Member Info for UpDownFlat

About 6 weeks of buying left

BP bought lower than usual today. It's like they don’t want to be intrusive in the market

you know that BP 's trailing PE will drop a lot once Q3 is announced. It feels like the company is rated as Junk for equity, but A2 for debt?

Today they should reach the 1% of issued shares bought back YTD. At then end of Q3 they will have bought back 2.25% of their shares.

I could foresee BP having 4 or 5 hydrogen plants by 2035.
Because of the cost and complexity, they have a barrier to entry from competition vs. say solar.
I think the current strategy of going slowly over a 10-year period is correct for the company, perhaps not for the shareholders who want a return immediately, but they get a higher return then the debt holders.

So you don't like them Mojo ?

I think this is really good news for BP.

Does anyone else notice that the oil price seems to rise under democratic Presidents

The biggest thing holding BP and other oil companies back is the future oil price. People want to see if the price stays up or goes down. If the Saudi's and Russians can double their profit’s by holding back 10%.

29 working days

Put it to this way, if I had £48m this is where I would store it.

And obviously good shareholder value for the share buys,
…and it pays 5% divi,
so it feels like it can only provide ( “a little bit at least” ) upside for the next 30 days.

Actually Markgo it is quite a good question, Interesting.

I think they are doing it slowly so as to provide downside protection.

But because every day they seem to buy at the bottom of the range I assume they are genuinely buying back the shares because they believe it is a good investment vs trying to jack the price, which they could do if they wanted to.

If the buy backs are a sneaky method to raise the share price so that they can get bonuses, then as a shareholder I say "good luck to them."

II don’t think they need to raise finance, they have $34b in cash and are reducing net debt rapidly. They are one of very few companies that have issued perpetual bonds. Obviously, they want as cheap debt as possible, but their net debt should be around $30b by the end of this year. This is impressive given the level of capex spend. BP are currently a cash machine. Its not unrealistic to imagine net debt of mid to low twenties end of next year.

41,907,557 (LSE vol only) is less then they have bought this year, up to the 9th of Aug(Q2+Q3), it was 154,831,000 shares. On a large buying day they buy around 12,000,000 shares, but today it was 6,862,485, so I would guess around 1/10th - 1/15th of the shares traded on a day (all three exchanges), go back to BP. They must be the biggest buyer on the day.

I wonder how many shares are in the pool of actively traded. I guess around 1b-2b. Does anyone know ? What I am asking, "is there a point at which a shortage develops ?"

The buybacks will continue to the end of September, maybe all the way to the next results date. They have spent £100m so far.

So Q3, based on the current price of gas and oil will generate +-$2b operational cash over Q2. No GOM but increased capex. This means another $1.5b buyback, plus a debt reduction of $2b