About forty years ago, my late father-in-law, himself a by then retired successful soldier and former War Office worker, strongly pointed out to me that the moment the squaddies choose the generals the army is enfeebled. And one wonders whether Ed Miliband was chosen just because Len McCluskey and other intellectuals of the trade union…
What’s in a name?: a director of Proxama (PROX), “the international mobile proximity commerce company”, has left the board. He is one Miles Quitmann. Are you surprised? ***** Astonishingly, Mitie (MTO) have yesterday bought back another 150,000 shares – or at least £1m+ in recent days. They must be loopy. But however loopy they may…
Last week, Jim Slater compared an investment in Telford Homes (TEF) with one in ASOS (ASC). He is very keen on Telford and he may be right so to enthuse – I myself am cautious about housebuilders since they have always seemed cyclical to me. However, he slates (well, he would wouldn’t he) ASOS arguing…
As we head on to Thursday’s General Election we can reasonably assert that none of the parties has considered in public the financial position of the UK. This is amazing. That said, anyone who trusts Labour with a cheque book is more trusting than I. One must just ignore the fact that there has lately…
Lucian Miers sought to challenge LSE chairman, Chris Gibson-Smith, at yesterday’s AGM but was sidelined by a chairman who clearly felt authorised to push on regardless. Mr Gibson-Smith tried to justify misconduct at AIM by claiming that AIM had been very successful commercially and therefore should not be criticised. In so averring he missed Lucian’s…
Master Investor was packed on Saturday. I do not know whether this is down to the endeavours of the Burnbrae Media management or a reviving interest amongst private investors or whether it is a bit of both. At a guess it is the last identified. At the end of my own contribution I was asked…
I caught up with Andrew Monk of VSA Capital this morning. VSA are brokers to Madagascar Oil (MOIL) and Andrew is, to put it mildly, bullish. I started by pointing out that Madagascar is hardly the safest territory politically speaking. However, he countered that the World Bank is in there and the new president of…
This matter of Mr Sarao has unsurprisingly attracted a lot of comment in today’s press. What shines out is the inability of anybody to identify what has occurred and how it breaches any law remotely understood to anybody. One correspondent (I asked four expert traders yesterday what they thought had gone on) remarks that, seemingly,…
The secret of announcing losses is to describe them as “non-cash”, which means that they do not count. As if. However, should one knock off intangibles from Tesco (TSCO)‘s balance sheet, one is left with £3.3bn tnav. This contrasts with a market valuation of the order of £19bn. This is quite alright provided one reckons…
Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard where he lectures on the MBA course, stayed with me and my wife over the weekend, preparatory to talking in public on Adware Shenanigans in 2015. It was really interesting – clearly there is massive fraud taking place. The chief villain in quoted UK is blinkx (BLNX). Seemingly,…
