Nu on the block
02 May 2018
Chairman Your quite right Bill,he needs to be held to account,which is why I commented earlier about the other directors, who presumably are sitting on their hands!
ballymena bill
01 May 2018
Re: Chairman I've always bought my shares in the company, in the belief of the forward progression of card factory. Using my eyes and local knowledge, re numbers visiting the shops and paying at tills. I see it as a huge stab in the back for (whats his name) to sell his bonus and sink us small shareholders
Muzzletoff
01 May 2018
Chairman He was also made Chairman of AO World in June 2016. He has not sold any shares, if he has acquired any, in AO world, but maybe its early days.It would seem at Companies House he has a number of apparently active Directorships. So, it could be argued a professional Director coasting to filling his retirement fund as full as he can. I am always a bit wary of this style of Director, but I suspect on Corporate Governance rules, he may be due for rotation at some point, and he has been Chairman since 2014.If (and I have no idea) CF have started looking around he may starting to sell down his shares.
the-mong
01 May 2018
Re: Chairman sells Sell before ex divi date. Wait a couple of weeks for price to bottom out then buy back in and make a killing on rise up to special divi date Bet they wished they sold at 248
Kool Keith
01 May 2018
Re: Chairman sells Not a good sign at all as that was nearly a third of his holding!Disappointing.
Nu on the block
30 Apr 2018
Chairman sells Hardly a vote of confidence from the Chairman, surely the rest of the board would have had something to say?
contrarianstyle
30 Apr 2018
Chairman sells 100,000 shares Chairman sells 100,000 shares....hence drop today i suspect.wonder why he`s sold so much...
sound money
19 Apr 2018
Odd, somethings changed? Debenhams got hammered this morning but Card went up. Is the market finally getting the message?Shire, BP and Shell doing nicely thanks.M
frusset
17 Apr 2018
Re: Good points on both sides - confusio... "There is indeed a huge weight of research - both academic and practical - behind this debate, and yet the clear conclusion is... there is no clear conclusion. Not least as the debate is forever bedevilled by selectivity (eg. of timescales and sample sizes), subjectivity and, often, semantics.""no clear conclusion" isn't a surprise. Investors have to make the best use they can of partial information.Academic studies based on data, at least bring some objectivity to the issue. There's more scope for selection bias in opinions and memorable cases. Investors don't follow a random sample of stocks, the kind of stock an investor follows can change over time, and the memory of cases will be selective due to limited memory capacity (for most people) and confirmation bias. Still, I have to rely on my own opinion because each study usually sets out to investigate a single simple hypothesis. You can wait a long time for more detail. For example, the small firm effect (that on average, the stocks of small companies outperform the market) was written about in 1993, as one of the factors in the Fama-French 3 factor model. The effect proved to be unreliable and disputed. Any investors taking an interest in it had to wait until 2015 for a study with evidence that the small firm effect is real, if you control for quality. In other words, the small firm effect was fighting against the way 'junk' stocks are concentrated at the small cap end. I expect many investors had worked it out for themselves without waiting for the academics. For more info see [link] back to leverage, I expect it's most useful in particular circumstances, but I'm relying on 'common sense' and cases (essentially anecdotal evidence). It's fairly obvious that a growth company with capital needs can grow faster with leverage. If the business has a big competitive advantage and the market is reliable, then a lot of debt doesn't necessarily mean poor risk/reward. The best case I know (with apologies to anyone who read it on the CVR discussion) is Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which used most of the fractions of crude oil, for example kerosene (for lamps), while small operators extracted gasoline and dumped the rest. Along with the business model, market, lack of regulation, and Rockefeller's management skill, debt enabled him to get so rich that a top bracket of income tax was created with just one taxpayer: Rockefeller.There's also a case to use debt to accumulate a bombed-out asset that's likely to recover, though it seems more problematic to me. In my opinion, borrowing to pay a special dividend is not a good use of debt. I only claim weak support from the studies on leverage, because I don't know of any that focus on the effect on returns of using debt to pay dividends.Even if there was somehow a plethora of relevant and reliable studies, statistical studies produce generalisations to which there will be exceptions, and studies can't account for all the idiosyncrasies of a company or the market it's in. There will always be scope for disagreement about individual stocks.
gamesinvestor
17 Apr 2018
Re: History "I have no idea what that post meant about historical resistance at 237"Doesn't count for much does it?No one knows where stock prices will move in the short term - charts, fundamentals, tea leaves, knowledgeable people lol!!, or asking you dog for an opinion - is all seemingly a waste of time.You are either in it because you believe in it, and you think after a reasonable assessment that the finances look OK and the growth looks plausible - realistically you can never be sure - or you are just guessing.Games -- Well in profit now - dividends included of course!! - No Champagne or Cigars on this investment so far.
marktime1231
15 Apr 2018
History I have no idea what that post meant about historical resistance at 237, it would be fairer to say that until recently the sp floor was at 268 and before that at 238. If CARD has recovered its outlook I would say the recovery should continue? But then that is just staring into the tea leaves anyway.I was over-exposed so I have trimmed off the last slice from when CARD was heading to the bottom, but holding the rest for the dividend and the prospect of recovery.On debt and so on, I am sure everyone else is right and I am wrong, you may as well borrow when money is cheap and cash is flowing as the mortgage man says. One thought has struck me though ... presumably the 950 stores already opened out of 1200 are the ones with the most potential. So from now on a squeeze on gross margin, and return on investment will get tighter even without a rate rise. CARD needs to see off some of the competition, amazed that Clintons hasn't yet made it onto the list of High Street casualties.
Bill1703
15 Apr 2018
Re: Good points on both sides - confusio... "The results indicate that investors are not being compensated for the extra risk they are taking on when investing with high-leveraged firms. Several previous empirical studies has come to the same conclusion."There is indeed a huge weight of research - both academic and practical - behind this debate, and yet the clear conclusion is... there is no clear conclusion. Not least as the debate is forever bedevilled by selectivity (eg. of timescales and sample sizes), subjectivity and, often, semantics. Are we talking about "high-leveraged" businesses, or the sliding scale of all levels of leverage? And how do you define leverage? Over recent decades we have moved away (quite sensibly, I think) from traditional measures of "gearing" (eg. net debt / net assets) and toward those based on hard cash and cash flow metrics - notably ND/EBITDA (importantly, the key metric of choice for debt rating agencies), though I would also advance the hitherto under-used ND/FCF. I don't think it's controversial to say that businesses typically go bust NOT due to an excess of debt but an insufficiency of cash flow (albeit the two are of course related) ... the recent high-profile examples of Carillion and Conviviality, while very different case studies, both bear this out."... So if I understand this right gearingleverage is good until it is bad... Free cash flow as ever the key."So as an effective practical summary of the essence of the debate, you'd struggle to do better than SM's encapsulation, as above (but only IMHO, of course!) FWIW the CARD leverage level of 1.7x ND/EBITDA (both current and projected medium term) is merely broadly in line with the UK market average (if anything, slightly below)... always remembering that views of "optimal" leverage will vary enormously across sectors. And on a ND/FCF basis, the current (most recent FY) level of 2.8x is significantly below average market levels (not that this is widely observed - perhaps it will be more in the future... certainly should be IMO)... and every chance that growing FCF medium-term will see this fall appreciably, even on static debt levels.So I certainly don't see CARD as high-leverage, on any relative basis... no more than moderate, at worst. Though equally, taking a relatively conservative view of the prospective long-term interest rate profile, I think the balance is now about right (as CARD management themselves appear to agree).
sound money
15 Apr 2018
Re: Good points on both sides - confusio... So if I understand this right gearingleverage is good until it is bad.Mm, bit like a mortgage really, comfortable until it becomes a worry. That depends upon your income against servicing your debt. Free cash flow as ever the key.As to compensation, those bad boys (Good imo) over at Melrose have a habit of being rewarded handsomely for the extra risk and high leverage that they play with. Thing is they know the tipping point and when to get shot of it.It will be the same with Card. Much to early to stop using it yet.M
frusset
14 Apr 2018
Re: Good points on both sides - confusio... The Bachelors Thesis [link] (PDF), "The Effects of Leverage on Stock Returns" by Matilda Andersson, September 2, 2016, claims empirical studies conclude that leverage is bad for stock returns, in:"The results indicate that investors are not being compensated for the extra risk they are taking on when investing with high-leveraged firms. Several previous empirical studies has come to the same conclusion."The conventional theory was (and maybe still is) that debt increases risk so investors demand higher returns to compensate.A study from 2008 found a similar result, except for utilities:"We find that for utilities, returns increase in leverage which is consistent with the findings of Miller and Modigliani and Bhandari (1988). But for the other sectors, the relationship is negative which is similar with the more recent work of Korteweg (2004), Dimitrov and Jain (2005) and Penman (2007)."From "AN EMPIRICAL TEST ON LEVERAGE AND STOCK RETURNS"Gulnur Muradoglu, Cass Business School, LondonSheeja Sivaprasad, Westminster Business School, London[link] readers can assess the likelihood of selection bias - I googled "leverage and stock market returns", and only looked at the first page of search results. I followed up only the two links above. I saw no results indicating that more leverage is good for returns, except that my first link looked that way, with "suggests that common stock returns increase with the amount of debt". It turns out, that's the conventional wisdom, which empirical studies contradict.
Here today - Gone tomorrow
13 Apr 2018
238p is as far as we are going...for now. There is historical resistance to anything over 237p in the short term and RSI is now overbought. If the amount of the special dividend and the Exdate is confirmed in a matter of days then the share price will break it's metaphorical neck. Take profits. IMHO DYOR blah blah
