adel
Author Archives: adel

Markets find it tough to break the BTFD conditioning

Was the Friday rebound in equity markets another BTFD opportunity, or a possible suckers rally? Certainly, the wall of central bank liquidity over the past five years have reduced the market’s pricing mechanism to little more than a pavlovian response to the next turn of the central tap and where bad news can be good […]

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Budget airlines soar in September, but war of the handbags still being fought

Ryanair is still packing in the passengers (Sept +5% with load +5ppts to 90%  vs +7.5%/+2.5ppts respectively for EasyJet), although with the Air France strike settled and the end of the summer holiday season I would expect the Oct traffic figures to be a little less supportive.  The stock is still my preferred one in […]

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Beware fake arbitrages on Yahoo – Alibaba!

For an arbitrage opportunity to exist, asset classes need to be fungible (deliverable against each other), so anyone selling you a scheme to “arbitrage” an apparent pricing disparity between related, but non-fungible, assets maybe selling you a dud.   When I see investor research by banks, who should know better, promoting “the Yahoo arbitrage trade” […]

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IPO: Market valuing Alibaba as if it were a normal US tech Co!

I am surprised! Having cleaned up the reported numbers a little (eg including stock comp and intangible amortisation – excl goodwill), and applied a broadly average growth discount trend, the Alibaba NPV on the WYT growth discount model comes within 5% of the post IPO price – nb this already adjusts for forward valuation horizon […]

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Correlation <> causation, but sometimes maybe!

When I was but a nipper, a wise old Chairman of a large and successful financial information business gave me a valuable piece of advice:  That mediators extract better margins in poor information environments and when price discovery is obscured. As his business, amongst others, picked off and commoditised market after market with real-time pricing, […]

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WPP FY14 interims: flat margins on >+4% organic sales

WPP :   The group is tightening the screw on hiring and staff costs to absorb slowing net sales growth while maintaining the public forecasts of rising GDP and advertising expenditure into 2015. The hitherto growth engine markets of BRIC however, are looking increasingly wobbly, while the contraction in margins at the digitally heavy specialist communications […]

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