Facebook: Q1 beat followed by controlling shareholder share sale – ring any bells?

Facebook shares had a good bounce on its blistering Q1 results which, oh so conveniently, accompanied its announcement of a stock split into new non-voting C class shares. This is a similar ploy the one Vere Rothermere used a few years ago with the DMGT scrip issue as a way of enabling him (well at […]

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Looking beyond central bank interference in equity valuations

Behind the incessant background noise of Yellen’s ‘will she won’t she raise rates’ discussion, the closing of the Q1 results season provides a good opportunity to take stock of the broader earnings and more importantly OpFCF yield basis on which equities are priced. Relative to expectations at the start of the year, there have been […]

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Apple – when a picture is worth a thousand words!

Okay, so we’ve got Apple’s Q2 results out tomorrow and expectations aren’t very ambitious (see Outlook in below Investment Summary). It’s the big issue that is going to get the share price right however, and by this, whether we are looking at a re-run of Sony over two decades ago after Akio Morita stepped down. […]

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Sky’s response to rising churn and weaker subscriber growth is……to put prices up. Brilliant!

Yesterday, Sky announced its Q3 FY16 results (the Jan-Mar 2016 quarter) where it reported a slight deterioration in net subscriber additions in its core UK operation (of +70k QoQ vs +127K the year before) including an increase in churn from 10.1% to 10.7% notwithstanding a flat ARPU of £47. After the +6.8% UK sales increase […]

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Vivendi: Mediaset deal – a compliance concern

When Vincent Bollore forked out the equivalent of €864m on a 3.5% stake in Mediaset and a 88.9% stake in Mediset Premium, do you think he was provided with more financial details relating to the scale of MS Premium’s losses than has hitherto been released to the markets? With an implied cost for this pay […]

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Mediaset is still looking like a value trap

Reviewing last week’s Mediaset results I was struck by a sense of deja vue. Here was a company that for a third consecutive year was denying that it was not trying to sell its lossmaking PayTV unit (Mediaset Premium) in the face of supposedly well sourced rumour to the contrary, this time to Vincent Bollore’s […]

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