Hello Share Wavers. Twenty years ago, most of my income came from takeovers. I would choose a company that might be in the sights of a bigger fish and buy some shares, and it was not unheard of for me to suddenly make £10,000, say, in a day when a merger was confirmed. Examples are Arm Holdings or Yorkshire Television, but this has now not happened for me for some time. These days I tend to choose companies with regular pay-outs to keep me in take-away pizzas. But my favourite analytical bank, Berenberg, reckons that takeovers are coming back in vogue. Where though should we trust our mazuma when hoping for a takeover?
Hello Share Mongers. Regular readers of my humble scribblings will know I favour comparison sites from the customer’s point of view. What’s not to like about competitors for our custom striving to be top of the ‘cheapest service’ lists? But shareholders in comparison sites also benefit from the comparison game.
Back in October 2021, I observed about Moneysupermarket.com (MONY) concluding that new deals from the “start saving serious money today” company were a-coming. And clearly, they are, including a bunch of new TV adverts over the last few months, along with a bunch of MoneySavingExpert and Quidco angles for all the cost savers (inevitably) out there. How did its first half numbers get on and what are its prospects for the rest of this year and beyond?
I have not written about Moneysupermarket.com (MONY) before but Malcolm has, as you can see here just over a year ago. He was absolutely correct that helping to identify good value car insurance, home insurance, credit card deals, travel insurance, pet insurance and broadband deals, along with the ownership of MoneySavingExpert.com (thanks Martin Lewis), was popular with lots of people. And whilst COVID-19 issues with the travel industry has caused some challenges over the last year, a business with some overall net cash on its balance sheet and free cash flow generation helping to support a 5%+ dividend yield certainly could have been a lot worse. But the shares have had a very poor last few months as, whilst the travel insurance business has been only slow to improve, the energy deals business has been an absolute shocker recently.









