Member Info for SquirtyFlower

Pretty much all in the price I would say. Next forward guided that 3Q would be difficult, retail markets have generally been difficult and company share price has fallen considerably over the past couple of months. The results were pretty much in line with expectations with good news on cost savings, profit and pick-up in Oct sales. All-in-all, pretty reasonable statement.

Frankly I'm staggered it even bought 472 shares on Friday given the Finance Director must have known before 8am on Friday morning that the currency hedge had gone belly up overnight and that a profits warning would ensue. Why didn't he stop the share purchases altogether for Friday? Is he up to the job having fouled this up on top of the appalling currency hedge activity?

This latest fiasco demonstrates yet again that Ashley needs to get serious professional management in here and stop trying to run this business in such an amateurish way. - issuing bad news RNS at 3pm on a Friday is the stuff of badly run AIM companies not FTSE250 companies. - the RNS itself is so brief as to almost be an afterthought. It ought to explain in far more detail what went wrong here e.g. when was this hedge entered, how has it backfired so spectacularly so quickly, what mitigation steps are being put in place to minimise the risk of further problems here, etc. Frankly the way the RNS is worded it sounds like we had a stop loss trigger when the £ dropped through $1.20 and we lost £15m there and then. I don't see other companies announcing hedging failures today despite the overnight currency shenanigans so how have we managed to do so spectacularly? - why can other companies manage to set up hedges that successfully protect them, not give themselves an immediate £15m headache with the potential for £20m more (and it isn't clear what happens if the £ drops to $1.10 for a sustained period....does this become a £40m hit or is £20m the maximum worst case exposure? The company needs a proper full-time FD not some temporary FD for 3 years. It needs to get its act together quickly and stop shooting itself in the foot (it must be an octopus given the number of legs it has blown off in the last 12 months), and it needs to explain this latest mistake properly. How come other companies manage to run themselves efficiently and effectively without the slightest whiff of scandal or incompetence, yet we manage to mess up time and time again?

That's my target, but will probably take 54 if it looks like getting stuck there. From a share price perspective, a blast of wintery weather would helpful to get people buying their winter togs sooner rather than later. A mild autumn is not what clothing retailers want.

It's been a bit stronger for the last few days and looks to have bottomed around 4700p. Today is a better day than yesterday because the NXT share price is relatively strong compared to the overall weaker market whereas yesterday almost everything went up so harder to tell whether sentiment had changed on NXT or just caught up in general rise. It does look oversold and Fibonnaci 38% retracement from most recent high to low suggests it should go back to 5000p over next week or so. All imho!

.....and looks like another lesson for Tom Loserfrith too.....