We had a lot of great entries this week for the Bulletin Board Moron contest. Apparently, all you need to do is give a desirable prize and people enter. And the prize this week is...? Oh, dear.
Sometimes for routine incompetence but more normally for attempting to publish the sort of money tree worship inspired fake news that should be the preserve of the BBC and the Guardian, pizza hardman Darren Atwater gets fired at least once a week by ShareProphets. Naturally he is reinstated almost immediately. The winner of this week's BBM Contest gets to fire Darren next Monday by mail or in person. What a prize!
One RNS caught my eye amongst the plethora of after-hours announcements on Friday evening. At 6.05pm AIM-listed LSL Property (LSL) was pleased to announce (so why at 6.05pm on a Friday?) a strategic investment in an online hybrid estate agent.
It is all very well saying that tiddly little companies like Advanced Oncotherapy (AVO) or Eden Research (EDEN) are worthless cash guzzling frauds heading for 0p but they are just very hard to short. That both stocks will hit zero is a given. In the end frauds always run out of other people's money. What you want are stocks you can short which look almost certain to collapse. And right now you need them badly as a hedge. A hedge against what?
It seems that Roger Lawson of Globo and blinkx fame is not impressed by my suggestion that he is a bull of Purplebricks (PURP) and that it might therefore somehow be jinxed. But in a couple of after the pubs opened O'clock comments here last night he focusses the mind on what a select group he himself belongs to.
It is quite amazing to see just how few friends fund manager Neil Woodford has in the City these days. It is almost as if I am starting to feel that he is a kindred spirit. Neil, how about we have a joint Square Mile Christmas party for all of our friends in a telephone kiosk somewhere? The vast fees Nomates has charged for delivering three years of dismal underperformance do not play well but it is the arrogant insistence that Mr Market is always wrong because Nomates knows better that has unleashed such waves of schadenfreude after his latest disasters. But he still has one or two defenders who say "aha remember 2001" - but this Maginot defence does not wash.
I wrote about the red flags at Purplebricks (PURP) two weeks ago and promised to return to the subject but was distracted by the Telit (TCM) fiasco last week - on that matter I must urge anyone interested to listen to Tom Winnifrith's bearcast yesterday. I challenge anyone to listen and NOT to wnat to go short. But back to Purplebricks.
I wrote recently that I wouldn’t want to be short Fevertree (FEVR) or Purplebricks (PURP) on the basis that clearly crazy valuations have a habit of getting crazier.
Infamous short seller Matt Earl, aka the Dark Destroyer, has gone to war with Purplebricks (PURP) questioning its absurd valuation and also its response to last night's hatchet job on the BBC Watchdog programme. Earl notes:
Purplebricks (PURP) is one of a raft of new-breed estate agency companies making some bold and questionable claims in the property market at present but how many of these claims stand close scrutiny and are they even trading within the law?
From the FCA's spreadsheet of short positions required to be disclosed to it, the following shows the shorted AIM shares with positions from 2016 and thus far in 2017 (by net short position %) - and if this position has increased (red), reduced (green) or remained unchanged (black) since last week...
So far I have been wrong about Purplebricks (PURP), but despite that I still view it as over-valued at the moment.
From the FCA's spreadsheet of short positions required to be disclosed to it, the following details the shorted AIM shares at the end of this week (by net short position %) - and if this position has increased (red), reduced (green) or remained unchanged (black) since last week...
