The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode with London Stock Exchange Group's Chris Mayo has just been released. Listen here.
Having made a placing conditional on the successful outcome of the auction, the Directors have gone ahead with the placing anyhow despite coming second in the auction.
Are they mad?
They have clearly fallen for the charms of the commission hungry snake oil salesmen in the City.
Credibility is shot to pieces.
Any half decent company knows by the minute their covenant position. They are not waiting to the middle of the next month to know. The only reason for a delay is if the lenders need a formal audit of the numbers. And of course there is always the possibility that there is no breach.
Does anybody understand the accounts. One certainty is that they are loss making, and another is that their net assets are in permanent decline. The CEO seems to think his job is to buy and sell assets rather than the boring bit of of the day to day grind of actually running Drax's operations.
Disappointingly the UK is not the US when it comes to financial services. As evidenced by AJB announcing yesterday that it is increasing some of its fees up by an inflation busting 20% to its loyal customers.
Until regulators take action over failures such as the outages at a whole range of financial services companies during the market rebound last month, there is every incentive for these companies to continue with their rip off business model.
Physical car dealerships are similar to department stores: a relic.
OEMs will bit by bit learn to sell direct to the punter online, whilst second hand transactions are already trending fast online.
Lookers and all the others will have to adapt or die.
Nothing to write home about. Financials as ever peppered with 'one offs'. Stocks and inventories have increased despite reduced turnover, whist net debt is only down because of huge increase in payables i.e their suppliers are effectively acting as a bank.