Member Info for zccax77

No sign of 40p today.

TED has always been a good cash generator, even last year they had £50m+ of cash from operations, when underlying EBITDA was £10m

An article for a 5% move up in sp? Someone is controlling this.

Only ten years old but will need another 4-5 years to steady the ship and make a consistent profit. Hill and Donaldson should be sued!

Someone got a lotta baby mama's to feed.

All eyes will be on the expected credit loan losses. If they are below £50m we will be fine and I expect this to rise. Odey is expecting £300m.

I love these articles which with one hand talk about the challenges MTRO has with a low yield (low risk) portfolio and then talks about rising bad debt levels in a recession. You could not make it up.

One thing MTRO has no problem getting is low cost deposits.

Next April will be the best time to buy. strangely those houses near me no longer have the developer paying the stamp duty ;-)

Jimjam, there are some new housing developments which I follow around me. One of them near me has sold 5 houses from a total of 9 on the development in the last week alone.

Plus indicates house prices won't fall more than 10% at most. MTRO LTV of loan book: 60% fully collateralised. Odey is still expecting NPL's of £300m, lets see what August 5 brings.

The stamp duty holiday will push up transactions in the housing market.

Yuri this is a bank, so the regulators will not willy nilly allow management to do what they like with the equity. £1.6bn of equity is sitting there, most of which is tangible and Mr. market is valuing this at £190m.

I used to use Smile back in 2005. Didn't know they were still around.

Smile and First Direct were the original internet only banks. Looks like they were not the way forward.

Matlot: I hope Odey still has his TSLA short open. That must be fun.

This comment sums up Metro's problems, but no doubt management are still opening new branches:

"The problem is that Metro’s model, that is a focus on customer service, is one which only works when the market you operate in has nice juicy net interest margins (NIMs), giving sufficient space for the inherently costly nature of providing such a service.

Once upon a time, with base rates at 5% and NIMs at 300bp+ for secured mortgages, this was possible. Say in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Now of course, plenty people will quibble and say that even then banks offered poor service. But let’s leave that to one side for a moment. In the here and now the point is that for a decade since 2009 NIMs in the UK banking market have been decimated (there are lots of reasons, but exceptionally low base rates is the prime one). Quite simply this leaves absolutely no space for the kind of model which Metro attempted. It is impossible to make it truly profitable at any scale and the only way they managed to make it look like it could work is a combination of pushing certain liabilities (those expensive leases) off balance sheet (until IFRS16 came along and put them on balance sheet) and selling a growth story good enough to keep the equity trading far enough above boom that raising more equity is actually accretive. Once that balloon was popped the problems multiplied.

The sad fact is that UK consumers, whether they actively think they are doing it or not, are voting with their wallets: they care most about low low mortgage rates, even if that’s at the expense of customer service. That’s why every bank is ripping out cost as fast and furiously as they can (branch network, call centres etc.), as it’s the only way to keep their heads above water.

Gosh and I haven’t even talked yet about the impact that the regulatory environment has had on smaller banks (summary: it’s not good). Yup, it’s tough for Metro I’m afraid.

PS. I say all this as someone who hoped they would flourish too, and indeed still hopes I am wrong about all of the above!"

RKB, the auditors are themselves audited. I used to work for Deloitte and our audits were reviewed by Grant Thornton on audit quality. Spent most of my time documenting and very little time thinking outside the box.

2 years max? expect audit costs to double or triple. First year of an audit is a total loss due to documenting all processes takes ages.

These clowns did not use the furlough scheme, so they had the travel staff sitting on their hands doing nothing. The BoD need sacking. Expect a zero profit this year, maybe even a loss.

Thought they only bothered when the holdings moved by more than 1%