Member Info for Splice

"Norges Bank / Noregs Bank is the central bank of Norway. Apart from having traditional central bank responsibilities such as financial stability and price stability, it manages The Government Pension Fund of Norway, a stabilization fund that may be the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. "

It's either their national pension fund or their sovereign wealth fund buying

If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it is that the qe will pump asset prices including the stock market

CJ, “placement of scares” it certainly was. I think that capital raise was a very good thing and cleans up the balance sheet for the medium term. Current price is a basement. Positive california vote thursday will be a nice surprise.

Bet Fred need to stop messing around with these little deals in the USA and buy themselves a nice big US footprint through a takeout of William Hill. 305p would be a nice offer price.

CJ you absolute maniac nice call. I actually feel the same but didn't want to say the number. The balance sheet is cleaned up once the HMRC cash and capital raising cash comes in. About 450m to the balance sheet almost wipes out the debt load (need to get updated figures on the 2023 and 2026 bonds outstanding). Wmh is much more investible now for people who were previously scared of the debt load. Interestingly, draft Kings just raised capital today also - equivalent of about 1 bil in GBP. I've read speculation of a possible draft Kings / wmh merger a while back. We know draftings have the cash to have a shot at it now if they wanted - sell the wmh UK retail business to bet Fred and keep the rest.

As long as sports keeps going (which it can do safely) and the retail can stay open, hills will be ok. If you are concerned about that try a bond fund or stay in cash.

Many people are in this stock for the US growth story. No idea about return of divs being a driver of price, for some investors it may be. The California vote is far from a slam dunk. It would need to pass the Californian legislator on Thursday and then a public vote in November. May our may not happen, I have no idea.

Downbutnotout, when this traded at 115-120 things were grim. No hmrc 200m gift, no sport, no vaccine news, shops closed, june debt was a concern. All this is different now - we will find out soon enough

Thechancers, if they printed and gave away 20% of the shares, the share price should drop 20%. However this is not what has happened. They have printed and sold 20% of the shares for about 250m, which will be cash on their balance sheet.

You think a capital raising would have tanked the share price 27% a month ago? Seems like a lot, the people buying into the raising would have taken a bath as well. How did you come up with that?

Yeah if that California vote happens things will get interesting. I still have no idea what the odds are of it passing

Crazy action, those buys were when the capital raising was on

Madfist, some will attempt to do this no doubt. Keep in mind they aren't going to sell below whatever the raising price is most likely. We had some good news today in the trading report, including the 200m HMRC windfall. The mad lads at Jeffries put a 305p price target on this stock today:
https://thefly.com/landingPageNews.php?id=3111441&headline=WIMHY-William-Hill-can-pursue-growth-more-aggressively-with-new-funds-says-Jefferies
I've watched a number of names rally through capital raising because it derisks the balance sheet. Could will happen here, there are three phase 3 trials of vaccines coming in July - moderna, j&j, sinovac. Things can change very quickly. I am not worried but we may see some moves on the coming days. California makes a decision on whether to put sports gambling to a ballot this Thursday.

Anyone care to guess the share price this week. Kinda hard given we don't know the size of the capital raising or offer price.

I think this is bullish, maybe not as much as Jeffries with a 305p price target though. This raising combined with the 200m HMRC rebate changes the landscape for WMH in terms of their debt load and liquidity risk.

The question here for me is does the market think WMH will allocate the capital well.

Thoughts lads?

1.
"Since our update on 15 May 2020 our monthly cash outflow has reduced and we have repaid the
outstanding £203m"

"Following further engagement with HMRC and our legal advisors, we now expect this refund to be received in the second half of 2020 and for it to be roughly equivalent to the value of the bond repayment."

So the HMRC repayment is ~203m, not 125-150m?!?!

2.
-32% drop in revenue in aggregate for Jan 1 to Jun 9 2020
~50 to 57% (somewhere in between) for the period of Corona virus shutdowns

3.
Table tennis saved the sports betting business by the sounds of it

Bullish day today, good to see wmh outperform the indexes, I'll take that. I went and looked at a few betting shops, bet Fred and Ladbrokes. They had a handful of people in them - not bad for a Monday I guess.

Yep should be a positive week. A lot of people out and about today from what I've seen. Madfist, I used to gamble a bit too, but it's just too hard to consistently beat the bookies, if you are profitable they limit your account - much better to bet on their stocks instead. I think a lot off people will be shopping come Monday, the fact that we've had people protesting in groups without any intervention from police or government is going to make social distancing a hard sell for the average person. No idea if buying now for the short term is right, as we saw last week this market could do anything and big moves either way wouldn't surprise. Long term will be fine though IMO.

How the market can grind higher into those GDP numbers is beyond me. The range was expected to be negative 15-20%. We got -20.4%, below the bottom end of the range. Market rallies. It's the slow grind higher that doesn't make sense, no point fighting it

Market seems to like those abysmal UK GDP numbers, worse than expected. Maybe the logic is that it will lock in government stimulus.

Email from William Hill:

"Around half of our shops will open from Monday 15th June. The other 50% will open over the coming weeks. Please check our shop locator http://promotions.williamhill.com/offer/shop-locator to see an up-to-date list of shops which are open. (Please note, shops with 0:00-0:00 shown as open/close times are closed). Currently, only shops in England are permitted to re-open on Monday 15th June. Shops in Scotland and Wales will remain closed until we are advised that we can open them.

Full details are also available here https://wh.bet/shopinfo"