from the plant based revolution. I am serious - this fund manager rates ANIC because he thinks plant based products are the future!!!!!!!!! This should absolutely be challenged. Don't just follow the herd. Think about your investments.

Hi RyeSloan - Maybe I am on the negative side, but I thank you for your comments delivered in a non-aggressive manner which is unusual for these boards. As I said in a previous post, I think it is good to hear both sides of an argument so you and I can both decide if we are over or under invested.
So I want to hear the news that tells me "here is the potential market size" or "here is the progress we have made on achieving price parity with conventional meat" etc. However, simply stating "here is the market size of conventional meat, ergo we will capture 90% of that market within 10-20 years" (which is more or less what some of the Times article quotes implied) is naively optimistic and I think this forum should allow these statements to be challenged to ensure all investors are aware of the level of risk they are taking on and that they are comfortable with this. So other people might read the BBC article and say that change is on the cards and this is good for ANIC without also thinking that there are enormous sums of money involved in farming with vested interests to retain the status quo and also enormous undesirable social consequences of eliminating a profession. Thinking about the downside might influence what level of risk you want to take on.
As I have said previously, i don't have a huge amount in this (circa £3K) and I hope it does really well, but I also have a few other speculative punts on crypto, AI, biotech etc. and actually I would like to expand on these speculative bets. But I realistically expect only 1 or 2 of these to come good.

I'm not sure what to take from that article. Are we to draw the conclusion that conventional farming requires lots of state aid, therefore if Cell Ag takes off we can throw all these farmers on the scrap heap and save the taxpayer a bob or 2? I'm not sure that's unequivocally good and just highlights that there are many, many challenges to overcome before ANIC comes good.

I don't think we should get above our station. Posts on this forum are inconsequential to the share price. We should be encouraging alternative views and not criticizing posters for "deramping". Why do you only want to hear views that align with your own? Wouldn't you rather hear both sides of an argument and then decide whether you are over or underinvested? Go on, post something meaningful!

AgroFan - "Professional pundits" have no more insight than any of us here. Read Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock to confirm. Or don't bother - just think about it. ANIC is invested in a startup industry trying to break into a well established market. There will be at least 1000 challenges to overcome along the way and it won't have a meaningful impact for at least the next 5 - 10 years if at all. Any one of these 1000+ challenges may prove a bridge too far for this to take off. You just can't know. What does a professional pundit bring to the table that is not summarized in that statement?

OK, some minor observations about the Sunday Times article, and I will start all this by saying I am invested in ANIC and hope they do spectacularly well.
1 - It quotes an estimate that 90% of meat will be lab grown.
2 - It estimates the market value is a potential 5 trillion.
Now I didn't particularly pay attention to who wrote the article or who was quoted as the source of these figures, but I am almost certain none of them went by the name of Marty McFly, nor did they drive a DeLorean. Let me be clear - these are no better than fairytale numbers. Why do I say that? Well just look at the shocks which have shaped the world, including the investment world over the past 20 or so years. To name but a few we had the dotcom boom, bust and back to boom again, September 11th, 2008 financial crisis, Eurozone crisis, Brexit, Covid 19.....need I say more. Going back further in time, who in the 1980's was predicting the fall of communism and the Soviet Union (clue - no-one!). In the 1960's, everyone was worried about a forthcoming ice-age, not global warming. In the 1940's the then head of IBM predicted the world would have no use for more than 5 computers and 5000 photocopying machines. In 2003, Lehman Brothers predicted Amazon would run out of cash - look how their fortunes reversed. No-one can account for the effect of these existential threats and just because the investment story sounds plausible does not mean that people will not laugh at our naivety 10 - 20 years from now.
Now I believe this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, but do not believe these made up numbers because they fit a plausible narrative. Folk here seem to be pinning a lot of hope on BluNalu (me being one!). But again, don't kid yourself that getting to the market early automatically means you will remain the top dog. Google was not the frontrunner in it's field - that was AltaVista. Facebook was not the front runner in it's field - that was Myspace (and do you even remember Friendster, SixDegrees or Friendsreunited). There will be competitors out there who just might usurp everything in 5 years time.
But I am invested and here's why. You've got to be in it to win it as the gameshow says. So the overwhelming majority of my investments are in notionally much lower risk assets - I have disproportionately high allocations to cash, government bonds, gold and a bit further up the risk scale a FTSE All World Equity Index tracker. But at the other end I have tried to invest small sums in lots of different frontier developments, accepting that most of them will fail but if one (or best case 2) come good then they might increase 100+ fold. But it's important you have lots of these speculative bets as most will return 0. If anyone knows how to invest in CRISPR technology, then let me know (if you don't know what that is, then Google, or Altavista(!) "Has the 1st person to live to 1000 already been born" - surely there's got to be an investment bubble in eternal life

Desmond45 - don't want to get into an argument, but you are confusing smart with lucky. You got in at the right time and couldn't possibly have predicted the success you have achieved. For those who invested 2 weeks ago, they have massively underperfomed the FSTE All World Index. They weren't stupid investors - they were unlucky (over the short term). Comparing this stock to the FTSE World Index over 2 weeks or 2 years is meaningless. The entire growth of this stock has been over a period of 6 months. The success of this stock is hugely uncertain - that makes you and I speculators. You (and I) are betting on an enormous shift in consumer trends which we have no influence over and which may not happen. All that being said, I hope it does happen and I wish us both the best of luck, but I can't help but reiterate that neither of us are smart investors - so far for you this has been a lucky gamble. If it doesn't turn out that way over the long term will you come back on this board and say you were stupid? I hope not. You would just be someone with average luck.