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It occurs to me that perhaps you should not be investing in a venture capital stock.

Same. I have a very chunky holding and added another 10% yesterday at £5.30.

But EVEN STILL the £6 barrier remains impervious. Sigh.

Absolutely massive round.

Absolutely mad volatility of zero company news. Down almost 10% in the last 24 hours. Bizarre.

Yeah nothing like this. It's madness - especially in absence of any news or indeed wider market activity.

Another day of it: up as high at 520p before settling at 491 on close. Crazy.

Crazy volatility over the last couple of weeks. A few times the price has jumped 5% or more during the day only to fall off by close.

Any ideas why?

Classic Blackrock, never happy to hold.

Chrysalis was always more aggressive than Molten with its valuation methodology. I had this theory that its discount to NAV was much lower because it attracted investors who had more appetite for risk whereas Molten was too conservative and as a result ended up with low risk and value investors who were completely unsuitable for the stock. So any time the share price ticked upwards, they sold off, which kept weighing down the price.

Sometimes it feels like Molten has its own version of the Triple Lock...

Molten's share price will be dragged down buy the more powerful of the following 3 factors:

1. Negative macro sentiment

2. Negative tech industry sentiment

3. Negative company sentiment

Molten's practice is to ensure NAV is the "worst case scenario". Yes the NAV can change but it represents a pretty solid worse case scenario. Even failures like Graphcore sold more or less at NAV.

IMO it's simpler than that - the entry of Saba as a buyer means there's a new institutional buyer that sees longer term growth. Effectively new money is chasing the same number of shares. Molten's fundamentals really haven't changed a great deal of the last few years (really), yes there have been exits in the last year but what the company has been doing operationally isn't dramatically different. The problem is that there was just too much institutional selling which kept dragging the price down. Molten just needs more new institutional buyers to bid up the price.

The maddening thing about this stock is that Iceye is doing what Molten expected it to do all along. This is the case with virtually everything else in the portfolio. Of course it doesn't always work out that way, but the outperformers always overcome the underperformers - that is the VC model.

Molten is always conservative in its NAV valuations so realistically the NAV per share should only ever be seen as the floor price of the stock. The fact the market believes it can second guess this is absurd.

I'll be fascinated to see how he plans to increase the valuation. The company is at a ludicrous discount when you consider that the NAV is pretty well justified by exits, news around valuations of Revolut etc and sentiment of the industry in general.

Does he think management is that poor or is he just going to try and convince the market they're all wrong on the price?

This is a crazy market behaviour, especially considering all the exits in the last 12 months were at or above NAV and Revolut is ~2x the NAV Molten held it at this time last year. What the market is saying is:

"Yes we know you have better access to understanding the underlying performance of your portfolio companies. And yes we know that you were right about the value of ALL the companies you sold in the last 12 months, even being a little conservative. Indeed you were probably correct on NAV over the last few years. But we know better than you the value of everything else in the portfolio."

Truly the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Maybe, just maybe, the markets will figure out that if Molten is undervaluing its stake in Revolut (as it seems to have the whole time), there might be more value in other portfolio companies.

Crysalis has a lower discount to NAV despite being worse at picking (Klarna), too aggressive with valuations - ie. less trustworthyt - and famously more greedy with bonuses (off the back of Klarna).

Discount to NAV of 20-30 seems reasonable and in line with the market. 50-60% is absurd and not the responsibility of management (though maybe they're too conservative in valuations?).

Also, whatever you think of management, the NAV is supposed to reflect the CURRENT value of assets. It's absurd to believe the current value of assets should be discounted to NAV when evidence of exits in the last 12 months is that NAV is either accurate or maybe a little conservative.

IMO the problem here is institutional investors. Whenever the SP gets a bit of wind in the sails, the likes of Blackrock start selling depressing the SP once more.

I'm sorry you don't know what you're talking about. VC is a hits business, Revolut is precisely that. The uplift more than covers the declines in companies like Thought Machine.

The key story of this results is the realisations - £135m realised in 2025 with an IPO market that's completely dead. That's better than 2022 which was still crazy times and only 2nd to 2021 which was peak crazy. Getting exits and returns at this level in this market indicates the Molten team is very very good at doing trade sales when many VCs are not. Better still even the worst exits (Graphcore) returned the money invested (more or less) which SHOULD indicate that the NAV is solid.

I have my concerns about Molten's ability to pick winners in the future, but the NAV is based on the current value of the current portfolio. There's no way the discount should be 50%.

I notice that after a nice bounce this morning, the SP is now down below yesterday's close. The pessimism of Molten shareholders is undefeated.

Sure, I recall things got a but silly after Covid, but then Molten was exiting assets like Peak Games at far higher than NAV, and these exits were outside reporting cycles so the official NAV took a while to catch up. So some speculation was natural.

What's weird now is the 50% discount DESPITE all the recent exits being priced at or above NAV, and it's persisted like this for a couple of years.