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Thanks all! Any views on what triggered the significant fall the last few days(on pretty big volumes)??
While completely under water on my holding now t is very tempting to double up....(my biggest investment failure...).
Cheeers,

Looks like a hold and pray...

Just to clarify, US Banks, and US community Banks, also follow BASEL 3 liquidity ratio regimes. Just like European Banks. However, European Banks are weighted down with insane EU regulation in terms of MiFid but also on ESG. A couple of reasons why returns on North American Banks have exceeded European Banks. However, SVB was one of the biggest proponents of ESG, DEI and Wokeness and as they seemingly abandoned meritocracy for this new undemocratic anti-western religion it is not stupid to assume they lost focus on what they need to do to run a bank. Pretty much like the Biden administration. If this religion is not removed we can expect almost all areas of society to collapse. Already many examples of that.

Obviously important to optimise your portfolio in your tax situation and certainly in the UK the best opportunities may lie in the various tax free wrappers. But these big shares like LGEN are owned internationally so for us in Switzerland for example we pay income tax on dividends but no capital gains tax on shares (or bonds). In the US you pay income tax on dividends and capital gains tax which depends on the length of the holding period. That's even before institutional ownership and speculative trading kicks in. All in all, in my view, the international and diversity of ownership of these type of companies provides no opportunity to "be smart". Best thing, in my view, is to look at your own personal tax situation and design a strategy accordingly.

I don t understand this reasoning. While I agree (with analysts) that the stock is cheap from a valuation perspective, the Bank is not transforming, not in a good way anyway. They are in the same geography with the same (diminishing) product range and they still have not improved markets shares or capabilities of their Private Bank or their Commercial Bank. Their Transformation investments vastly prioritise costs, not new product investments. All they "can" do is to cut costs and hope that the UK economy improves to reduce write offs. They do not have a fee business and their culture, after they eliminated meritocracy, is internally focused. I hope the stock will rise over and above Euro Stoxx Banks indices but history distinctly says otherwise.

Thanks for this!

Am also looking to load up a bit more as my dividend portfolio yields the next month. My main concern is really the lack of liquidity in the stock.

Fleecy, the way the construct deferred compensation schemes are extremely bad for recipients. They inflate the number on your payslip so it looks like you are being well paid but then you are either dependent on LBG hitting various qualitative goals (such as complaints, ROE etc) or the actual share-price itself (which obviously has been going down for 7 years). This is in theory good for the company but it has distinctly been bad for the employees. The combination of this payment method with the removal of merit virtually guarantees low quality poorly motivated employees. The only hope is cost cutting and improving interest rate margins.

Agree with the first post. Relative to the negative macro environment LBG may be come out better than others tomorrow.

I agree with Stagecoach. This requires a complete clean out of management because management consultants, incompetent diversity hires or old "leaning bankers" will not cut it. When I was there they did everything to reduce the fee income and focused exclusively on lending. And the UK only. NatWest had the people and the muscle memory to achieve this, LBG doesn't. But I understand Charlie is a keen cyclist. We all need helmets on this week.

This stock is exactly where it was 10 years ago when I first owned it (while also working there). It did well after the privatisation in a bullish market but for about 7 years it has done nothing else than going down. This is despite good interest rate margins, high UK markets shares in retail, cards and car financing. Plus analysts have been more bullish than not for all of this time. The stock is a slow follower in bull markets, a fast decliner in bear markets and the government will reduce dividends in crises. In summary it has no positive momentum today or over recent times. If I didn't already own a sizeable position from deferred compensation and yet to vest schemes, all of which are very much under water, I would not own this share. Plus during my 5-6 years there the quality of management deteriorated, meritocracy was completely abandoned and every attempt to build fee income (as opposed to interest rate income) was abandoned. Market shares in commercial banking, insurance and private banking never took off. One can hope for a good dividend this year and that funds will increase their allocation to LBG so that the share recovers, but it is hard for me to see any positive surprises unless there will be a solid FTSE bull market, a strongly improved UK economy via lower taxes and regulation and peace in Ukraine.

What do you mean? Am foreign investor and not as familiar with the news...

Does anybody have any comments on the call this week? I found it informative (the slides were really good) and somewhat reassuring so will continue to build the position. But my goodness, in my days on "Wall Street" in New York and London you actually had people with a heartbeat that presented to investors...

It is very difficult. When I worked there in middle management (MD level) they systematically removed meritocracy in favour of equity. Meaning that I could not hire the best people only the ones with right gender or skin colour. The entire promotion system was changed accordingly. You would not believe the absolute morons they promoted just to populate the right colouring of the spreadsheets... That was about 4-7 years ago and if they have been "successful" in implementing it across the company it is likely to have potentially devastating impact on qualitative and quantitative results. It seems like the analysts are still using the old theoretical numerical earning models hence the various Lloyds upgrades and targets of 70 plus. But I have not yet seen any analyst that have modelled the systematic incorporation of incompetence in the corporate world.

As Scott Adams have pointed out, the difference between reality and humour has been wiped out.
Its now not possible to understand if people are serious or just joking.

Thanks all!

I was looking to add until the latest earnings call when Butt said something profoundly stupid about ESG so I held off.
But it feels like they are a better investment than other REITs that trade at significantly bigger discounts with unclear plans about how the gaps will be closed. At this stage I feel a HOLD is appropriate. After all, the viability of the business model depends much on the UK economy....And that's risky enough...

Thanks for info!

Thanks!

Many thanks!