This story is about grubby nepotism, egregious compensation schemes, and aggressive business strategies, with an old-fashioned, car auction house at its heart. It threads together the microeconomics of executive incentives with the macroeconomics of the credit cycle.
Whilst the likes of Invesco had offered formal undertakings to accept the offer form BBD Bidco for shares in BCA Marketplace (BCA), Neil Woodford only offered a letter of intent to vote for the deal. Of course, the deadwood press was full of how Neil was supporting the offer. Well….
Yesterday I asked which fund manager was just so strapped for cash that he had been forced to sell 13 million BCA Marketplace (BCA) shares at 190p when the stock traded at 205p. I thought it was Neil Woodford. I was, as is almost invariably the case, correct – see HERE. And that makes the questions asked in today’s bonus Bearcast special, end game for Nomates, even more pertinent.
It seems that some venture capitalists, specifically Apax partners, do have more sense than money after all for this morning Apax has walked away from a bid from hugely overvalued second hand car dealer BCA Marketplace (BCA). BCA chairperson Avril Palmer-Baunack has responded with A grade horse…
We know that BCA Marketplace (BCA) is highly operationally and financially geared. It has too much debt. Its chairman dumped over a million quid's worth of shares at 188p – and Avril is no fool. The car market is struggling so there must be questions over earnings visibility . and yet from left field there may be a bid. Bizarre.
BCA Marketplace (BCA) was written up as "The Big Short" in my major Autumn dossier at 221p HERE. The shares are now 149p. And the share trading by those connected with it of late stinks of panic suggesting that it is a big a short as ever.
Normally non executive directors give some notice when jumping ship. For a NED to quit within no notice the first day after Christmas looks bad. For two to go that way looks very bad. Happy Christmas BCA Marketplace.
Yesterday's interims from BCA Marketplace (BCA) dazzled investors and the shares bounced back to 217p - almost where they were before I published THE BIG SHORT. But if you do some number crunching...
Giants of investment analysis like Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett have told us that the stock market is a voting machine in the short-term and a weighing machine in the longer-term...and of course there is more than a hint of truth to such observations. Hype, hope, spin, right-on trends and related can push a share up or down for a while but gravity always wins in the end in the form of cash flows and reality. And with such an observation we turn to to the runners and riders for the upcoming quarterly FTSE-100 and FTSE-250 reshuffle.
Even supporters of BCA Marketplace (BCA) concede that it is massively operationally and financially geared to sales volumes in the second hand car market. And thus yesterday came the data that bulls such as Neil "Nomates" Woodford must have been dreading.
In my opus magnus on BCA Marketplace (BCA), the Big Short, I highlighted in Red Flag 4 point 1 the operating leases with no break clause until 2031 and noted that adding these to the balance sheet would double the apparent debt burden.
Yesterday I produced some quality analysis on why shares in BCA MarketPlace (BCA) will collapse. Predictably the paid shills masquerading as City research analysts have responded. When BCA shares tank as they will inevitably do please do not let hapless broker N+1 Singer forget this ( the underline is mine and suggests that N+1 has not even bothered to read my note before responding with this horse...):
The red flags are obvious. The business model is one that could blow up with the asset bubble that has created it. Even in a best case scenario the valuation is absurd. Oh and Neil Woodford is a major investor. Need I say more. After Purplebricks (PURP) which is a nailed down zero, this is my number 1 short for the Autumn.
