Member Info for ShearClass

The Sunday Times recommended it before Christmas at 110p as well! It was blatantly a paid for column & likely dragged dozens of naive PI's into providing exit liquidity for some spivs. If that wasn't enough, you then had the CEO using paid twitter posts to claim this was the most undervalued listed gaming company when shares were ~48p. All the while there has been stock getting offloaded in chunks. Today we see why.

Yep, the funniest bit was the reference to him winning stock picker of the year in 2019...what a qualification for the job. The previous CFO wasn't qualified either so no surprise they've gone for someone internal. IMO no serious CFO would touch this with a bargepole as controlling the desires of the CEO will be next to impossible.

Anyone buying after that sh*tshow of an RNS is utterly mad.

Exactly as I expected when I researched this a few months ago. They are addicted to acquisitions, it's utter nonsense to spend £15.4m in the current environment when you've already stated the priority was reducing debt! Back to the £4-5 range IMO.

Really pleased to see trading restored here, it looked extremely unlikely last week so fair play to the board for pulling off a minor miracle.

Boohoo showing their true colours - the irony of the their comments this morning is unbelievable. I for one hope their shares get shorted into the dust and Frasers do to them exactly as they’ve tried to do to REVB.

In my view they need to provide a multi year outlook via a capital markets day, they need to get analyst coverage in line with other FTSE companies (i.e. they currently have just 1 analyst covering the stock vs 15 that cover something like WISE...), it needs price targets with material & realistic upside, it needs international funds to be able to buy shares on the open market whenever they want. All that will come with the move off AIM.

HNW investors do not scour AIM for exciting new fintech opportunities at the best of times, nevermind the current market!

Yes the Q2 figures should appear at the bottom of this page, very intrigued to learn what average cash balances have been, I'd guess blended rates will be in the 3.5% ballpark but let's see... https://www.alphagroup.com/investors/corporate-governance/

I'm also looking forward to seeing the Q2 shareholder movements, my suspicion is that Cannacord, Jupiter & Liontrust will have continued to reduce due to fund redemptions, i.e. see today's news here;

https://citywire.com/wealth-manager/news/liontrust-suffers-near-5bn-outflow/a2419877

They held 11.5% of Alpha at 31/03, so will have almost certainly been forced sellers here in order to satisfy liquidity.

What it means is there is a constant supply of shares so we have remained range bound despite the already excellent fundamentals becoming even more stunning in the last 6 months. It's providing a great opportunity for alert PI's to accumulate positions though, so I'm quite happy for the time being.

Yep, and I think the key thing re. Alpha is the resilience of western economies to the higher rates. It's notable that the vast majority of established companies are reporting trading in line or even ahead of expectations. This is almost certainly due to record low unemployment & pay rises allowing consumer spending to continue.

The chance of interest income exceeding a run rate of £100m in the near future continues to increase, the market continues to shrug it's shoulders... for now.

Seem to be aggressively controlling (manipulating) the share price here.

31 TR1 notifications between them this year, UBS in particular have been up and down like a yoyo, from 26m to under 13m and then back to 23m. Goldman meanwhile have increased their total position from 8.2m to the 9.5m reported this morning, although the 2pm notification on 30th May which showed a position of 22.5m held via ordinary shares (9.7m) , securities lending (3.2m) and swaps (9.4m) gives some insight into the games they are playing.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they were working together and playing both sides of the order book to shake out nervous PI's, in fact it looks fairly likely.

Bottom line; there is a major resource upgrade on the way next month which will almost certainly increase mine life by a number of years & significantly boost NPV. Further, the CEO confirmed a couple of days ago on Twitter that all was on track for Q4. Add in the spectacular drill results reported last week which showed elevated copper grades & I think risk reward looks excellent at these levels. Certainly I don't know of any European juniors that are diversified across Silver, Gold, Copper, Zinc & Lead...

JC, PI's have been buying this hand over fist since it dropped 30% in Feb, particularly after the disgraceful pumping it got in the Times a couple of months ago & via the CEO using paid twitter posts to claim it was the most undervalued gaming co. around. It's now fallen a further 30% since the 7th June concert party RNS which announced Luke Burtis was free to do as he pleased. Judging by the share price movement it's not hard to guess what he's doing with his 14.2m shareholding.

Ps. their latest game 'Farworld Pioneers' looks to be a disaster; https://store.steampowered.com/app/1363900/Farworld_Pioneers/

Comments always to be taken with a pinch of salt, however this one would be fairly damning if anywhere near true;

"I worked on this game. So obviously I will recommend it. But with a private note... When I worked on it there was a known bug involving the AI pathing. Nearly two years after I left the team, at the 1.0 release - that bug remained unsolved. Take from this what you will."

37% positive reviews from 12k steam downloads is about as bad as I've seen.

Aha, now down to 33p... chickens are coming home to roost here.

It's a very good RNS that provides the level of transparency required to make an investment decision rather than taking a punt. Right sizing new stock intake whilst aggressively clearing inventory back to sub £600m is absolutely the right strategy, they can then use this cash to get rid of the expensive debt & put themselves on a much firmed footing.

I'd be surprised if this is trading under the placing price for long, however it depends what some of the quant funds algo's do in the short term. Overall the risk / reward now looks a lot better.

A decent chunk of the discount is surely related to the fact they are under capitalised & need to raise a min net £100m via either portfolio realisations or new equity? I don't think new debt (as alluded to in the results) is the way forward in the current environment...

Good spot on the careers blurb. The most exciting thing here is that they can attack a number of new projects fully funded by the growing interest income stream.

This is a really good read on their newest solution announced a few weeks back;

https://the-drawdown.com/article/deep-dive-on-alphas-fund-finance-solution

“Further details of the solution will be announced during the coming months. “We have already identified more than 200 lenders and profiled close to half of these, many of whom have capacity and appetite to lend. Based on our existing client base alone, we have more than 800 fund managers that will have instant access to our solution. Moving forward, we are looking forward to working closely with market participants on all sides of the equation as part of our insight-led innovation strategy in this space.” concludes Heaysman.”

They've been selling down their holding for a long time now - at the end of 2021 they held 138m shares, so including yesterday's sales they've disposed of ~53m in the last 18 months. Almost everyone is aware this is due to Jupiter being in financial difficulties - it's also the reason they had to sell a large chunk of Starling bank way below the going rate.

Very positive that there was investor demand to take such a large chunk of shares at 65p, if Jupiter were to exit their stake in full over the next few weeks it would be a major positive IMO.

Interesting that Frasers have put £75m into AO World. Can't help but think ASC would have been trading significantly higher if they had raised a total £150m in equity & £75m less via the cowboy 11% loan...

Exercise the warrants at 40p and sell into the spike at 50p+. Standard MO for the UK market…

New fintech IPO announced last week;

https://www.standard.co.uk/business/fintech-firm-cab-payments-eyes-ps1-billion-valuation-in-london-ipo-b1086393.html

Valuation wise this can only be good news for ALPH, this is reinforced when you look at CAB's financials which show they make most of their money by selling FX to customers in emerging markets at a whacking mark up - a service that has a far smaller competitive moat than ALPH's product offering IMO.

Nevertheless, it can only be a good thing for new money to enter to UK listed fintech market...

And further to that point there has been a notable increase in US job adverts, with the total now at 29;

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs?clientkey=CA518AACD06747D958404929D26FA686

Most notably they are opening a Chicago office, i.e. this advert for an IT Director;

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs/ViewJobDetails?job=70557&clientkey=CA518AACD06747D958404929D26FA686

"Set up Chicago based office with required IT infrastructure."

Additional Chicago adverts for a Financial Controller & Senior IT support.

So A LOT going on behind the scenes here.

Excellent quarterly CYBHI public webinar last Friday where Kooth's Tina Sanders presented their virtual platform solution to all interested stakeholders in the Cali health / youth system. There was also a presentation from a Californian teenager who was part of the youth focus group that assessed potential platforms, all focused around why they chose Kooth.

A replay should appear on this page in the coming days; https://www.chhs.ca.gov/home/children-and-youth-behavioral-health-initiative/

There was a similar webinar back on April 10th where Kooth got a brief introduction, however back then they emphasised that they needed to finalise a secondary provider for the 0-12 age group. On Friday it was announced that Brightline have been awarded this contract; https://www.hellobrightline.com/

With both platform providers now announced you'd think the formal announcement is imminent...

Why would anyone make a takeover offer without knowing the exact state of either the £980m pile of inventory or the £830m of trade payables? They are huge risk factors vs the market cap.

Next weeks update will be fascinating, how much will they disclose? I'd guess it'll be more guff about how determined they are about executing the turnaround plan / green shoots. At a minimum there needs to have been progress on reducing that ridiculous inventory position but I'll believe it when I see it.