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FTSE rankings actually done close of play tomorrow ie Tues 2nd. Announcement confirming changes at the end of the 3rd.

By my reckoning, ATG is now ranked #323 in size. Ranking 325 or above gets automatic entry to the FTSE 250. Something to keep an eye on - it is decided at end of the day on the 3rd, ie Wednesday. Currently very tight around that mark though so ATG share price moves and those of the companies around the cut off, will matter over the next two days.

There we go. Was expecting this to come. New CEO has put his money where his mouth is to the tune of ONE MILLION of your Great British Pounds. His average purchase price is around 420p also.

Great to see. Should be a positive reaction to this next week you would hope. And hopefully that will be enough of a nudge to get us back into the FTSE 250 which should see some forced buying from the trackers, maybe even £10-15m worth (2-3% of company).

The numbers are fairly close to the the Barclays announcement a couple of days ago so could be related. But if Barclays was just acting as the market maker there still needs to be an underlying buyer and a seller. For a trade that size there should be an RNS next week you would think, it's 4.5% of the company. Although I think for some funds the threshold is 5% so maybe not.

If there has been a seller in the background trying to get out, and this is now them out, you would expect shares to bounce following this. Ie usually them trying to sell drives the price down, but it bounces once they have sold. I wonder who the buyer is, and whether it's a new holder or an existing topping up. Could also be one or more of the shorts closing (personally I hope not because I want to see a big short squeeze and watch them get burnt on the way up), which I guess could be interpreted as a positive signal though, although it would also need a seller the other side.

As SG said in theory it could also be a new or increased short position - ie a hedge fund has borrowed shares and sold them on the market in this transaction. But even in this case there still needs to be a buyer the other side. I think this is unlikely is my understanding is these types of funds tend to build positions over time (lots of drip selling into the market to try drive the price down over time) rather than is one fell swoop like this. But I could be wrong.

Basically it's impossible to know if this is a good sign or a negative one unless we have more information.

There's not much information on the shareholder register. But fidelity are the biggest with 14% or so and they have been buying over the last few months going up from 10% to 14%. JPM also have been increasing their stake a little to go over 6%. Which leaves Blackrock or Slater as the potential sellers who owned about 5.3% and 4.3% respectively as at December. I'd like to think it's unlikely to be Slater. My money is on Blackrock, possibly related to the merger between Blackrock Thromortons Trust and Blackrock Smaller Companies Trust that is going on at the moment?

If I'm right, then it's more positive then negative as Blackrock in that situation would have been almost a forced seller. And it means there is another buyer in size out there also.

Of course this is all crystal ball gazing, it could also have been multiple buyers and/or sellers booked under one trade. Let's see if there's any RNS next week. Or any change in the short register.

Have a good weekend all.

I've just sold all my lion trust shares and bought into this instead. I think an easy c15% arbitrage. Not quite as good as I hoped because of the big spread, but got these at 5.5p which is implies mcap of 7.9m vs value of lion trust shares or 9.1m plus any additional consideration... Apparently due to complete before end of June...

What am I missing? This is going to be sold to LionTrust for 2.97m shares initial consideration.

2.97m x 307p (current LIO share price) = £9.1m vs current mcap of £7.4m ie 23% discount. Plus anything further from the additional consideration*.

I'm not really a merger arb guy but this seems like a chance for free money unless I'm missing something?

* Additional consideration largely dependent on outcome of EOT trust strategic review which results of which were announced today. I'm sure that a lot of investors will cash out, or shift to JPM Trust, but maybe 30% will stay with Devon/River/Liontrust in the open ended fund they are making, which means there could be maybe £0.5-1.0m extra to come to shareholders in additional consideration (out of a potential £2.4m or something).

Holding this level today after the big move yesterday is really positive. Nice to be back in the black with this one. I think it's massively undervalued and a good set of half year results on the 11th June should see further strength imho. I think market was concerned about the H2 weighting, but by June they will only have 3.5 months left in the year and should have good visibility to year end expectations.

Fingers and toes crossed!

The big news I'm waiting for on this is the triennial pension revaluation, which should be completed in the next 6 months (by March 2027 at the latest). They have now effectively wound up all but two of their pension schemes - only the nasty MGN and MIN schemes remaining really. Trinity scheme they recently did a buy in, ENSM has done a buy out, WF scheme is in process of being wound up, and EN88 is in surplus and only costing £1m a year into escrow which they may get back.

At their recent annual results they said their schemes were in an *accounting* surplus. So I would not be surprised to see their contributions to the two remaining schemes reduce when they do the triennial valuation.

In any case there is only 18 months more of big pension deficit recovery payments (think v unlikely these will increase given where bond yields are currently) and then the cashflow and valuation of this company starts to look very attractive!

Excellent performance here. Trading at a discount for the first time in a while. NAV 213p.

All looking good from where I'm sitting

Decent update - small decrease in NAV but seems to me to be due to conservative mark to markets on three investments (Finsbury Foods, Alliance Pharma and SQLI) which are performing strongly, and slightly weaker performance at WS Logistics which is still early stages and probably the most cyclical / exposed to fuel costs etc due to Iran...

26.4p NAV vs 14p share price - we're still trading at a ludicrous 47% discount to NAV!

Big move on no news...

Divi arriving tomorrow - wonder if we'll see some strength from any DRIP schemes reinvesting it.

@ByeHi that's a good chunk of change - good luck to you. Future is one of my biggest holdings alongside RWS, but I'm an order of magnitude smaller than you! I generally agree with you, although think getting back to double digit rating is a very long term story that needs a lot to fall into place, including recovery of advertising market, stabilisation / recovery of audience, and ultimately, some upgrades! With upgrades the balance sheet starts to look v healthy again and M&A and bigger buy backs will be back on the table - which should lead to more upgrades and a bit of a virtuous cycle. The SP will follow.

@sg0913 You're obviously right that the SP is the only thing that matters ultimately. But if you think share prices and business performance / quality are always aligned then share picking is not for you. I remain invested here because I think there is a massive disconnect between the SP and the business fundamentals. If I thought the business was rubbish I wouldn't be. Similarly if the shares were at 1000p I don't think I'd be invested as in that case I think the SP would accurately reflect the underlying business.

My personal view is that this company is performing OK in a tough environment, but has very negative (and largely sector not company specific) sentiment against it, and is massively undervalued by the market. If I'm (we're?) right the SP will correct eventually, but blaming the mgmt and the company for what in my view are largely sector wide issues (perception of AI risk, Google traffic trend, weak advertising market) is missing the mark.

I can only point to things like SFOR where sentiment has changed very rapidly on slight improvement in trading, and shares have doubled in a short space of time from a very depressed valuation. I can only hope and wait that we'll get something similar here, eventually. Patience and conviction are very difficult to things to have when shares keep going down, but everyone needs to decide for themselves whether they have faith that the company will deliver and ultimately be rewarded with a commensurate share price.... Or if they have lost faith / conviction / patience in the mgmt and company, in which case surely the right thing to do is to sell out, 'bank' the CGT losses and redeploy into something where one has belief in the investment case.

To hold onto a stock where you don't have any faith in the company or management is surely folly.

We're a %pt or two away from getting back into the FTSE 250. Cut off seems likely to be around the £505-510m mcap mark, depending on what happens to other companies around that mark. Decided at close of 3rd June. Looks to be a fairly close run thing. If not this time round think it's very likely in the following one given the takeouts happening further up the index.

https://www.stockchallenge.co.uk/

I would say very positive. And well written. My only small gripe is using FCF to equity and comparing it to Enterprise Value (rather than market cap). Either exclude interest payments from FCF and compare to EV, or include them and compare to MCAP.

He doesn't hazard a guess at what the company is actually worth though which is a shame. But the broad thrust of what he is saying is bang on the money - here is a company that has the perception and valuation of something that is going bust, but when you look under the hood the reality is very different. Lots of tech, lots of IP, and most importantly, lots and lots of cash generation.

Good note. Solid results. Beat on cash impressive. We await news on Moore Barlow. They probably have £40-60m firepower to deploy. Will be upgrades on the deal for sure.

Question - with interest rates going up, will they actually earn more on client monies this year? The bears were pointing to this last year as a drag on earnings given interest rates were coming down. But seems it might be a boon for them and will drop straight through to the bottom line and cash.

I think 8-10x PE rating for target price is fair, but should be higher if they can deliver sustained organic growth.

I've recently taken a small position in GTLY as I think it's also a high quality company in the space going for a very cheap price...

LiveRamp revenues c.$800m and adj operating profit c.$180m. So $2.2bn is roughly 12x EV/EBIT. Not that high a multiple, but still a long way north of where S4 is trading which I think is 4-5x EV/EBIT currently? However they were growing around 10% a year...

Anyone have any theories as to why there are so many shorts in this?

Also, does anyone know what expected EBITDA for Cyber is expected to be this year? H1 was c.£8m I think which implies c.£16m? Or maybe a bit more if they are on an improving trajectory?

Revs c.£240m I think, so they are still a long way away from their mid teens EBITDA margin target which would be c.£35m EBITDA....

Not sure if I should be bullish because they have a lot of margin upside to come, or bearish given their margins now are so far away from what they aspire to!

Rusty - to some extent that is a fair comment. But it also supports what I'm saying. I reckon pretty much everyone in the world (8bn) was exposed to covid and we had somewhere between 7m and 20m deaths. So death rate was 7/8000 to 20/8000 ie 0.1% to 0.3%. And these deaths were very much disproportionately affecting those with underlying conditions or the elderly. So the risk to healthy young volunteers really was negligible. But yeah, not on the board to rerun that old debate!

It does help with market perception I guess, but to my mind doesn't do much to actually getting any new contracts in the door and across the line.

I'd be interested in knowing how many diseases there are that fall in that range like covid, colds and flu where HCTs are really beneficial. I've not seen any estimates on what the addressable scope is... Like infectious and dangerous to enough people for it to warrant the expense of developing / rolling out a vaccine. But at the same time very safe for healthy volunteers to undergo HCTs without major ethical or legal concerns. Anyone got any ideas?

Sadly I think human challenge trials might struggle to recruit participants for an Ebola vaccine trial! Even hantavirus. I mean it kills 60% of those infected!

We're limited to doing trials for only mildly dangerous viruses like flu and covid, which are not going to kill 99.99% of those infected if they are otherwise healthy.