Something for the Weekend – Britain’s Got Telecom

It amazes me that people here are so absorbed by foreign politics but scarcely seem to engage with domestic politics at all. The Trump campaign is a classic example. I see countless retarded posts by Brits on Facebook saying things like “we’ve GOT to stop Trump getting elected”. I say retarded because, given the person making the post has no vote in the US, their chosen course of action is to make Trump trend on social media which only helps his campaign! When we had the most important referendum in years, the one about STV (Single Transferable Vote) in 2011, practically no one cared, and there was little or no public debate. As a result we now have a one-party system. Well done morons. But Trump – that gets everyone talking. There must be an awful lot of villages missing an idiot these days.

Another thing that seems to have gripped the nation is France’s stance on beachwear. Again, it’s a separate sovereign state, and we’re not even in the EU for all practical purposes any more. Yet there’re copious postings about the subject, almost none of the authors of which seem to know anything about France’s secular laws, nor how arrogant it is of us in the UK to presume the French are doing it wrong, just because it isn’t what we would do here in the UK. While we’re on the subject of what we do in the UK, or rather don’t – unlike France, which has over 100 successful prosecutions – we have yet to convict a single person for carrying out one of the estimated 400 cases a month of FGM (female genital mutilation) here in the UK since it was made illegal decades ago. Perspective, people!

Which brings me on to what privatisation was supposed to achieve. Another dramatic failure when it comes to BT (LON:BT.A). I moved to a new house last year where I had no choice for fast broadband other than to use a BT line and BT Internet. Thirty-odd years it’s been since the telecoms market was allegedly opened up. Yet this part-monopoly still exists. And it’s not like I’m in the sticks – I’m 35 minutes from central London! OfCom are pretty useless, and if I’d been asked there was a quick solution: tell BT either they had to fix the lack of monopoly or provide free wi-fi in every English city by the year x.

So, given this persistent advantage, how are the shares doing? I wrote about BT in my magazine article ‘Using Corporation Tax as a Technical Indicator’ last September. There was upside to be had and I wrote “There’s a nice upward trends on the CT chart, and the price chart is in a healthy up trend too. A new ATH is looking likely, and this pull-back could be another entry signal for the more aggressive investor.”

The stock was then around 437p. It quickly rallied up to 500p before trading off, currently around 400p. So a nice little earner and a quick one too. BT is still only paying £441m in CT so not the breakout that we might have expected. It’s not dead in the water yet (although a new ATH now seems remote), but we certainly aren’t getting a signal from the CT paid chart. The price has failed on the monthly below the Ichimoku and on the other hand we don’t have much of a short signal. Leave well alone would be my position on this right now. We made a few quid last autumn and that’ll have to do for now.

I have never had so many problems as I’ve experienced in the last year with the BT Internet so-called service, which is far from cheap. This week has been awful, with something like 200 outages. Yes, 200. Luckily Virgin are now putting cables in and I can get to the internet refuge and away from my abuser: BT. At the first opportunity I shall be looking to get my money back via the markets!