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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Another non-farm payroll and another missed opportunity to normalise rates

“Silence”. That is what I hear after yesterday’s March US non-farm payroll figures. Even a few months ago, these data points, while flawed were eagerly awaited as harbingers of revisions in US Fed monetary policy. Not any more. After February’s decision to hold rates in what looks like a clumsy attempt to goose oil prices […]

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