Member Info for TakingMyTime

I think the whole market is expecting a div cut, so if it is cut in half I suspect the market to shrug. If cut by less or not cut the SP may go up.

I wouldn't assume Biden will win. Trump is crazy, Biden senile, the debates are going to be ugly. I also don't think the US will be carbon neutral that quickly even if Biden wins. POTUS is powerful but not that powerful.

Good luck, LEVIS. If I had uninvested funds, I think I'd be adding here today, too.

LOL, @schlemiel. The market has to be the most fickle judge and jury ever. Is it correct now or five minutes from now or five days from now?

'How does the jury find the defendant, guilty or not-guilty'?
'Guilty, mi Lord'
'Take him down'
'Wait! Not guilty!'
'What?'
'Well, hold on. Yes, Guilty! Wait... mi Lord, can we hold off on a verdict until market close? Or tomorrow to see what happens in America after we close here? Or the weekend, so we can see what the derampers say?'

@Hopefully
I hope you are wrong and they keep mining Telfer as well. The toll processing of Hav ore at Telfer should keep the Telfer mine economically viable for a while. Fixed costs of toll processing will now be shared between Telfer and Hav.

I don't think they'll have trouble staffing both mines when the time comes. They are just now hiring an Early Works Manager for Hav, way too early to be hiring a full team.

@spoon
So if that's true and there will never be a vaccine that is effective, and you can catch it repeatedly, then shouldn't all lockdown restrictions and restrictions on flying be lifted? If we can't beat it and are going to have to live with it forever, then it's pointless to lock people in their homes and keep people from travel if it can't be eradicated. You can't go on with no one working. You can't keep people from visiting their overseas families. You can't say that people can't practice their religion. You can't put everyone under permanent house arrest in solitary confinement. You can't live that way. You have to let people make their own decisions about how much risk they want to take.

It's one thing to do all these restrictions temporarily if you think the problem is temporary and is going to have solutions. It's quite another if there aren't permanent solutions.

@Nige, haven't read him for a good while, but just did as you did.

We've done pretty well here in recent days, almost 20% in the last two weeks. Was nice to get the stamp duty boost. My view -- lots of companies are going to come out with results showing losses this year. PSN is going to show a profit. Lots of companies are going to keep their dividends cancelled for a while. PSN is going to restore it's dividend by next year at the latest and still may pay a dividend this year. And other builders are more exposed to London / South East, and more exposed to higher priced housing, than PSN. In a downturn, which I expect, the housing shortage means people will still need houses, but will be more likely to buy PSN houses than some others.

So, I'm staying put here. I get your logic, I just see it differently.

@LEVIS
GGP is an exploration company. The value of the company is not in its earnings but in the value of its assets. They've found gold, a lot of it. How much, no one knows, of course. In my view, the evidence indicates that the current SP significantly undervalues the asset. Others may of course interpret the evidence differently. But I'd say it is a mistake to look at what a company like this produces. It's akin to disregarding PSN's land bank and cash holdings because those assets aren't producing anything right now. But those assets are a huge factor in valuing the company, IMO.

No doubt GGP bears some risk, and if that doesn't fit your investment profile / strategy, by all means give it a miss. But don't do so simply because it produces nothing -- they've found something very valuable!

GLA!

If your question is how it is relevant to IAG, it's certainly relevant to how demand will or won't grow for international travel, and how quickly. If those granting approvals, and the populace in general, have spoon's attitude to risk, it's going to be a while before we have a vaccine that will make a difference. If they have mine, we might have a vaccine sooner, but with more potentially more risks attached to it.

@spoon "That word imperfect is one that should never be used in any vaccine talk"

Well, most vaccines are imperfect in the sense that they don't 100% guarantee immunity. And almost every vaccine has some risk of side effects. Probably the word "perfect" shouldn't be used in vaccine talk.

I totally get your point but it just depends on what "imperfect" means. If it means you have a sore arm for a couple days, it means nothing. If it means you have a 1 in 10,000 chance of catching an active but mild case of COVID, it's probably worth that risk for most people, anyway. If it means you have a 1 in 10 chance of permanent heart damage, or a 1 in 20 chance of some kind of cancer, then it's a different story.

Life is full of risks. There are risks in virtually every vaccine. There are risks in not using it. It's a question of balancing risks. We're in a devastating pandemic that is likely to kill several million world wide, and leave millions others with potentially permanent damage, before we are done. That justifies some level of risk in the vaccine.

I also will not be taking a vaccine anytime soon.

I will be keeping very active and fit, take reasonable precautions, and eating a healthy diet of a reasonable amount of food. I will not put on weight. If my lungs and heart have to fight this thing off they are going to be ready for it and I'm not going to make them have to support excess weight while doing so.

But whether I take a vaccine or not, a vaccine, if it comes, will be very, very good news for those who have serious vulnerability due to other conditions and for many of those people, the risk of a rushed vaccine may well be worth it.

And, a vaccine will be very, very good news for our investment in IAG, even if it is rushed. It will have a huge effect on sentiment, and if it is widely available, many will take the opportunity, and they will then feel free to travel. Even if we have a rushed and imperfect vaccine, it will buy more time for new and better ones to be developed. So any moderately effective vaccine will be great news.

@SPete "PI cannot buy in Aramco, unless you are a Saudi."

Not yet. Might be coming.

Quite happy that PSN didn't take any furlough payments and kept everyone on salary.

Primark is getting good press for not taking the furlough bonus payments. Presumably, when some politician decides to rant about builders, Help to Buy, and other incentives to try and get the economy rolling again, PSN will be able to say, 'Look, companies like ABF / Primark didn't take the bonus payment but we didn't even take furlough payments.'

That, the better governance on executive compensation, the retention policy, and the improved HBF survey ratings, all convinces me that they know what they need to do. They messed up badly with the stupid bonuses but there's a clear awareness of the need to be good corporate citizens. These are substantive things that cost actual money, it's not just fancy words. And yet, it's proving to be the case that they can still be profitable -- none of this had to be expensive, it just needed a changed mindset.

Very happy with my investment here. Corporate culture seems to have done a course correction from the mistakes of the past, and trading update was really quite good, all things considered.

@Landy
"@Barcode you must be fun to talk to at the pub lol"

More fun to filter, I didn't even know he was still hanging around until you said that. It's really fun looking at the green box and saying, "Oh, cool, I thought it was messy or caitlin but it's Barking mad!"

@bluelight
"Opening borders will cause a significant second wave, and the only reason its allowed at all is that it is financially unfeasible for the economy to remain closed. In short the government is putting money over people health and lives."

This is utter rubbish. The lockdown is costing lives in suicides, domestic murders, increased substance abuse which leads to increased addiction, delayed cancer and other treatments, etc. Destroying the economy does all those things. The unemployed are more vulnerable to depression, addiction, etc. There's a direct correlation between poverty and shortened life expectancy. You can't say that it's just about money over people's health and lives. If they don't restart the economy it's destroying health and lives. That includes flying.

In my view, Labour has failed as an opposition by failing to challenge the government on the cost of the lockdown. There will be no money for the NHS, no money for a social safety net, no money for anything, if there is no economy.

Absolutely borders need to be open to the greatest extent possible. No one wants a huge second wave but no one should want a dead economy, either. It's only those who think government money springs out of nowhere in endless supplies that don't care about the economy. It's not money vs lives, it's lives vs lives.

@luddite / Bricks
Research the CARES Act and Medicaid supplement. It's an extra payment made to hospitals by the US Government for Medicaid patients who have COVID-19. It guarantees that numbers won't be under-counted, and that whenever a patient (whether they live or die) can be considered to have / have had COVID, they will be.

US numbers high? Yes, I'm sure they are. The Land of the Free won't take kindly to lockdowns and being told to wear face masks, it's not in their emotional makeup to let uppity bureaucrats tell them what to do. They'd rather throw the face masks in Boston Harbour while claiming that forcing them to buy one is taxation without representation. But I really doubt that the real number of cases and deaths in America is as high as reported -- every questionable case will be reported as COVID.

Do we have similar incentives here? I don't know. But when a government puts everyone in lockdown with a stated goal of "flattening the curve" and "protecting the NHS" and then keeps the lockdown (or parts of it) even when the curve is flat and the NHS is under no threat, they lose trust.

@trev, google Covid-19 timeline of events.

You can get the WHO version, but I didn't even bother to read that because I don't trust them, I think they catered to China too much. Wikipedia is useful but not always reliable. I primarily looked at this: https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/04/covid-19-timeline/

I also just have this bad habit of remembering mostly useless facts. Fortunately, I wasn't in IAG at the time. When it started to drop I did wonder if it was a buying opportunity I should grab but I wasn't paying that close attention until it went below 250. I grabbed it at 240.

So, Happy, I tend to agree with you. There's so much still unproven in the scientific models pushing this.

But what's a company like BP to do? All the governments are buying in to this stuff. That means regulations are incoming, and likely at a rapid pace. If BP doesn't respond, they will likely be the first to die.

I bought BP because I believed in oil. I still do. But I do understand why Looney is going the direction he is, too.

I'm wondering if I am better off buying into a smaller oil company. A lot more risk, of course. But the smaller oil companies are more likely to fly below the radar of government regulations, and if (as I think) the world finally wakes up to this economic suicide, they'll be producing oil and happily so.

I suppose one could invest in Aramco but that's overpriced and if the House of Saud loses control and there's a revolution you could lose everything. Russia is happy to keep producing oil but similarly, not convinced that it is going to be a stable place to invest.

My conclusion is to stick with BP for a while. I expect a huge price rebound, the Looney transition isn't going that fast, and oil is going to surge sometime in the next year or five. I used to think I'd be in BP until I died and the dividends would supplement my retirement income. Now, I'm looking to make a COVID profit (I trebled my investment here when the priced plummeted) and probably get out, or at least significantly reduce my BP holding.

I suppose the question is whether the bad results are already priced in. If so, it could be a reversal of the usual "buy the rumour, sell the news." When it's bad news, it's "sell the rumour, buy the news."

I expect bad results, and so does probably everyone else. If worse than expected, markets will go down. If better than expected, or matching average expectations, then with uncertainty removed, markets will probably go up.

But who knows? Sentiment is crazy and markets are often detached from reality. Both US and European employment law guarantees that huge assets are pumped into pension plans every month, everyone is telling a bunch of uninformed people that the best long-term asset for their pension funds is equity, so stock markets are going to keep having money pumped into them. Someday it will likely all blow up but a mere thing like a global pandemic and poor earnings isn't going to turn off the money tap.

@Floater, I don't have a big argument with you, at all.

There's Sprott and then there's Sprott, and then there's Sprott.
1. There's Eric Sprott, who no longer is associated with Sprott Asset Management.
2. There's Sprott Asset management who do a bunch of things and have a variety of funds, some of which are actively managed, and Steve Todoruk is part of that. The things he says are very positive for GGP but as far as I can see there is no example of them having put their money where their mouth is.
3. There's the Sprott ETFs. That's where the GGP investment lies, and Sprott AM set the rules, and administers them but, unless they are lying in their documents, there is no human judgment used in that administration.

A. If anyone says Steve Todoruk is saying positive things about GGP, great. It's a good (if minor) indicator, but DYOR.
B. If anyone is saying, "Sprott bought shares in GGP, that's evidence this is a good investment," they are making a mistake. I'd hate to see someone invest on that basis, so I hate to see someone make the argument -- they might convince someone to invest on that basis.

I need to go get some sleep so I can argue with myself, LOL. Best of luck to you.

Closed at 642p on 19/2/2020. Next day, it started to drop.

Wuhan went into lockdown on 23 January. 24 January the Lancet mentioned pandemic potential. 30 January the WHO declared an international public emergency. 31 January Italy suspended flights from China, by mid February no one was flying from China and airline share holders had to have been getting nervous. In early February there were cases in Italy, but the share really began to drop once a major Italian outbreak was confirmed 21-22 February. By then, it wasn't just flights to China that shareholders would have been worried about.

This really is a coronavirus-induced drop in the SP.

@dave
Are you my brother, LOL? Sound just like him. I agree with everything you just said about me. I might argue with it later, but right now I'm busy developing a knockout response for someone who doesn't understand the difference between profit margin and investment profit percentage and started a big argument.