Market Position: Pound/Dollar below $1.41 Risks $1.36 RBS (RBS): Fundamental Collapse It may be conceded that at the time of the financial crisis eight years ago it seemed like a good idea to bail out or merge UK High Street banks. After all, the credibility of the UK financial system as a world centre for…
Do you want to know the true probability of Brexit happening? Then forget about political polls and look at predictive markets instead. The odds offered at betting exchanges and bookmakers provide more accurate forecasts of future outcomes than polls can ever command. While the Brexit vote is now a tough call at newspaper and other…
Quite why Petroceltic (PCI) is 8p bid I have no idea. The bidder owns 30% already and has squared the banks. There is virtually no chance that anybody else can intrude. The price should be around 2.9p. ***** If you have not so far read Victor Hill’s excellent piece in yesterday’s Master Investor where he…
Market Position: Dax above 9,090 Targets 9,790 Lloyds Banking (LLOY): Buttering up Shareholders I am not sure whether after some seven years in the wilderness, shareholders of Lloyds Banking finally have a warm and fluffy feeling regarding the aftermath of the shotgun wedding between it and HBOS. This was clearly the work of the saviour…
When I was young the word “security” denoted that one had the wherewithal to buy a cosy retirement bungalow in the Home Counties. Today, the word has been appropriated by politicians with Orwellian intent to mean protection from foreign invasion and from terrorism. (Here at least, they’ve been more successful in the former than in…
Market Position: WTI Crude Oil below £$35 Still Targets $25 Barratt Developments (BDEV): Key Support Zone towards 550p It is always interesting to see the explanation of a surprise sharp move to the downside, which in the case of the FTSE 100 today was “global growth fears”, or alternatively, “the market is down, and we…
Tate & Lyle (TATE), for those who didn’t know, is no longer in the business of making Britain the fattest, even if it is also possibly the phattest, country in Europe. They got out of the sugar business some years ago in 2010 when they sold the Tate & Lyle sugar brand and Golden Lion…
HSBC (HSBA) was one hundred and fifty years old in 2015. It has celebrated its birthday by putting in place capital rejuvenation plans through a restructuring, which last year produced an extra $11.3 billion of capital with which to improve capital ratios and increase the dividend. This year will see more restructuring costs, and bumps…
We kick off this morning with a report by Zatarra Research (zatarraresearch.com) into Wirecard (WDI on Frankfurt). This is a big company and there is plenty of stock to borrow. Punters should plunge virtually without reserve on this one cognisant that this informant, your diarist, does not know when the implosion will occur. But it…
And so it’s arrived. The Brexit referendum. Governments of course won’t consider referenda unless coerced, and then of course they’ll want to see the desired, or what they would call the ‘correct’, result; otherwise they wouldn’t have them. There was a joke in Sweden to the contrary. They had a referendum in 1955 about whether…
