I got spifflicated at Richmond. I only note it by way of completeness. However, we can all make mistakes as did for instance HH Munro, who wrote as Saki (if you have not read his stuff you have missed out) who found himself in 1916 instructing some soldier to “put that bloody cigarette out”. For his pains he was immediately drilled in the brain by a German sniper. He was 43.
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I have been sent a long set of notes covering BooHoo (LON:BOO) which at 120p is capitalised at around £1.4bn. This company is furiously giving off red flags and looks wildly overvalued – it should perhaps be around half its current price. It may be engaged, inter alia, in channel stuffing. This dramatic but unbeautiful phrase covers the practice of selling at longer and longer settlement dates simply to put a sale in the tin. I do not need to brief readers of the origin and consequence of this practice.
Some will compare BOO to ASOS (LON:ASC). But the same laws of gravity apply.
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Plus500 (LON:PLUS) collapsed yesterday as Cysec, the Cyprus regulator, a body that I had dismissed as soporifically inclined, seemed to have woken up and put PLUS in the crosshairs. PLUS has cost me dough historically. But I suspect I’ll get it back.
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Finally, I see that PwC yesterday disclosed that it is estimated that the pension deficit in aggregate of UK occupational pension schemes dropped by around £50bn in November simply through the rise in yield on gilts. This underlines the point already made here that these deficiencies are in a very real sense phoney. This continues to bode well for Molins (LON:MLIN).