Member Info for Tony1957

Https://www.business-live.co.uk/enterprise/stelrad-increases-profits-despite-falling-29721384

Hope Mitch is still holding his shares. All that snake oil he was trying to sell us in June 2022 Jan 2023. "The offer price does not reflect the underlying value of the business."

"Never mind all that useless jabber, I have never heard of any platforms doing a runner in 40 years of investing. however the RIO sp is nearly down to buying time."

Vouchers are just electronic chits, easily issued and easily authenticated.

Just wait until you find out about the daily reconciliation software some of these intermediaries use.

Of course, though, you are right, none of that matters a jot .................until the one day it does matter , as various people in Lehman brothers found out.

The USA and UK platfom system I have investigated. The summary, if you fear a modest or major system collapse, get your money out of shares being held via platforms. Iinstead use a broker that will make the share purchase on your behalf and advise you of the share certificate details. Brokers who do this have significantly higher charges than the various platforms.

The chain of custody for platforms is deliberately long and obtuse, with simple vouchers being held, once away from the first, or sometimes seconds step. Legal liability to elements of this chain is limited not to absolute loss but loss as a result of a failure to safeguard or improper behaviour.

To understand how this will not transmit your loss to the source of liability, one needs to understand the nature of the chain. Major original holders of shares have independent subsidiaries, with carefully constructed legal frameworks, that offer very limited liability. These are not in place in the custody chain adjacent to themselves but at a 4th position or a point distant from themselves.

Say you have "purchased" shares in company A and the chain of custody is short, say only 6 different exchange houses. Say there is a collapse in the market and many share prices drop. This results in the opaque entity which is in position 3 in the chain becoming insolvent.

You feel content, although there has been a general market collapse, company A shares have been less seriously affected and have lost only 20% of their value.

Your platform then advise that your holding is lost and of no value. They are No 6 in the chain and they have been advised by Nos 4 & 5 that you holding is lost because 3 became insolvent.

Your claim for liability is with the platform you dealt with, No 6. To defend their liability for the loss you have suffered they simply have to prove that they have acted properly in all matters. Did they do due diligence according to accepted industry standards, did they hold all the correct certificates and recent tests of authenticity and verification? Oh yes, No 6 will have all that with No 5 and No 5 will have all that with No 4.

So who is going to pursue your loss, because certainly Nos, 6, 5 & 4 have suffered no loss as a result of the collapse of No 3, they have simply written off their liability for their holdings against yourself? Yes, look in the mirror, there is the only individual interested in holding anyone to account for this state of affairs, and to do that you will be seeking details and records from opaque entities for whom your loss is irrelevant to them and assisting you with details of records and transactions is in fact a financial burden. They will not co-operate voluntarily. You may well be able to legally enforce co-operation but that requires that only a single element in a long chain has become insolvent and has lost its records & will be prohibitively costly to yourself.

My car is currently worth £10,000. If I have pay for this "upgrade" which costs (7÷24 x£10,000=)£3,000 it will add so much more to the value; trust me.

OK, here's the £3,000.

Market - what is the car worth now?

Exactly the same as it was 5 weeks ago, £10,000.

Cash - are you guys joking? This is a company with £55B of debt on its books. "Cash" of £7B is going to do what? Stop 55 being 62 and meaning the Execs missed their bonuses.

There is only one priority for the Execs and Board - shareholder value.

So a few weeks in and now ex divi and the capitation is unmoved as a result of the cash raised by the rights issue. 1120 x (24÷(24+7)) = 867. So we shareholders have stumped up our cash and it has had zero effect on the net worth of the company. That, very definitely, was not the intended outcome.

Well done that BoD!

I hope they give plenty of our money to pay all the fees to those who gave them that so expensive advice.

Adding shareholder value - NOT!

Pockerchips wrote

"You also have a lot more debt out there ,a lot more, so you have more lenders to keep sweet"

In that sentence you have the whole problem. Boards have borrowed to buy sweets today and payback tomorrow - only they don't. They are then beholden to every Tom, Dick or Harry who wants to shove them around.

Nobody said they had to borrow money whilst the clowns dropped interest rates down to historic lows. Leave the Fed and BoE to stew in the mess they have made for themselves. Look after the money your shareholders have asked you to look after.

Pockerchips

"I would disagree that the Priority is shareholders .... shareholders just being one part of the balancing act "

This is a widely held belief, particularly popular in the types of people "like us" who "we" promote to the boards and executive positions in UK corporate governance. Our duty is to the customers, employees, the regulator, our neighbours down the street, that nice Mrs Jones who has nothing to do with our business but who always smiles when she walks by; we can't let her down can we? The shareholders? Just another stakeholder (like "our" new term?) exactly like Mrs Jones, only a little more difficult to please."

And it is exactly why, post war, UK commercial competitivity has waned; with rare exceptions.

Look after the shareholders capital and as a consequence you must keep your workforce diligent, trained and motivated and providing your customers with a service/product they come back for.

One priority and for the Board, one duty; look after shareholder interests. I would have a giant sign in the boardroom and in the CEOs office stating exactly this.

Abuse the shareholders as a cash cow and it will permeate the rest of the business, customers and employees there to be abused as well.

No effective return for the shareholders =no business.

When I started work, 50 years ago, the induction included half a day making sure we understood exactly this.

Longtime investor

"An opinion from a keyboard warrior about the people in charge at National Grid .

"FFS"

That kool-aid must sure taste good.

Despite F1nesse not typing what he intended, "24 x" not "7 x", and Pockerchips not being sufficiently numerate to see at a glance the trivial error, the RI was obviously a clear signpost, as so many are, that this is a Board & Executive who do not understand their primary duty.

Using F1nesse's 1120, the break even share price at the offer price of £6.45 is £313.95 ÷ 31 = 1013. The drop was always going to be bigger than that up to a value of 1120 x 24 ÷31 = 867 even allowing for the fact that there had been a 29% increase in share issue and so debt was significantly reduced. Therefore, unless one could sell in the first couple of hours significant loss was guaranteed and the only option for us shareholders was to take the measly offering, currently standing at (8.34 - 6.45) x7 = £13.23 "profit", to offset against the loss in share value the RI guaranteed.

The Executive and Board would have taken much, very expensive advice. Undoubtedly they expected the settled share price to be close to 1013 and the very worse case scenario of 867 would have been described as totally unlikely. That it is currently at 834 represents at 18% loss of invested capital.

The Executive and Board will be shocked with the current state of affairs. They took the wrong decision because they did not understand the metrics of the business, they are paid to understand, correctly. They covered this lack of understanding by outsourcing advice. The advice was obviously wrong. It was wrong because the input metrics put into their forecast model were wrong. The Executive and Board obviously did not appreciate this very simple fact.

Undoubtedly they decided to neglect their primary duty - responsibility to shareholder investment - because they saw ahead some pet scheme or project that would make themselves, as individuals and as a collective, appear "more effective" in their own eyes. Funding that pet project was just part of their path to personal success. They then rang for the snake oil salesman to call in and advise them which brand of snake oil to take, to make everything "good".

An Executive and Board that neglect their primary duty are not fit for purpose but I don't see them getting dealt with as their lack of talent deserves, any time soon.

For myself, before the RI I was sat on a modest gain. I was too slow to react on the morning and by midday there was nothing I could do but take up the 7 x £6.45 offer and watch. Currently I am now underwater.

Am I going to leave my money in a company so badly run that it could not spot that a 29% extra share issue for a company holding its current debts was going to produce anything other than a huge loss in capitation, such was their desire to do their pet projects so soon?

No.

I would be a fool to entrust my money with people who did not understand their primary function. I will watch carefully for a little bounce and then take my loss and leave.

Well another few months on and a new 52 week low and soon after Mitch actually bought some shares. So sad to see him join us underwater with this investment. The poor guy just can't seem to catch a break anywhere.

(Why oh why didn't I bail out in the summer of 22 or even Jan 23?)

Really quite good given the economic surroundings but it does require that one reads it. A PE of under 14 and cover of over 4% compares well with other retail shares e.g. Tesco at nearly 30 and less than 4, which I also gladly hold. This share is undervalued & suffers from "analysts" thinking it just sells petfood. The vet business under the same roof, open the same hours, is most important.

I posted a year ago that I made two mistakes, post Tailwind I have now made three on this stock. I took a bigger position on this post Kitsos thinking - give it 6 to 9 months and the Board will deliver. Its been downhill most of the way.

My third mistake was not jumping off post the Tailwind deal being confirmed, in one of those modest ups, in the summer, at around 255 when my losses were not too bad.

My only positive is thinking what lessons I am learning to make sure I don't get caught again.

Do I try some rapid trading 205-210 to 225 - 230 to try and negate some of my longer term losses. Might give it a try, it certainly bumps along.

If I made two dumb mistakes not selling during the high of last summer, I made another not selling as soon as the two events happened in December -i) the share price dropped ii) the nature of the deal became apparent. Days where the share price bobbed around 270p now seem relatively halcyon and 320p at the beginning of December - unreal.

Mitch must be cursing that flock of black swans and irrationality of the markets.

Some one wants this to drop - selling a single share well below- this has happened a short time earlier as well
09.03.23 13:42:53 932.50 GBX 1 9.33 AT P ALGO-XLON
09.03.23 13:42:33 938.00 GBX 85 797.30 AT P-XLON
09.03.23 13:42:33 937.50 GBX 175 1,640.63 AT P-XLON
09.03.23 13:42:33 937.00 GBX 95 890.15 AT P ALGO-XLON
09.03.23 13:42:33 937.00 GBX 105 983.85 AT P ALGO-XLON

Banbury boy - I did indeed read your post counting as you did. I wrote my post. It is 2023 and many of the self-righteous have manoeuvred their talent-sets to policing social media. I edited my post. I also continue to hold in hope.

Well, several weeks on and no sign of the market taking the same view of this deal as Mitch and the teen-age analysts at the institutional investors who listened to Mitch and then advised their bosses to vote in favor. Even the 320p values of November look like an unlikely exit possibility at this stage for those of us wanting out. Mind the copium of posters here who backed it acts to offset my self annoyance at not walking away when I knew I should have.

Humpy - you did a very good job of arguing against the position you wanted to take. I particularly like " peeps will continue to spoil their pets if they can." which could be quite a steep slope people would be willing to climb. But let me add another point about the "pester power". Part of the deal of pets, particularly for children, is educating them into the birth-maturing-adult-death cycle of life and particularly the role of the cable responsible individual to nurture & care for an organism - perhaps yourself when you are old - as that organism is exposed to risk or later death.
The "certificate of achievement" of that attribute is not a wider TV but easily quantified by the sacrifices one would be willing to make for the dependent. Pester power is, partially, expressing that attribute parents have sought to inculcate in their children. It is all a complex dynamic with lots of other factors but Fido ain't ever being put out on the street so the kids can have another chocky bar.
This is a good stock and the well ordered, in-store, vet., grooming and care services make it so much more. It was driven down by incorrectly treating it as just another retail stock, I know because my Tesco and Sainsbury's stocks also took a good beating last year as well!

I will try not to be too disparaging " No sign of folks skimping on their pets yet" is absolutely wrong thinking and yet time and again I see it in connection with this share. This is a retail business but to characterise it with that comment is to fail to understand the nature of the business and the psyche of the customers this outlet appeals to. Let me re-phrase it - "customers would rather starve themselves than skimp on their pets". That is why this is going to be so resilient in the difficult times of the near future; there never will be a "yet".

Loving that purchase of a single share at above the current rate earlier today. "I've put 10k in your account to use to support the price of SQZ - do what you can. Yes I know I should have read the stuff from Mitch about the deal before I told the boss that we should support , but WE need it to not sink otherwise he might go and look at the chat boards and then it will hit the fan. And if I go, i'm taking you with me. Work with a couple of your mates, there are others in the same position. Come back to me if you need a bit more."