“Accept the Recommended Comcast Offer Immediately”[!!!] If I was a Comcast shareholder I would be concerned about the apparent enthusiasm with which the Sky board were recommending that their shareholders accept their managements revised offer for Sky. Whoever was pulling the strings over at Sky (Murdoch, Disney?), they have played a blinder; extracting a 125% […]
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Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. According to the Sunday Times yesterday (23rd September 2018), a volcano in Iceland (indeed an “Icelandic giant” called Katla no less) is “about to erupt”. “The ash plume that brought European air travel to a standstill in 2010 could be dwarfed by an […]
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The commercial TV industry is littered with failed acquisitions of production companies, but that doesn’t seem to stop newcomers from falling into the same trap. New management at ITV ought to take note, given the reports that they are considering purchasing Big Brother producer, Endemol. The strategic rational of moving upstream into content origination […]
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Chasing rainbows for capital intensive businesses can be tricky, particularly if you’ve sunk a lot of capital only to find no crock of gold. This must be how Copa Holding must feel now, having thrown capital into building capacity in Argentina ahead of some particularly aggressive traffic growth forecasts. While traffic volumes has so far […]
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What is it about the warning that advertising growth was going to “come down meaningfully”, that markets didn’t understand from last year’s guidance? Perhaps it was our old friend ‘recency bias’ at work, given the sustained high rates of top line growth through both the second half of last year and into the first half […]
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A safe play would seem to be to bet on UK Sterling weakening further. What matters is not that a ‘Hard Brexit’ might turn out a lot better for the economy than portrayed by ‘Project Fear’, or that Theresa May could still manage to secure Brino, but that evidence of the former would be beyond […]
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Yes, its out; the US non-farm payrolls for June. In between love island, the World Cup footie and what counts as financial porn (endless tit-for tat negotiations on tariffs and Brexit) you might have missed these. For those fretting about interest rate rises on an overheating employment market, I shouldn’t worry too much that it […]
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The herding instinct is strong in markets. Solomon Asch would characterise this as ‘informative conformity’ where the participant would disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes and yield to the group think. In Asch’s experiments, the results were remarkable, particularly given the exclusion of outside variables beyond the comparative data (the height of the columns […]
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