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Airlines and oil prices
With fuel costs representing 45-50% of an airline’s operating costs and 35% of its revenues, it would seem self-evident that a significant movement in oil, and therefore fuel prices, would have an equally dramatic effect on margins; in particular when the industry’s margins are often the wrong side of 5%. The oil price however is […]
Continue readingP&G swaps Duracell at 7x EBITDA for shares in itself at 13x. Buffet wins again!
When a company such as P&G can sell 10 year debt at little more than a 3% coupon, then we should not be surprised at some of the pricing decisions being taken. With regards its subsidiary Duracell, it has a business in slow structural decline, which provides a drag to its own organic growth figures, […]
Continue readingMarkets 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 […]
Continue readingCorrelation <> 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:Â 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, […]
Continue readingCheap new cash = property boom. Nothing has changed in 2,000 years!
He “made money so plentiful, that interest fell and the price of land rose considerably, And afterwards, as often as large sums of money came into his possession by means of confiscations, he would lend it free of interest, for a fixed term, to such as could give security for the double of what was […]
Continue readingWelcome to the UK recovery!
Still faced with a structural deleveraging in personal and public debt, the policy response by those who ought to know better remains the same – juice the system and hope growth miraculously appears. That’s right, the same strategy as adopted for Greece, Portugal, Spain, France etc, etc, & etc. After the >+10% MoM rise in […]
Continue readingWill you be see the collapse in the property market coming?
Will you be see the collapse in the property market coming? There is an entire industry of vested interests out there to ensure that you don’t. You have a Government whose declared purpose is to juice demand and support funding with its various schemes to encourage the consumer to put themselves further into hock at […]
Continue readingThe need to look beyond the quarterly agencies reports
My iPhone weather App is like a set of Agency results. It gives me a largely coincidental view of the weather if I don’t want to look out of the window, but is pretty useless as a meaningful forecasting tool. With two of the big four agencies reporting, are we much the wiser? Omnicom edged […]
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