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Stanley Gibbons Fund Raising

Stanley Gibbons (SGI) issued a profit warning in late February indicated likely losses for the year, and immediately said they were considering a number of fund raising alternatives. More...

CMA, Ofgem and Data Protection Rules

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) have been tackling the lack of competition in the market for household utility supplies for some time. They are concerned that many customers have not switched suppliers for some years. Stuck on a basic tariff, they may be paying several hundred pounds a year over the market rates available by shopping around (for example by using price comparison web sites). They were proposing a price cap for such tariffs, which would of course not be a ...

Company Results – Alliance Trust, LSE and Whitbread

This morning Alliance Trust announced their results for the year ending December 2015. This company has been the subject of a campaign by ShareSoc (see https://www.sharesoc.org/alliance.html ) and Elliott Advisors were also aggressive in demanding changes before Alliance's last Annual General Meeting but then committed to a truce for one year. Subsequently the Chairman Karin Forseke and Chief Executive Katherine Garrett-Cox have departed and the board has otherwise been restructured. This followed some years of underperformance which resulted in a wide ...

Fundsmith Annual Meeting – Another Good Performance

Last night was the latest annual meeting for investors in the Fundsmith Equity Fund. It was another good performance by Terry Smith on the night, and of course a good performance by the Fund itself was reported. It achieved a return of 15.7% last year (year ending December 2015) which was way ahead of any global fund index you care to choose. A lot of stock picking investors did well last year, but how many also have achieved 4.7% in the ...

London Stock Exchange – Deutsche Börse Merger, and Brexit

More details were announced this morning of the proposed merger between the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Deutsche Börse. Is this really a "merger of equals", as it is being promoted, because such things are very rare in practice? Deutsche Börse has a larger market capitalisation and their shareholders will end up with 54.4% of the combined group. We now learn the group will be domiciled in London but will have headquarters in both London and Frankfurt with listings on both the ...