Member Info for unhooked

haha, it can be a bit of a madhouse here too!

... of THG! Sorry

Check the advfn board

Kelso just bought 0.83% of THG and Kamani has 3% of Kelso, so a minor situation, but symbolic. In fact the Kelso share register is an interesting read of 'heavy hitters' at the sportier end of entrepreneurial life!

There's not much they could or should say, but I think they were right to release the RNS, if only to stop people saying "why hasn't the company commented?"

... and a TR1. Major shareholder Canaccord sold a few.

196melrose, nothing for the regulator to do. I'm afraid they are allowed to publish a bearish note and short the stock all at the same time. Regular occurrence - look at the short attack on Adani Group trashing the Indian stock market right now.

Would that be Umar Kamani of Boohoo on KLSO's register? Ha!

I see that Umar Kamani has bought a few THG shares via his holding in the recently formed Kelso - an activist fund. It's all small beer, but interesting nonetheless.

Tacked onto the end of what should be a good news story about Kelso, Sharecast add:
"Numis, which rates the shares at 'sell', said: We believe a separation of the group will be hard to realise, and feel if the Nutrition business were to be split it would be at a lower valuation than implied, whilst we have concerns over the shape of the rest of the group. With the balance sheet providing further reason for concern, we remain negative."

This story is about Kelso - nothing to do with Numis - but they couldn't resist...

Thanks for posting this info. An endorsement.

Those are fair points Paulof. I guess it depends how you define 'distressed' He doesn't always buy a company out of administration, he buys where he sees the value and , let's face it BWNG is cheap. Indeed sometimes Ashley doesn't bid at all - he holds a stake in a company for a while and then eventually just sells the stake. Re your comment about the Alliances scooping up Schroder shares, I thought it was established from the TR1s that the Schroder stake had gone to Frasers.

They are on speaking terms. Maybe Ashley has told Brough of his plans and on that basis Brough has sold out at a price somewhere in the low 30s.... that tells us something.

Andy Brough at Schroders has always been a fan of Mike Fraser.
One thing we know about the latter gent, is he will *not* overpay - quite the opposite in fact - so, if there is to be a credible Frasers takeover, one or other of the Alliance family will need to be prepared to accept a low-ball price. It's possible. Deffo can't see Ashley paying 70p.

The attack that worries me is the sustained short attack on DARK today..

Spoke too soon.
Seems it just came up for air before diving again.
A rollercoaster day for DARK holders!

Lowest I could get was 209, but I'd already bought 10 mins earlier at 2.17...
Was that today's bottom?

Be helpful if one could get a quote...

The whole history leaves a bad feeling that the Schroder Juniors are treading water with this trust - happy managing the decline and picking up the juicy 1% management fee (based on the NAV, not market cap, note), and with no performance fee. One thing I loved about the old WPCT was that it was paid 100% out of performance fees… with a 10% p.a. hurdle.

It’s going to take a lot to turn SUPP around. Only ‘loss aversion’ (or the sunk cost fallacy or whatever they call it) – something I’m badly afflicted with – keeps me from getting out at what would be a big loss.

Here’s my tuppence worth. The 3 Woodford entities were Woodford Equity Income Fund , Woodford Income Focus Fund and the forerunner of this trust, WPCT. Sadly, I've been in all 3 at various times. The Income Focus fund concentrated almost exclusively on large cap income payers and I don't think it had any holdings in common with the trust. The Equity Income Fund, his main entity, did have holdings in common: before the fund's demise, in an effort to improve liquidity in the face or redemptions, Woodford pulled off a stunt whereby he packaged up most of the fund's holdings in common with the trust (the illiquid ones), and 'sold' them to the trust in return for shares in the trust. The result was that the trust doubled up on a number of esoteric holdings, including a load of really dodgy stuff, and also ended up with an overhang of its shares as the fund set about selling the newly 'acquired' shares. I remember this financial engineering by Woodford to save his back caused a lot of disquiet among investors in the trust. The stunt didn't ultimately work for the fund either because, as we all know, Kent County Council shortly came in with a redemption request for £230m worth of units and that was that. The point is, I don't think there were many (or any) holdings in common left when Link set about liquidating the main fund... and if they were, I'd have thought they'd have been long sold off by now... unless you know different Agricore? Certainly, Link didn't try to sell them to SUPP (like Woodford had to WPCT).

So, in terms of what's depressing the NAV or causing the persistent discount, I don’t think it’s the overhang of stocks in common which Link are trying to sell, because I don't think it exists anymore. For me, the reasons are to do with lingering doubts over the quality of the Woodford legacy portfolio along with growing doubts about Schroders after 3 years in charge. To underline my point about Schroders, the 1st thing they did, to reduce the trust's debt, was sell some good quality biotechs to a specialist healthcare investor who quickly sold them on for double or triple what they paid us. That didn't help sentiment. Then, their first stock pick was JMT, which I remember they lauded pompously in some blurb as a world beating UK disruptor, etc, etc, and then it promptly crashed 30% following a profit warning or news they were getting out of batteries or some such. That also didn't help sentiment! Actually, have any of their picks done well? More recently we've had the appalling 'administrative error' in the valuation of Benevolent AI in the books of SUPP, which knocked a few pence off the NAV, and which caused Schroders to sack Link and bring valuations in-house. I don't know about you all, but somehow that didn't fill me with confidence (neither the mistake itself, nor the bringing of valuations in-house).