Member Info for TheTrotsky

I think you ought to re-read the Times article.

It's not just the transfer of the debts to Azzuro that's in question but the enforceability of the original loan guarantees. The judge is suggesting that the original loan guarantees may only be legally enforceable in very limited circumstances. It might be fixable, as FCH suggests, if the ultimate decision goes against Azzuro/FCH but it may not.

In fairness, loan guarantees are a blight (lenders often insist on loan guarantors regardless of the circumstances) and I think each case needs to be considered on its merits. Some companies/directors set out to defraud financial institutions from the outset and the directors should rightly be held accountable. However, in other instances, directors have acting in good faith and are being held to account for circumstances that are completely beyond their reasonable control e.g. who would have foreseen at the start of (say) 2019, on top of Brexit disruption, Covid, the supply side shock, war in Ukraine, energy prices soaring, inflation rampant etc. Should directors then be hounded into bankruptcy? It's debatable in my view.

Now he wants to create a US sovereign wealth fund! Wonder how that's going to work. Is he going to increase the US debt burden to provide funds to invest? Countries that have surpluses are the ones who normally create sovereign debt funds; not countries that have debt up to their eyeballs!

My bad, not NAFTA but USMCA (much more catchy); same principle.

Bizarrely it was Trump who negotiated the terms of USMCA; so if anybody is to blame for it "defrauding" Americans, he is!

He's now rolled back his threat of tariffs on Canada and Mexico for 30 days. This is no way to conduct a negotiation; you can't always go nuclear (look at the distability its' caused in workd markets not to mention the US).

I'd imagine more than a few US business executives have been running around like headless chickens the last 24-72 hours to try and deal with the implentation of tariffs on short notice and are probably chuffed to bits with Trump having wasted their time. He just says and does things on a whim without any thought for others.

Yes, he said throughout hei presidential campaign that he was going to implement tariffs (and is still threatening to raise tariffs on the EU/UK) but you've got to allow more time for their implementation. Was he toying with Canada and Mexico? He's just carrying on like a petulant kid.

Sparhawk, Ever heard of NAFTA? The US is a signatory. Nobody twisted their arm. Yes, Trump did say he'd do it but no right minded person (outside the US) thought he'd be stupid enough; he's sunk to a new low. The US consumers will soon have rampant inflation again (if the tariffs hold) and will be wondering why, like turkeys, they voted for Xmas

The reasons for the trade imbalance with Canada is because Canada is resource rich; like Australia. If the US doesn't want to have such a huge trade imbalance with Canada then it should look elsewhere for the resources it needs. But that wouldn't solve their problem (it would just shift the trade imbalance elsewhere), so instead Trump has become intent on stealing the resources from Canada (and also Greenland) by trying to fore it to become the 51st State.

In the early 2000s the US deliberately started moving jobs offshore to make goods cheaper (globalisation) and everybody else copied them. China's economic ascendancy can be directly traced back to that (stupid) decision. Nobody is stopping the US from now onshoring those jobs again but it will cost the US consumer. Trump seems to think that he can onshore the jobs and get somebody else to pay for it; he's living in cloud cuckoo land.

Finally, the reason given (by Trump) for the punitive tariffs on Canada and Mexico is not trade but drugs and immigration; we all know that's not true but that's what he says (so it must be true). If Trump wanted to try and get a fairer deal, then he should have addressed Canada and Mexico through the auspices of NAFTA. The reason he hasn't is because the current deal is as fair as it's likely to ever be until the US starts ramping up the use of its own resources and building the infrastructure needed to process it.

The guy's a babbling lunatic. Apparently his teams's current mantra is "tariffs don't increase prices for consumers but taxes do"! Bring back George "Dubya" Bush, a academic titan by comparison to the "Orange One" and his bunch of charlatans.

Trump is/was a bully as a businessman who was mostly allowed to get his own way because the even dumber invetsment bankers lent him too money and couldn't afford to let his business empire collapse. The problem he's got is that the US is on the hook for its debt, not the other way round, so he can't use his normal bullying tactics (he can't threaten to forfeit on the US's debts because interest rates in the US would skyrocket overnight and the US government would likely collapse due to a lack of new funds within months, if not weeks).

Can't help but laugh when he says that Canada is living off $billions of US subsidies and should become the 51st State. Who in their right mind would want to acquire Canada if, as he suggests, it was on the breadline! He doesn't even see the idiocy of his own statements! He wants Canada's resources but doesn't want to have to pay for them. If Canada was to become the 51st State, Canadians would end up being worse off because they'd be given less of the "pie".

If this follows its normal course, he'll ruffle a few feathers, realise that levying tariffs on Canada and Mexico was not such a great idea (China more debatable), blame/sack someone in his new administration, try and wheedle out some meaningless concessions from Canada and Mexico on the drugs war/immigration (so he can at least try and claim a hollow victory on his Truth Social account) and then (quietly) roll back the tariffs in a few weeks/months. Thereafter he'll deny ever levying any tariffs on Canada and Mexico (having first deleted any mention of tariffs on his Truth Social account), and blame "fake news" for suggesting that he did ;-)

Interesting but rather overly simplistic article.

E.g. He assumes that MS Galleon is unhappy just because the sp has dropped (it doesn't help) but MSG's primary reason for being unhappy is Topp's continuing refusual to offer a large range of MSG tiles. If MSG had its way, its tiles would account for at least of 30% of Topp's tile sales; effectively enabling MSG to potentially siphon off Topps profits without actually having to pay to acquire the 70% of Topps it doesn't already own.

If he actually bothered to step away from his keyboard for a moment and take a look outside he'd realise that, from Covid onwards, this has been a very tough period for retail generally and big ticket spending particularly. I still hold to the view that the majority of tile/flooring sales, excluding new construction, tend to align with discretionary refurbishments which can be deferred almost indefinitely, unlike repairs.

As regards on-line vs stores, I personally concur with his view that the majority of one-off purchasers still want to physically view tiles before they buy and therefore, more often than not, tend to make their purchases in-store rather than online. In part this will be due to tile retailers, unlike (say) electrical stores, not normally stocking common product lines; so you can't generally walk into a store, decide on a tile and then go and buy it cheaper from a different online seller, as you might (say) a tv. Although Topps has been making inroads into online sales it still has the largest independent store portfolio in the UK (which has been further increased by it's CTD acquisition)! Topps caters for both markets. It's as if he hasn't even bothered to look at its accounts!

With regard to financial firepower, Topps remains cash generative and is better placed than most of its direct competitors to deal with the continuing economic downturn; it's been doing exactly that since before Covid. Yes, its cash resources have become more depleted in the last financial year but that's because they've just completed the acquisition of Pro Tiler and opportunistic acquisition of CTD Tiles (the two acquisitions accounted for £18.9m of expenditure in the last financial year). Topps still has c£9m of cash and no debt; a far shout from where it was at the time of the 2008 financial crisis when it was lumbered with a large debt due to a mis-timed, debt funded return of capital to shareholders.

One of my personal conspiracy theories is that hedgies acting collectively use a sequence of small share trades to signal the way the price action should move throughout the day (agreed personally, in advance, with no nasty paper trails). E.g. three successive 9 share trades indicate to start selling whereas three successive 3 share trades indicate to start buying. Probably over thinking it but it seems to me that if would be fairly easy to arrange and impossible to detect (especially if you agreed to change the trading signal from day to day). I don't have access to Level 3 data but it often seems to me that auto trades swing into action without any particular rhyme or reason (even when you look back at the reported delayed trades).

Trendz, FTC isn't into mass communication network solutions e.g. mobile phone chips. It tried that back in the late 1990s/early 2000s (when its market value last peaked) and found that it couldn't compete with cheaper Asian suppliers. FTC now specialises in low volume, high margin communication networks.

To date, FTC has been able to finance it's latest expansion from its own existing cash resources (there's no indication that they've had to assume any debt since the SpaceX collaboration was announced) and it doesn't appear to need a significant influx of new capital to meet current/future demand and/or R&D commitments. As regards the SpaceX warrants, they expire 5 years from the date of vesting and will need to be exercised before that date or allowed to lapse.

Broomtree, You've got to have something to talk/argue about whilst you're watching the paint dry ;-) You can't constantly be speculating about what's happening to the GSF share price. We've all come up with reasons why the GSF share price should recover etc. etc. Meanwhile Mr Market (probably hedgies) continue to chip away at the share price because it puts a few £k in their back pockets everyday without having to overthink it.

Not convinced that SpaceX would make a bid and/or whether such a bid would get approval from the UK government on national security grounds (not necessarily because Musk/SpaceX may not be suitable but because of the key role that FTC plays in UK defence communications). I don't believe SpaceX would want to get involved in defence contracting and I don't think the space, defence and other business lines are separable. FTC's businesses currently benefit from a cross-fertilisation of ideas, e.g. encapsulation, and that would be lost if you tried to split them apart.

Also, Musk doesn't have a history of trying to block competition (at least when it suits him). E.g. he gave away Tesla's IP for free to try and kickstart the move to EV evolution, and it might suit his purposes for space to become the next big "global" business. Musk doesn't need to build all the spacecraft/satellites that might be required, and all of the capital investment that that would entail; he just needs SpaceX to grow more manageably whilst becoming significnatly more valuable. E.g. Tesla is significantly more valuable today than it was 10 years ago despite its share of the EV market having got smaller.

What Musk/SpaceX needs is first dibs at any new developments and it's strategic investment in FTC gives it the leverage to become the partner of choice on any new development projects.

"Civil servant" jokes?

Canada is a sovereign nation (like the US). I don't think Trump would appreciate Mexico turning round and suggesting that "it's just a line on a map" and that the US should become a state of Mexico (as much of the south western US was before it was forcefully acquired by the US). Likewise Greenland (it's an autonomous territory of Denmark) and Panama.

You could argue that Kim, Putin, Xi et al are just "trying to do what's best for their countries" too. Even Hitler thought he was doing what was best for his country! That doesn't make it right.

Not only that, Trump questions Denmark's historical rights to Greenland even though Greenland was occupied by Danish Vikings long before Columbus even stepped foot in the Americas. There's even some Viking and Native American lore to suggest that Vikings sailing from Greenland may actually have landed in the Americas before Columbus too. When you get down to it, Denmark has as much right to Greenland as the European colonists et al have to the US.

Trump is supposed to be an ally (the "defender of the free world") but he's increasingly sounding like a dictator. It's one thing to put forward a proposal (for discussion) that you might consider to be in the "free world's" interests but quite another to threaten economic sanctions or even military intervention to achieve your aims.

Trump is a schoolyard bully who was pamperd by his father (Fred Sr) after his elder brother (Fred Jr), who was due to inherit the family businesses, died in his early 40s and has never grown up. Fred Sr always considered Fred Jr to have the brains but was forced to accept "the Donald" as a poor substitute. Even Trump's business acumen is questionable; the only thing you can say with certainty is that he's (successfully) made his businesses so indebted to the banks that they can't afford to let him fail (he's been living on the never never for most of the last 40-50 years and fiddling his tax returns as he went). He can certainly market himself but there's a lack of substance over form.

My pips are being well and truly squeezed! Relatively small Auto(Bot) trades are constantly chipping away at the sp (don't tend to see a lot of sizeable trades during the day) and then the hedgies seem to sweep in to sell the shares that they've accumulated duringthe day at the closing auction (a few £ks profit each day soon buys someone a new Ferrari). Nobody really knows what's happening so it's easy money for them to trade on investors uncertainty.

Whilst the sp continues to slide as normal, an aside if I may.

Anybody ever watched Canadian Bacon with John Candy & Dan Aykroyd (it's currently available on Amazon Video)? Has some amusing similarities with this current Trump administration's antics (both in Greenland and Canada); a case of real life mimicking art for a change ;-) Somebody really ought to tell Trump that it's a fictional comedy ;-)

Sorry, I should clarify that last post. In book-keeping terms, if they hedged against losses on their gilts there would be no book loss to report ( the profit on the derivatives would offset the the loss on the gilts). However, if we accept in principle that PHX should never normally make a loss on its gilts then given the binary nature of these derivatives, hedging would only expose PHX to potential losses on its derivatives if it sells them at a profit which, given that PHX is only ever likely to buy gilts at, or below, their maturity price, is almost 100% certain to occur. Not only that, PHX would be paying an upfront fee to their counter-party for the benefit!

Hope that better explains my logic for saying that hedging would appear non-sensical where the gilts are being bought on PHX's clients' accounts.

Poker, If they used derivatives to hedge against losses then there would be no losses to report. Assuming that they hold until maturity UNLESS a better option comes along (as suggested by Meconopis), they don't need to hedge because the act of hedging would, in itself, needlessly expose PHX to capital risk when no capital risk exists. You only hedge if your income and/or capital is at risk.

Poker, A lot of personal private pensions aren't always index linked. At commencement, you are given the option to receive a fixed or index-linked income for life and, if you choose the latter, the pension offered is normally less at the outset, which often means that people tend to opt for the fixed income. Where someone opts for an index-linked pension then PHX will match them with index-linked gilts, which means that both the principal amount and the coupon are adjusted in line with RPI. Bottom line the income increases in line with inlfation without any capital risk to PHX.

Meconopis, I would imagine that holding "until maturity UNLESS a better option comes along" would generally only apply to the extent that the pensioner and their beneficiary are both deceased. Whilst the pensioner and their beneficiary remain alive, I would imagine that PHX would, first and foremost, want to ensure that they can meet their pension commitment without any capital risk. Obviously, if an opportunity arises to both cash in the gilt in at a profit and reinvest the original principal to generate an equal or greater income, then I'm sure that PHX would avail themselves of this opportunity but I rather suspect that such a scenario rarely, if ever, arises. I would concur that in normal times any selling of gilts would only likely occur if there was an upside opportunity but there always remains (IMHO) a possibility, albeit small, that PHX could become a forced seller (at a loss) or that the UK government could default. In the absence of such risks, the mark-to-market requirement under IFRS would be wholly unwarranted.

Broomtree, They have to calculate the NAV based on the best information currently available at the time otherwise they'd be no better than guessing and completely undermining the whole process of having periodic independent valuations. The NAV calculations always carry the caveat that they are based on the latest market information available and may be subject to future change. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the market overstated future price expectations up to this juncture but if, say, UK prices continue to improve from here on forward and price expectations in overseas markets remain static then we could well see the NAV revised upwards (I'm not saying that will be the case because pricing expectations in its various operating markets, including the UK, are unlikely to remain static).

As regards LNG, who knows. Trump's "drill baby drill" philosophy might be expected to increase US gas production but that does not necessarily mean that US LNG production will automatically increase (LNG production is capacity constrained). If I recollect, Biden placed a morotorium on any new LNG capacity being built. Trump may remove that morotorium, if he's not already done so, but it still then remains to be seen whether US refiners will actually start building more LNG production capacity, whether that production capacity will be increased on the eastern seaboard (increasing production capacity on the western seaboard is likely to have less effect in Europe) and/or whether there is sufficient LNG carriers to transport the increased supply (increasing production capacity without increasing transportation capacity may nullify any price benefit). Resolving these issues will require capital investment and may take several years to reach fruition, on top of which the US refiners will have to consider the implications of any volte face if the Democrats returm. Factor in potential tariff wars with Mexico, Canada and Europe and Trump's apparent contrary approach to OPEC (if OPEC increases production as Trump has requested to force Russia to the negotiating table then the expectation would be a drop in the price of oil which would hardly be an inducement to US producers to invest; their cost of production is much higher than OPEC and they would not be wanting to be producing at a loss), then I think the situation is far from clear. Also, last but not least, you've got to factor in the UK government's current net zero target; it would not suit this government's long-term planning to import more LNG and totally undermine existing/future renewable energy production targets.

IMHO I don't think anybody will be jumping the gun just yet. Trump (as usual) is sending out confusing signals (he seems to think everything happens in isolation and that a potentially falling oil price won't put a damper on increased production in the US) and I think they'll want to see the dust settle first before making any investment decisions.

Fonzi, If one's holding falls below 3% there is no regulatory requirement to disclose the new holding %. So Akers could now hold anywehere between 2.99% and 0% and we'd be none the wiser. The original RNS is no help because the shareholding disclosure was his original holding, not his new holding - I did check just in case they'd made the mistake of inadvertently disclosing the wrong % but the correct holding following his sale(s).

Manraj, In principle I agree (you couldn't get an RNS more wrong if you tried) but tomorrow is, as they say, another day and it still remains to be seen whether the sp will actually open below the closing price, let alone the price before the RNS was released. There might be an expectation but no guarantee. You never know, Trump might ban DeepSeek as being contrary to American capitalistic values ;-)

That's not how the market appeared to react. The suggestion that Akers had increased his stake appeared to boost the sp before the close (the price jumped shortly after the release).

All things being equal, you might now expect the reverse reaction to the correction issued shortly after the close, albeit you comment about a seller now being out does carry some water. Don't know how the sp will open tomorrow (there are other factors such as the US overnight that might affect it) but if does open down then I think there will be few investors who will understandably be quite upset if they bought between the announcement and the close. As foul ups go, it could hardly be worse.