Member Info for TheTrotsky

I was a bit surprised they'd selected Belgium and France to open their first overseas franchises (given the long history of cakes and confectionary in both of those countries; stiff competition) until I heard that the shops were being opened by existing UK franchisees who hailed from France and Belgium. Also, both countries have large Muslim communities and CBOX's halal credentials should particularly appeal to them. They're starting small (with a shop in each) to test the waters; it's a sound strategy. Belgium and France may not succeed but any financial loss should be minimalised if they fail and I've no doubt that valuable lessons will be learnt regardless.

Listening to the CEO, I'm more convinced than ever that Ambala will prove a very shrewd investment and will compliment the existing Cake Box offerings, particularly amongst the Muslim community. Also, he confirmed that a new Ambala website was already in development. Hopefully that might be up and running before Xmas (he didn't give any timeline in the interview). Ambala will have little impact on the FY25 results, given that the acquisition was only completed a week before the year end and FY26 will probably be a year of transistion for Ambala as CBOX implements its strategy. Meanwhile the existing Cake Box network, and new franchise openings, should continue to go from strength to strength.

The opening UT was a "sale" of c22k shares at 700p and the share price then steadily dropped on comapratively small ATs, interspersed with at least 3 large, presumbaly sales, trades of c100k shares that I've seen. A very bizarre opening; up nearly 10% at open and almost back to parity within 30 minutes later!

Just realised that TFIF has started issuing new equity again now that the share price is trading at a premium to NAV.

If my recollection serves me correctly, TFIF hasn't been able to do that for the last 3-4 years! Times are a-changing (perhaps).

Motor claims? Do you mean car financing? I wouldn't have thought that either AV or DLG would have been materially exposed, if at all, to the ongoing car financing claims.

The question is whether it can hold and continue to move upwards. Ther have been previous rallies where the share price has slipped back over the next few days. We'll have to wait and hope that this is different.

LOL Elon

How to become a $millionaire; start with a $billion and then start trash talking the president who you helped to put into the White House ;-)

First he started with his (frankly) loony political views, then he started supporting Trump and now he's turned on Trump! He's a complete nut job.

Couldn't make it up if you tried. I'm not sure how much longer he can last as CEO of Tesla. SpaceX is his own personal fiefdom but I bet the executive board of SpaceX must be becoming as frustrated as Tesla's.

Alternatively, the larger combined trust might be able to negotiate a lower management fee (certain trust costs are "fixed" regardless of size and an element of duplication will have been removed)

Also, combining the the two trusts might offer the opportunity, because of the increased size, to consider bringing the management function in-house (in a simialr manner to Supermarket REIT's recently announced change)

Listing and associated costs. Also, potentially borrowing costs.

The Airbus contract was announced in the RNS on 15 May

You've been saying that for days and, in fairness, everybody (myself included) has been saying much the same for the last 6-12 months and yet still the share price has been falling. We're really not seeing the whole picture here. Despite the LSE's much vaunted (over) regulation you are still left to wonder how much of this is still able to go under the radar undisclosed.

Predator, if you look at Espen's post at 11:04 this morning it was simply the continuation of a thread started by MiningForGold on 23 May. It's a red herring; there is no new RNS this morning. Why Espen chose to "reply" to that thread this morning following the share rise early doors is anybody's guess.

Well I didn't expect that after last night's spat but it's still early in the US and Elon seems to be on a roll (of self-destruction) at the moment ;-) I'd suggest that he be kept in his padded cell today if at all possible ;-)

Begs the question, if everybody thinks the share price is going to rise why is it still lingering at these levels? Most perplexing.

That's not how SpreadEx works; it's a betting exchange and makes most of its money from the spread prices it offers. It operates a bit like an on-track bookie; it offloads most, in not all, of its risk with other counterparties and adjusts its spreads to try and balance its "book". SpreadEx doesn't generally take positions in shares; customers are betting on the movement in the share price not the physical shares. However, where SpreadEx keeps some of the risk on its books, one of the tools it has at its disposal to minimise its potential losses is to actually acquire shares (which effectively puts a stop on any further losses arising if the share price continues to rise). It would appear that SpreadEx currently has a lot of long bets on its books that it hasn't offloaded to other counterparties and this has now spilled over into the "real" world". It's bought the shares as a defence rather than as a speculative buy. That said, SpreadEx would probably only buy the shares if its internal risk department thought that the share price was more likely to rise than not from here.

A bit too early to count your chickens just yet me thinks. The market, i.e. us PIs, is betting on this spat blowing over and US buyers taking the opportnity to buy in this afternoon. Unfortunately I don't think we can rely on either Trump or Musk backing down (they'll both want to have the last word).

Elon is a complete numbskull. First for getting into bed with Trump to start with and now this. Despite previous denials, I can well imagine that the board of Tesla are beginning to lose patience with Elon's persistent (and frankly deluded) outbursts in the political arena. They were probably hoping that once he left the DOGE he'd keep his head down and avoid further controversy. If Tesla oust him then I think there is a risk that he could spiral even further out of control. SpaceX is his personal fiefdom and is now at risk of becoming the punch ball (like Twitter) for his ego-driven opinions. He's unhinged.

I stopped using stop losses years ago from my own bitter experience. The problems with stop losses can be threefold.

Firstly expectation and reality. A stop loss is an instruction to your broker to sell your shares once the price drops to a certain point. It's not an instruction to your broker to buy your shares off you at your stop loss price (your stop loss is not underwritten). The problem is that when a share price is plummeting the broker invariably can't find a willing buyer at the price that you set and generally will only be able to find a willing buyer once the share price has plateaued, however briefly. This can often be at a much lower price than you originally set. The only way to try and get around this is to set your stop loss at a higher price in the hope that the sale will occur at or around your target exit price but there are no guarantees.

Secondly, once your stop loss is triggered you invariably can't stop the sale even if you think the drop may only be a temporary blip and you've had time to re-evaluate your options. Sometimes it's better to ride out the storm in the hope that everything will blow over. Last night's news shouldn't affect Filtronic in the short/medium term and there's a possibility that both parties may step back and re-evaluate their rhetoric (pigs may fly but who knows).

Thirdly, a stop/loss can become a target on your back, particularly early doors when the MMs can mess with the opening prices (they can dip the share price a few percenatge points to trigger some ill-judged stop losses).

Bottom line, unless your stop/losses are insured (if such a product does exist it would invariably cost you to implement) they really aren't worth the paper they are written on and are invariably guaranteed to disappoint in some shape or form e.g. if you set your stop loss above your target exit price and the price drops through the former but not the latter then you many end up kicking yourself all the same.

We might be in for a bumpy ride in the morning.

Are there any bounds to Elon's ego?

Regardless of what one might think of Trump, you can't have a public spat with the president, (effectively) accuse him of being a paedophile (what is it with Elon calling anybody who disagrees with his wolrd view a pedo?) and goad him to dare cancel SpaceX's government contracts. At the end of the day, going to the Moon, let alone Mars, doesn't rank high, if at all, on most people's list of public spending priorities and, other than US national pride (which should never be totally discounted), I doubt NASA ranks high on Trump's list of spending priorities either.

Elon thinks he's too big, and too important, to fall. I think his "uppance" might be "coming" sooner than he thinks. He's become a walking PR disaster since he took over X "The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter" (as Prince might say). I'd go as far as to suggest that he's become seriously unhinged.

Technically 7p was always the floor and the dividend only rose to 7.5p in FY23 and FY24 because the average annual NAV was in excess of 107.5p. Under the old dividend policy GSF paid an extra 0.5p in dividend for every 7.5p increase in the average annual NAV over 100p. So, even under the old dividend policy, the dividend would have been 7p for FY25.

I think point 3 (buybacks are better than hasty acquisitions, maybe even most acquisitions) is very true.

Buffett is generally averse to dividends but there are a couple of points that people should bear in mind. Firtsly, US tax legislation favours capital gains (buy backs) over dividends. Secondly, unlike the UK, it is permissible in the US to trade fractions of shares. So when Buffett says "sell a bit" of Berkshire Hathaway he literally means selling a fraction of a share; which is probably a good thing because Berkshire Hathaway isn't renowned for its stock splits ;-)

Personally, I've always liked companies that pay dividends because it helps focus the BoD's attention on the operation of the existing business and I believe that there is some research to suggest that dividend paying companies generally perform better than non-dividend paying companies over the longer term (because non-dividend companies are more prone to making bad acquisitions driven by the surplus cash on their balance sheets).

It would be interesting to know how Berskshire Hathaway implemented its share buy backs and whether they were able to buy large chunks all in one go or whether the buybacks have a prescribed daily limit like they do here which tends to prevent UK companies from always buying back their shares at optimal times. Too often here in the UK share buy backs are announced ahead of time when the BoD consider the share to be undervalued but by the time that the buy back programme has been approved and started the share price has already (miraculously) adjusted and the rationale for the buyback is either lost or significantly reduced. It's not the BoD's fault, their hand are tied (they have to abide with UK legislation).