Member Info for ToffAppleton1

Retail investors.

I wouldn’t like to be holding this one over the weekend. I would be very surprised if it wasn’t suspended after today, given the intense speculation and volatility. It’s highly likely today will be the last trading day. IMO

Sushi

“Cinema is dead but someone will get the assets.”

I don’t agree with you that cinema is dead. Nothing can match the experience of watching a classy film on the big screen.

But Cineworld is dead as a company and shareholders will get wiped clean. Mookey & Co have acted like asset strippers rather than responsible management. It should be remembered they were the ones who saddled the company with $8.9 billion of debt, not the dreaded shorters. RBS under Freddy Goodwin is the closest analogy I can think of.

Anyone who had done due diligence before investing in this dog would have seen all the red flags - among them were…

Reckless acquisition sprees at inflated prices
Highly leveraged buyouts
Unmanageable debt
Selling the freehold to their property portfolio and leasing it back (the fastest way to bankruptcy)
And all to line their own pockets.

Even if it hadn’t been for covid this business was destined to fail.

What appears so obvious to us though is ignored by those who are in deep. Denial and self-delusion are common attributes with failed investment/trades - as is so sadly apparent on this board.

When the company does go into receivership the cinemas will live on. And when the dust has settled they will be sold off and any proceeds will be paid out to creditors.

Leaving shareholders with zilch (as usual)

Finally for those who get excited on shareprice bounces as we saw yesterday - that happens solely because of short covering - shorters buying, closing their positions and taking profit. And because the company is doomed any price rise results in new shorts being opened.

Bullsbears

The answer to your your question is in the Ernest Hemingway quote…

“You go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly”

Cineworld have been going bankrupt gradually for a long time. And today saw them reach the suddenly stage.

What the unenlightened fail to realize when they salivate over big buying trades is that they are mostly due to shorters closing their positions and taking profits. Which of course leads to a temporary shareprice bounce.

I’d estimate 90 percent plus of today’s buys were carried out by shorters closing their positions. And you can bet many of them will open new short positions on any sign of any bounce. Rinse - Repeat.

Clueless

“the Shorters (vultures) will push it down as much as possible. If the co goes bust”
——————-

Companies don’t go bust because they get heavily shorted. They go bust because the business model breaks - resulting in insolvency. Evil shorters weren’t the ones who run up $8.9 billion of debt - that was the work of the company’s management.

Shorters are merely betting on an outcome - same as you would with a horse race or a football match…

and they often lose…

But they certainly got it right with Cineworld

Clueless

“This is why I HOLD because sellers today at these low prices may regret not holding !! Not much more to lose now anyway !!“
______________________

Or far more likely holders will regret not selling.
The inexperienced almost always go down with the ship.

As for not having much more to lose - that’s relative to how much you paid for your shares. If you paid £1 £2 £3 you’re right, but if you paid 20/30/40 pence it’s erroneous.

In situations such as these savvy investors save what they can - not hold out for miracles of biblical proportions.

My apologies

Cineworld’s debt is a staggering $8.9 billion
Not my previously mentioned slightly less staggering $6.9 billion.

Seen it so many times before on these boards when companies are crashing out of existence. Dubious characters appear with upbeat posts - claiming to be filling their boots with dirt-cheap shares and other such nonsense. And there’re always fools who believe them - sometimes out of naivety - sometimes out of inexperience - but always out of sheer stupidity.

Cineworld has debts of $6.9 billion with absolutely no means of paying it back. God know what kind of people are buying into it now. It’d be like buying the Titanic when it was 99 percent submerged in the ocean. Anyway should be able to see that it’s days away from crashing out of existence.

I dare say a few Fever investors are familiar with the song of the same title.

Fever - originally by Peggy Lee
Covered by Elvis in 1960
And sung live in Aloha From Hawaii in 1973.

It’s a cool song with ultra cool lyrics - the kind that plays in the background of speakeasies over gin & tonics and other mixers.

I haven’t owned a television for years
And know nothing of Fevertree’s publicity campaigns

But haven’t they missed a trick there?
A TV advert (or a series of them) playing out to various versions of Fever. Maybe Baz Luhrmann could produce them

It may help to reinvigorate Fevertree’s flagging fortunes.

Simon

“However FEVR has undeniably established itself as a premium brand, is a good product equal to or better than Schweppes.”

I wouldn’t put Fever on the same level as Schweppes. I think if there were blind-tasting en masse between the two Schweppes would be the choice of the majority.

Fever was always a repackaged jar of jam in a different jar (a glass one) and their marketing department also perpetrated that idiot’s myth why anyone would use any other brand except Fever to mix with expensive spirits. A myth parroted ad infinitum by those with a single brain cell who are too stupid to see past the hype. And a cliche I’ve heard many times personally from the intellectually challenged.

I think the penny’s dropped regarding Fever’s self-allusion to superior quality, and that’s left the shareprice exposed. Exposed to reality - and that’s why I believe Fever will fall to £5.

As for getting taken over - why would a global brand take an upstart lemonade manufacturer over when they have superior brands of their own. Or alternately just concoct a new brand along the same lines to compete directly

As a worse case scenario i could see Fevertree going the same way as Blockbuster. Fashions come and go and in my view Fever have lost their appeal - which was after all only built on a myth.

The main issue with Fevertree has always been its obscenely high valuation. Markets rarely value shares fairly - stocks either get overbought or oversold. The old idiot’s cliche oft-quoted from the Trading Manual For Dummies that the market is always right is erroneous in the extreme.

But sooner or later these market darlings collide with reality and fall back to earth (Ocado being another prime example)

Needless to say Fevertree’s obscene valuation attracted the attention of professional shorters.
Blackrock investment management alone has a 4 percent short out. Millennium International Management also has a hefty short position - the list is endless. Sickly wildebeest are easy meat and will always attract a plethora of predators.

In my view Fevertree still has a long way to fall. And I don’t see any of the mass shorts being closed - so I assume they agree. If anything Friday’s profit warning will amplify short interest.

£5 by the end of next week?

I wouldn’t bet against it.

I don’t consider a company that makes a new type of lemonade as a good investment. Fevertree was always a gimmick, one which bears some resemblances to cryptocurrencies.
The only premium thing about it is the price.
With superior brands such as Swheppes selling for less why would anyone pay more for an inferior product.
Fevertree’s gambit relied on intensive market campaigning, which is costly, to convince gullible shoppers that their brand of lemonade was worth double or treble that of its rivals.
Fevertree could all be forgotten about in a couple of years. The brand isn’t strong enough to weather a downturn. I’m tipping it to go the same way as Colt 45. In an era of hyper inflation cost-conscious consumers have woken up to the fact that paying treble the market rate for lemonade isn’t such a good idea.

Lending

“The way I see it, all companies with a P/E ratio greater than one depend on future earnings to justify their SP”

Don’t get hung up on P/Es - that’s a newcomer/novices game

All shares are valued differently depending on multiple variables.

If the market were to assign a constant p/e value to every stock they would become savings accounts.

The yanks know this - but uk investors have an over simplistic perspective on market dynamics. In my view uk markets are incapable of valuing shares fairly because of their huge intelligence deficit with the rest of the world. And a lot of that is to do with the combination of a nanny state culture and being tabloid educated.

Hyena hedge funds based in the US are the only sellers. The FCA really needs to introduce regulation to stop this practice. What they do in the UK would never pass scrutiny in their own gun-infested s**thole

It works like this. - packs of hyena funds collude together to create selling pressure by mass shorting - careful to keep their positions below a threshold that would require notification. They program their algorithm trading robots with multiple sells ( usually very small ones) but that’s enough to fool obtuse UK market makers into marking the shareprice down aggressively.

Hyena hedge funds specifically target uk tech stocks because they know UK investors have a huge intellectual deficit compared to the rest of the world. Easy picking when investors are lame and have zero balls.

And Bojo the clown is doing his best to convince ARM to relist on the Permabear 100 so that too can get systematically trashed by hyena funds.

Like Wise & Darktrace are.

The Permabear 100 is toxic for tech companies - listing on that miserable index is financial suicide

Both Darktrace and Wise need to buyout their own companies and relist on the Nasdaq, if they are ever going to be fairly valued.

If the FCA had another brain cell a simple investigation to the source of these mass automated trades would lead back to US hyena hedge funds. Multi billion fines and lengthy jail sentences would be in order. Because if you did what they’re doing in a casino you would serve twenty years.

Mo

“if your shares halved or even 1/3 it will still be worth more than the price investors bought in at”
__________________

Yeah isn’t it amazing how professional funds have overlooked an opportunity to make a couple of thousand or even twenty thousand percent on this busted flush.

If is a word that gets used repeatedly by losers

My answer to that is - if my aunty had balls she’d be my uncle.

Dadean

“Wonder what sort of rebound, if any we will see..”

Don’t hold your breath. When the market becomes bearish on a share they often drift lower of languish in the doldrums.

You also have to take into consideration that there’re packs of US hyena hedge funds who make their money shorting the world’s most bearish market (UK) And when markets turn bearish hyenas hunt.

I’m not really against shorting but I draw the line when packs of hyena hedge funds collude to drive down the shareprice of a company. That’s as near to price fixing as you’ll ever get on stock markets and it needs to be prohibited.

And like their namesake on the Serengeti Plains - when the hyenas swarm on their prey everything else is frightened away, resulting in a company’s shares getting hijacked by hyenas.

Steve

“reasonable update so I don't understand the 20% drop”

Uk market makers are incapable of valuing shares fairly. This morning, they saw ASOS’s profit warning and priced it into Halfords, even though the business models are as different as chalk and cheese.

All those obtuse smucks need are loincloths and clubs over their shoulders, then they’d be full-blown Neanderthals. Is it any wonder why so many great British businesses get taken over by overseas predators when those responsible for valuing them have an intelligence deficit as wide as a black hole.

Halfords is far more than a retailer - unlike ASOS many of their products are essential; not discretionary. Motorists go to buy brakes and tyres from National because they have to - the same can’t be said for clothing.

Halfords will probably drift lower in the short term but I believe 160ish Isa good entry point for substantial long term gains.

The windfall tax is a crude policy by a pack of desperate vote buying washouts to ensure many more years of single party rule and elected dictatorship.

There will be consequences the world over - the Tory’s Stone Age socialist policy of taxing private sector companies for success will deter investment and scar corporate Britain. I bet Shell regret moving base to London now - if they had moved to a single Dutch base investors would be billions better off.

A mindless tax on pension funds and people who take risks - and all because their bet paid off.

Big oil should confront populist vote buying politicians and threaten to leave Britain - and what a grievous wound that would leave on the country.

And all because a nation of whining ninnies who sit in obscenely overpriced houses are indignant that private sector companies are making more profit than they feel is right. Populist politicians are pandering to Philistine prejudices.

It needs to be said big oil is already paying huge revenue to the government because of high oil prices. So this despicable tax is a windfall tax ON TOP of a windfall.

And they did it with the banks too. Vote buying to benefit their popularity. What a vulgar uneducated government this is!

The board will propose a final ordinary dividend for the year of 55.0 pence at the Annual General Meeting on 21(st) July 2022. Together with the interim dividend of 22.0 pence per share, this gives a total ordinary dividend of 77.0 pence representing a 10% increase on the prior year. Subject to approval by shareholders, the final dividend will be paid on 2(nd) August 2022, with an ex-dividend date of 9(th) June 2022. Our previously announced £200 million share buyback completed on 13(th) May 2022.