captainb

Don't know booths is privately owned so can keep stum for 9 months post reporting end. M n s made big deal of food performance in last results and Tesco etc expected to report record profits. Waitrose as a 100% sub consolidated into John Lewis. So my expectations if everything was well, would be a loss on clothing offset by a decent result on food. Again, speculation but a lot of larger ticket item retailers come unstuck by delivery chains and stock. I.e. order 5000 lamps thinking vest new thing, by the time they arrive in 12m nobody wants them and small lamps are in causing a big write down. Not sure on their working capital performance.

Yeah agreed again added before you replied. My concern would be the Waitrose element. Other food retailers have managed to raise prices and maintain margins. Despite seemingly to me Waitrose being more expensive, they haven't seemingly managed that. The food performance alone should stop them from dripping into a heavy loss on clothing like m n s. Seems something is wrong there.. and needs a shake up which either needs to be driven from the top or the top needs a shake up Far too many people coast thinking it will be alright. Might be ok in a government department where you get your budget every year with a 5% variance. Less so in the private sector at the top

Don't know I'm not a retail guru nor paid as such. I'm also not a guru on running a governmental department. I'd suggest they hire the former rather than the later though being a retail buisness. I'd also suggest BP hire a head of operations whose worked for an oil company. More useful there. In all seriousness though.. they own bloomin Waitrose. Tesco is reporting record profits this week... m n s food doing v well. Why is it failing.

Agreed with that in general but would suggest if tech goes to a p/e of 80 like it did, even huge companies it's probably not time to buy particularly if other sectors are trading at 15. Active funds can be heavily limited in what they can invest in. So even if the fund manager thinks hang on India is horribly overvalued for whatever reason but Japan is cheap, he/she can be tied to having min 80% of holdings in India as it's called India growth or something similar. Personally I try to time it.. but accept when looking back my overall performance is very similar to a global tracker!

It's heavy tech weighted, so went up like a rocket then game down again. Like most things timing a reasonable entry and exit point is key. Less so if you buy a tracker

Just rather odd. I didn't think John Lewis had failed. If you need a new leader fine but at least have someone who has ordered stock 1 year out, dealt with wharehouse and shipping delays etc etc etc before

Aside from bizarre conversation above, seems odd to give someone that CEO leadership role when they have no private sector or retail experience whatsoever. Non-exec maybe. Im equally not convinced that someone would make a good permanent treasury secretary after running Tesco's operations for 20 years.

Depends on expiry and if you are holding to expiry as disclosed. If the auditors are any good, I have my doubts then they should be looking for evidence they are held for trading and change the accounting accordingly. Holding the value at the cashflow you fully expect to realise and have confidence in, isn't fundamentally wrong. If it's junk corporate then agreed. If we are saying us government are junk then respectively disagree. Svb had god awful treasury management that much is for sure. But unconvinced jp Morgan etc will need to flash sale bonds which are classified as held to maturity to cover deppsits. Particularly as their inflows from smaller banks have been impressive. Additionally realising losses to cover customer funds like that as svb found out is normally game over

I actually don't agree with any of that including the collapse as forecasted consistently (on the internet but gold pushers). Not to say it won't collapse, but holding bonds to expiry and accounting on that basis won't be the cause as it's fundamentally not "wrong" unless on redemption the government can't pay (which logically they can in USD bonds for us government by issuing more bonds or cash etc etc). Regardless of which, I don't get the relevance of a king 'forgiving" the peasants his yearly crop steal from them in times of bad harvest.

Would be wonderful for the BTL Barron's.. get the mortgages forgiven

You can invest in Peter Schiffs funds and see the performance (or lack of) here. https://europacificfunds.com/funds/

It's not a single market. While there are provisions to reduce customs checks it doesn't eliminate them just agrees standards and lack of tariff levels applied. Control is applied on good out i.e. exported back out of the UK Big "risk" in so much as it remains is via the northern Ireland border. However, not sure in reality how profitable it would be to import say beef into Thurrock, load the trucks up and ship across to northern Ireland then down into southern Ireland illegally and take a hit on the sales price for not having right documentation... Plus any scale at risk of being caught... Rather than just importing into Rotterdam and paying the tariff.

Meh would rather have paid off 18/25ths of a mortgage than rented. Fundamental issue compared to buying shares.. you need somewhere to live in, the utility has value unlike a share cert

There's a lot of light industrial "green belt" land. You can make reasonable relaxations without turning London into LA

Works both ways no? Slowest during covid boom in which case same argument applied would be lower prices.. as sellers can't see that house down the street went for 20k above asking etc

Typically though the deposits from SVB say ended up at JP Morgan or whichever major sensible companies could open an account fast enough. Which is why those largest of us banks did the reverse transfer back into first Republic There's no evidence that people are withdrawaling material amounts out of the US or EU or Swiss or UK systems themselves into gold or Saudi accounts etc

I'm not sure if they are the only game in town for commercial reasons.. or if they are the only game in town these days who can pay "facilitation payments" direct. Quite a few local governors in Pakistan are pretty well off. Less so the country itself.

So typically they are built by Chinese firms who don't hire any locally trained people and certainly do not train the locals to be skilled engineers.... Returns on the loans are high or they do an agreed prohibitively expensive sell price on the electric. Guaranteed for 30 years plus. The infrastructure or underlying mines are used as security

What's the security demanded for the $1.4billion loan... See Pakistan's current power debacle

Brave punt. They shutdown production within days without a route out no?

4.5%, inflation still above target 5% or so but severe debate if next move should be up or down based on rising unemployment as at Oct/Nov 2023

Current is roughly, 4.1%. I charge 4.5% and off load my interest rate risk to the market. Then have product fee of upto 1k on top I mean it's not the stupidest plan in the world despite what some are saying on here.

Yep agreed it's a complex equation but the point still stands that the starting point is what you can sell the risk on the open wholesale market not whatever the base rate etc is. I expect if expectations change you will see a bigger spread between 25% deposits and 40% deposits on rates. That's what typically happens. If the bank has a 40% cushion the security of the borrower's job becomes more of a pain in the ass to realise via auction, rather than a cash loss. Less so at 25% where a 20% drop in sale price at auction plus fees etc means you can realise a loss fairly easy

And was a key driver for deffered share only performance bonuses since. Those at credit Suisse were not just wiped out of this year's bonus as reported but the last 3 as they typically hadn't vested yet. Plus any shares they decided to exercise and keep

Fair enough must have seen the odd mansion for sale, still outside by Zoopla barriers!