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Shrek gazumps Mickey & Murdoch
Perhaps the cunning plan was to absorb Sky while still carrying a hefty risk premium ahead of the all important Premier League (PL) football rights negotiations and then reap the benefit when these were renewed for what turned out to be -14%/-£199m pa reduction. Unfortunately, with 21st Century Fox’s (21CF) bid stranded with the UK […]
Continue readingWPP – position closed with a +19% relative gain (>+330% annualised ;-)
Add a bit of mean reversion to GrowthRatings, with a healthy pinch of recency bias and you can have a wild ride in these menopausal markets. For example, three weeks ago on this blog I highlighted the unloved Agency sector and in particular WPP. Those listening to what some key marketeers were saying about their […]
Continue readingWPP – friendless & unloved – perfect!
Not all marketing investment seems wasted. After P&G’s earlier withering criticism of its digital marketing ROI, Diageo’s Q2 report yesterday, delivering a combination of rising A&P investment, organic sales growth and underlying operating margins, suggests a more nuanced approach may be needed by investors to the industry’s current problems. Faced with an unsolicited approach from […]
Continue readingUBM/Informa merger revisited – surprised?
Having fallen out over the plum jobs back in 2008, UBM and Informa are back canoodling, with this mornings announcement of what is in effect Informa’s share and cash offer for UBM. In the intervening years, UBM has chased an earnings accretive, but growth dilutive acquisition strategy in US events while Informa has spun out […]
Continue readingAre equity markets expensive?
This is a regular question posed by investors and market commentators, but in many ways is also the most meaningless. This is because the relative merits of equities as an asset class owes more to the ebb and flow of liquidity to goose demand, rather than some theoretical notion of a ‘correct’ valuation that should […]
Continue reading“US Economy added only 148k jobs in December” …… Oh really?
A new year it may be, but don’t expect much improvement in the headline analysis of spurious government statistics. On Friday we had the December non-farm payroll figures. The headline net job additions was ‘only’ +148k in the month, which CNBC, the WSJ and other main media were quick to inform us was below the […]
Continue readingNovember US non-farm payrolls – a positive mix for equities
On balance, November’s non-farm payroll numbers were as good as might have been hoped for, at least for equities. Whilst the progress of the tax reforms, which offer to drop Federal corporation tax rates by 15ppts (from 35% to only 20%) are clearly more relevant to both valuations and FCF assumptions, the improved […]
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