Share tips thread
Discussion
Whilst I bailed most of my money out, I am happy to leave the rest in based on this;
http://www.quindell.com/customers/our-customers
A hell of a lot of big name customers who will have obviously done their own due diligence before signing up.
The price will recover but it will take a while. Says he who panicked and sold!
http://www.quindell.com/customers/our-customers
A hell of a lot of big name customers who will have obviously done their own due diligence before signing up.
The price will recover but it will take a while. Says he who panicked and sold!
Condi said:
Its very easy to say "we'll sue, we'll sue" and being all aggressive about it, but when you're talking to experienced investors with millions of pounds under management the answers need to be better than that! Why are you suing? Who are you suing? On what basis? Otherwise all they look like is a dog backed into a corner.
Quindell's full response isnt particularly good either. It's a lot of words which seek to explain, rather than refuting many of the allegations.
Its no wonder people are still taking short positions - sell the rumour, buy the fact - there is a lot of rumour and very little fact!
So the 2 or 3 news releases which completely rejected out of hand all points weren't enough to refute the research note?Quindell's full response isnt particularly good either. It's a lot of words which seek to explain, rather than refuting many of the allegations.
Its no wonder people are still taking short positions - sell the rumour, buy the fact - there is a lot of rumour and very little fact!
Edited by Condi on Saturday 26th April 10:08
Chris Type R said:
Interesting QPP article -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/ba...
The first comment on that Telegraph article is not a ridiculous onehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/ba...
"Symbiosis • 10 hours ago
Professional gambler complains to mummy and daddy that his very high risk £60m bet has taken a hit.
4 • Reply•Share › "
It's odd how we rarely hear about prices being manipulated up. If the allegations against QPP are so unfair ( I have no idea either way) people should be grateful to Gotham, giving them the opportunity to get in at a bargain price.
I think the fact that the share price has not snapped back up suggests that many investors are not convinced that all the claims are groundless. They could of course be wrong and £1 by Christmas.
limpsfield said:
It's odd how we rarely hear about prices being manipulated up. If the allegations against QPP are so unfair ( I have no idea either way) people should be grateful to Gotham, giving them the opportunity to get in at a bargain price.
I think the fact that the share price has not snapped back up suggests that many investors are not convinced that all the claims are groundless. They could of course be wrong and £1 by Christmas.
How about those who were already in and couldn't get back in at a lower price? That's the unfair part. I would be willing to wager that there are more private investors/buyers who lost money than there were who could make money from the lower buy in.I think the fact that the share price has not snapped back up suggests that many investors are not convinced that all the claims are groundless. They could of course be wrong and £1 by Christmas.
On the point about the price not snapping up, it was down 17% the few minutes before the rebuttal and then up 7% about an hour later - that's a 24% rise. Think that could count as 'snapping back up'!!! Also, the news only came out a couple of hours before close on a Friday, so not really enough chance for the masses to digest and buy back.
Jonboy_t said:
How about those who were already in and couldn't get back in at a lower price? That's the unfair part. I would be willing to wager that there are more private investors/buyers who lost money than there were who could make money from the lower buy in.
Um, the market isn't about whats fair. The market doesn't give a s
t about who wins or who loses. And remember, for everyone who loses money, someone, somewhere, makes money. Sorry, if you're going to start bringing up morals then maybe you should step away from trading and investing all together. Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to sell and buy.
Condi said:
Jonboy_t said:
How about those who were already in and couldn't get back in at a lower price? That's the unfair part. I would be willing to wager that there are more private investors/buyers who lost money than there were who could make money from the lower buy in.
Um, the market isn't about whats fair. The market doesn't give a st about who wins or who loses. And remember, for everyone who loses money, someone, somewhere, makes money. Sorry, if you're going to start bringing up morals then maybe you should step away from trading and investing all together. Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to sell and buy.
king annoying.Ultimately, you've got your own opinion of it and I have mine. I think you and I have used enough of a tips thread on trying to convince each other of our veiws on last week, they're clearly not the same and are never going to be the same, so let's agree that I'm right and you're wrong and leave it there
Jonboy_t said:
Condi said:
Jonboy_t said:
How about those who were already in and couldn't get back in at a lower price? That's the unfair part. I would be willing to wager that there are more private investors/buyers who lost money than there were who could make money from the lower buy in.
Um, the market isn't about whats fair. The market doesn't give a st about who wins or who loses. And remember, for everyone who loses money, someone, somewhere, makes money. Sorry, if you're going to start bringing up morals then maybe you should step away from trading and investing all together. Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to sell and buy.
king annoying.Ultimately, you've got your own opinion of it and I have mine. I think you and I have used enough of a tips thread on trying to convince each other of our veiws on last week, they're clearly not the same and are never going to be the same, so let's agree that I'm right and you're wrong and leave it there
There are several people in this thread who have too much emotional attachment to QPP for it to be an objective discussion. If you've lost a lot I feel sorry for you, if you've made a lot then well done to you too. Ultimately mine or your opinions on their own dont matter.
Anyway, I'll check out and leave this thread now. Remember kids; never trade without stop losses or a strategy.
Condi said:
There are several people in this thread who have too much emotional attachment to QPP for it to be an objective discussion.
This is a very fair comment and has been a theme on this thread since the beginning. Not falling in love with your shares is good advice, they don't know you own them. Condi said:
How do you know it was fraudulent, defamatory or factually incorrect? You could argue that it was possibly one of the greatest few hours of trading that the shorts were ever likely to have. They made millions in a narrow space of time and have the confidence to keep running their positions.
There are several people in this thread who have too much emotional attachment to QPP for it to be an objective discussion. If you've lost a lot I feel sorry for you, if you've made a lot then well done to you too. Ultimately mine or your opinions on their own dont matter.
Anyway, I'll check out and leave this thread now. Remember kids; never trade without stop losses or a strategy.
Stop losses worked well for shorters with the share price dropping from nearly 40p to 17p within minutes triggering them all ! Didn't work so well for the PI at work average price 25p stop loss set at say 18p......There are several people in this thread who have too much emotional attachment to QPP for it to be an objective discussion. If you've lost a lot I feel sorry for you, if you've made a lot then well done to you too. Ultimately mine or your opinions on their own dont matter.
Anyway, I'll check out and leave this thread now. Remember kids; never trade without stop losses or a strategy.
My observation on the AIM shares I've been following yes you get spikes but any re adjustment is normal over a few days after a spike not just a sudden reversal. Quindell was definately different, no spike and no-one could have read the 74 page report in the seconds it took to move the down so quick.
No emotion attached.....
limpsfield said:
This is a very fair comment and has been a theme on this thread since the beginning. Not falling in love with your shares is good advice, they don't know you own them.
If you believe your losses are the result of somebody playing the market / illegal activity you are going to have an emotional attachment. People are the same in business with money that isn't theirs. Sorry, I don't buy the whole emotional attachment b*****ks.
Anyone that owns this share needs to read this from the Sunday Times:
Lounging on red sofas by a ping-pong table, a gaggle of City analysts waited to meet the new stock-market sensation. They had come to the offices of Redleaf Polhill, a public relations company in the heart of the Square Mile, for a briefing by Quindell, an insurance claims processor whose shares were rocketing.
Minutes before the start, one of the crowd was pulled aside. Redleaf staff ushered David Toms from the stockbroker Numis Securities into a side room. The meeting was too full and he had not registered, Toms was told. Would he please leave?
It was an astonishing break with City practice. Public companies should welcome any reputable analyst. Toms, however, was not shocked. The same thing had happened the year before, although that time he had at least been granted a private meeting with management.
Rob Terry, Quindell’s executive chairman, had an elephantine memory. Toms had written a scathing note about his previous company, The Innovation Group, a dotcom star that burnt bright but quickly fizzled out under Terry’s leadership — 13 years earlier. Terry would not forget or forgive; Toms was barred.
The defensiveness was baffling. It was the morning of March 31, and Quindell had published a set of stellar figures — pre-tax profits trebling to £107m in 2013 on revenues 133% higher at £380.1m.
It looked like another step in an acquisition-fuelled rise that had made Quindell one of the fastest-growing public companies of recent times. In six years it had ballooned from a Hampshire golf club to a £2.5bn giant knocking on the door of the FTSE 250. “This business is going to be a FTSE 100 [company],” Terry, 45, claimed in an interview last year.
Last week, it all came tumbling down. Toms’s scepticism was put in the shade by a 74-page blast from a little-known American firm, Gotham City Research. The report, which questioned almost every aspect of Quindell’s business, halved the share price, wiping £1bn off the company’s value in a day.
Gotham, which makes money by short-selling shares, stood to gain heavily. Its report, entitled Quindell plc: A Country Club Built on Quicksand, accused the company of reporting suspect profits and acquiring a string of businesses of little economic substance. It claimed Terry’s £12m personal investment in Quindell was used to build a country club and golf course rather than a technology company. The shares were worth no more than 3p apiece, Gotham said — less than a tenth of the 39.5p they were at before it struck.
Quindell fought back, calling the allegations “highly defamatory and deliberately misrepresentative”, threatening to sue any publication that repeated them. On Friday, Quindell published a 25-page rebuttal and launched legal action against Gotham.
Quindell has divided investors since it joined the AIM junior market through a reverse takeover in 2011. It has churned through acquisitions, often funded by share issues, ranging from law firms to medical evidence businesses, buying about 25 companies.
Terry’s plan was to build a “one-stop shop” to run claims management on behalf of Britain’s big car insurers to cut their costs and reduce premiums for motorists.
It provides nurses, occupational therapists and psychologists to assess and treat drivers and passengers through its Mobile Doctors business, bought three years ago. The legal services operation was built by snapping up law firms including Silverbeck Rymer and Pinto Potts. Another division arranges vehicle repairs. Quindell is growing its telematics arm, which offers drivers lower premiums if they have a black box fitted.
As the deals piled up, so did the share price. Funds such as M&G, Fidelity and Investec climbed aboard, and an army of private investors.
“The bigger something gets and the faster it’s going up, the more important it becomes not to miss it,” said an observer. “People who thought ‘I don’t need to look at it’ have felt the need to take a look at it.”
Those jumping in might have considered Terry’s previous history with quoted companies, and how he had tried — and failed — to do something similar in the past.
IN THE spring of 2000, the tech bubble was about to burst. Rob Terry, then 31, was determined to make his mark.
And he did.
Boo.com, the fashion website, became an emblem of the dotcom crash when it failed after burning through more than £100m in 18 months. No matter: Terry’s vehicle, a seller of claims management software to insurers which he named The Innovation Group (TiG), was a firm of substance.
It was losing money, but then so many tech companies were in those days.
Terry floated TiG at a valuation of £240m. The stock soared. Over the next 2 years he rolled up competitors here and in America, pulling off the 25 acquisitions at about one a month. TiG’s stock soared, valuing the company at more than £1.3bn and catapulting Terry into The Sunday Times Rich List with a paper fortune calculated at £355m.
The first cracks appeared in February 2002. TiG’s shares plummeted nearly 30% in a week after analysts raised questions about how Terry had presented deals to the market. TiG had, for example, announced a £4m software sale to a German client only to reveal in the footnote of a separate announcement that TiG had lent the client that same amount.
Soon afterwards, TiG unveiled the $21m takeover of a rival. The announcement did not reveal, however, that TiG had signed a separate deal to sell software worth $14m to the rival’s parent. TiG’s astronomical growth was, perhaps, not what it seemed.
Terry sealed his fate a few months later when he and Stephen Scott, a fellow director and now a Quindell board member, sold £4.9m and £1.4m in shares respectively, just two months before a monster profit warning obliterated the stock price. The announcement included a £350m write-down on the companies Terry had spent shareholders’ money buying.
Within a year he had resigned, but Terry did not leave empty-handed — he had pocketed close to £20m through share sales and severance payments.
For eight years he stayed away from the City. What has happened since he returned in May 2011 bears some striking similarities to TiG.
In May 2011 Terry reversed Quindell into Mission Capital, a tiny AIM-listed cash shell. The deal barely registered in the City.
For years Quindell had not been a tech company but a leisure business called Quindell Golf and Country Club, near Fareham, Hampshire. Terry ploughed in £12m of the cash he pocketed from TiG shares into it, as well as properties and other businesses.
By the time of the listing, Quindell still owned the golf course but no longer was it dedicated to juggling tee times and green fees.
The new Quindell was a cutting-edge software operation that promised to save companies money by automating claims handling and other back-office functions. The day it arrived on the stock market it was valued at £33m. Then the deals started.
DURING its first six months as a listed company, Quindell bought or took stakes in five companies, including Mobile Doctors and Ingenie, a digital insurance brand.
Over the next few years it cosied up to some of Britain’s biggest insurance brands. Deals with the RAC, Direct Line and Swinton propelled its share price higher.
Announcements were coupled with grand statements about their significance, such as its technology tie-up with the RAC having the potential to be the “largest telematics rollout globally”.
But some acquisitions appeared flimsy, with a number of companies incorporated on the day they were bought. Quindell claims it simply has an eagle eye for small operations that have developed groundbreaking technology.
The company went through three auditors in three years, switching from Deloitte to RSM Tenon to, currently, KPMG. The company says this was simply a reflection of its growth from tiny firm to international enterprise.
Meanwhile, cash flowed out of the business, with a net cash outflow of almost £9m from its operations in 2013. Quindell argues this cash burn was in response to investor demand to keep growing the business.
Terry has his defenders. Among them is Davide Serra, founder of Algebris. He claims his fund, which specialises in finance companies, owns 2% of Quindell. “I’ve been to their offices. I’ve met their executives. [Terry] has done enough to prove that what he is doing is transformational,” he said.
“We’re well aware of his track record,” Serra added. “But everyone gets a second chance. That’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur.”
And the golf course? Quindell sold it last year to Skylark Golf and Country Club, a company run by Jonathan Stretton-Knowles, the 33- year-old former head of sales at Quindell.
Short-sellers strike again
Carson Block, founder of Muddy Waters (Bloomberg) Chalk up another victory for the short-sellers.
Gotham City Research’s mugging of Quindell knocked £1bn off the company’s market value in a matter of hours last week. The insurance claims processor took three days to respond to the catalogue of alleged misdeeds highlighted by the shadowy American firm. Its shares recovered a little, closing on Friday at 24p, but were still a third lower than before Gotham’s attack.
Whether the damage is permanent will become clear only with time. If recent history is a guide, the prognosis for Quindell shareholders is worrying.
Short-sellers make money by selling shares on the assumption that their price will collapse and they can be bought back cheaper. Critics deride them as amoral mercenaries who delight in destroying companies as long as they make money. Others say they are a critical element of the market who root out the bad guys.
Gotham, apparently headed by a publicity-shy investor called Daniel Yu, is one of a small band that take the most aggressive approach: they spend months investigating a company and then tell the world what they find.
The most prominent exponent of the tactic is Carson Block, the man behind Muddy Waters. The firm made a name for itself in 2011 when it published a damning report into Sino-Forest, which claimed to manage millions of acres of commercial forest in China. Muddy Waters said it was a “multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme” that vastly inflated its earnings and land. Sino-Forest filed for bankruptcy nine months later.
Gotham has had success before. Last summer American authorities opened a criminal investigation into Ebix, a US company which, like Quindell, develops insurance software. The inquiry was launched four months after Gotham published a scathing dossier.
Lounging on red sofas by a ping-pong table, a gaggle of City analysts waited to meet the new stock-market sensation. They had come to the offices of Redleaf Polhill, a public relations company in the heart of the Square Mile, for a briefing by Quindell, an insurance claims processor whose shares were rocketing.
Minutes before the start, one of the crowd was pulled aside. Redleaf staff ushered David Toms from the stockbroker Numis Securities into a side room. The meeting was too full and he had not registered, Toms was told. Would he please leave?
It was an astonishing break with City practice. Public companies should welcome any reputable analyst. Toms, however, was not shocked. The same thing had happened the year before, although that time he had at least been granted a private meeting with management.
Rob Terry, Quindell’s executive chairman, had an elephantine memory. Toms had written a scathing note about his previous company, The Innovation Group, a dotcom star that burnt bright but quickly fizzled out under Terry’s leadership — 13 years earlier. Terry would not forget or forgive; Toms was barred.
The defensiveness was baffling. It was the morning of March 31, and Quindell had published a set of stellar figures — pre-tax profits trebling to £107m in 2013 on revenues 133% higher at £380.1m.
It looked like another step in an acquisition-fuelled rise that had made Quindell one of the fastest-growing public companies of recent times. In six years it had ballooned from a Hampshire golf club to a £2.5bn giant knocking on the door of the FTSE 250. “This business is going to be a FTSE 100 [company],” Terry, 45, claimed in an interview last year.
Last week, it all came tumbling down. Toms’s scepticism was put in the shade by a 74-page blast from a little-known American firm, Gotham City Research. The report, which questioned almost every aspect of Quindell’s business, halved the share price, wiping £1bn off the company’s value in a day.
Gotham, which makes money by short-selling shares, stood to gain heavily. Its report, entitled Quindell plc: A Country Club Built on Quicksand, accused the company of reporting suspect profits and acquiring a string of businesses of little economic substance. It claimed Terry’s £12m personal investment in Quindell was used to build a country club and golf course rather than a technology company. The shares were worth no more than 3p apiece, Gotham said — less than a tenth of the 39.5p they were at before it struck.
Quindell fought back, calling the allegations “highly defamatory and deliberately misrepresentative”, threatening to sue any publication that repeated them. On Friday, Quindell published a 25-page rebuttal and launched legal action against Gotham.
Quindell has divided investors since it joined the AIM junior market through a reverse takeover in 2011. It has churned through acquisitions, often funded by share issues, ranging from law firms to medical evidence businesses, buying about 25 companies.
Terry’s plan was to build a “one-stop shop” to run claims management on behalf of Britain’s big car insurers to cut their costs and reduce premiums for motorists.
It provides nurses, occupational therapists and psychologists to assess and treat drivers and passengers through its Mobile Doctors business, bought three years ago. The legal services operation was built by snapping up law firms including Silverbeck Rymer and Pinto Potts. Another division arranges vehicle repairs. Quindell is growing its telematics arm, which offers drivers lower premiums if they have a black box fitted.
As the deals piled up, so did the share price. Funds such as M&G, Fidelity and Investec climbed aboard, and an army of private investors.
“The bigger something gets and the faster it’s going up, the more important it becomes not to miss it,” said an observer. “People who thought ‘I don’t need to look at it’ have felt the need to take a look at it.”
Those jumping in might have considered Terry’s previous history with quoted companies, and how he had tried — and failed — to do something similar in the past.
IN THE spring of 2000, the tech bubble was about to burst. Rob Terry, then 31, was determined to make his mark.
And he did.
Boo.com, the fashion website, became an emblem of the dotcom crash when it failed after burning through more than £100m in 18 months. No matter: Terry’s vehicle, a seller of claims management software to insurers which he named The Innovation Group (TiG), was a firm of substance.
It was losing money, but then so many tech companies were in those days.
Terry floated TiG at a valuation of £240m. The stock soared. Over the next 2 years he rolled up competitors here and in America, pulling off the 25 acquisitions at about one a month. TiG’s stock soared, valuing the company at more than £1.3bn and catapulting Terry into The Sunday Times Rich List with a paper fortune calculated at £355m.
The first cracks appeared in February 2002. TiG’s shares plummeted nearly 30% in a week after analysts raised questions about how Terry had presented deals to the market. TiG had, for example, announced a £4m software sale to a German client only to reveal in the footnote of a separate announcement that TiG had lent the client that same amount.
Soon afterwards, TiG unveiled the $21m takeover of a rival. The announcement did not reveal, however, that TiG had signed a separate deal to sell software worth $14m to the rival’s parent. TiG’s astronomical growth was, perhaps, not what it seemed.
Terry sealed his fate a few months later when he and Stephen Scott, a fellow director and now a Quindell board member, sold £4.9m and £1.4m in shares respectively, just two months before a monster profit warning obliterated the stock price. The announcement included a £350m write-down on the companies Terry had spent shareholders’ money buying.
Within a year he had resigned, but Terry did not leave empty-handed — he had pocketed close to £20m through share sales and severance payments.
For eight years he stayed away from the City. What has happened since he returned in May 2011 bears some striking similarities to TiG.
In May 2011 Terry reversed Quindell into Mission Capital, a tiny AIM-listed cash shell. The deal barely registered in the City.
For years Quindell had not been a tech company but a leisure business called Quindell Golf and Country Club, near Fareham, Hampshire. Terry ploughed in £12m of the cash he pocketed from TiG shares into it, as well as properties and other businesses.
By the time of the listing, Quindell still owned the golf course but no longer was it dedicated to juggling tee times and green fees.
The new Quindell was a cutting-edge software operation that promised to save companies money by automating claims handling and other back-office functions. The day it arrived on the stock market it was valued at £33m. Then the deals started.
DURING its first six months as a listed company, Quindell bought or took stakes in five companies, including Mobile Doctors and Ingenie, a digital insurance brand.
Over the next few years it cosied up to some of Britain’s biggest insurance brands. Deals with the RAC, Direct Line and Swinton propelled its share price higher.
Announcements were coupled with grand statements about their significance, such as its technology tie-up with the RAC having the potential to be the “largest telematics rollout globally”.
But some acquisitions appeared flimsy, with a number of companies incorporated on the day they were bought. Quindell claims it simply has an eagle eye for small operations that have developed groundbreaking technology.
The company went through three auditors in three years, switching from Deloitte to RSM Tenon to, currently, KPMG. The company says this was simply a reflection of its growth from tiny firm to international enterprise.
Meanwhile, cash flowed out of the business, with a net cash outflow of almost £9m from its operations in 2013. Quindell argues this cash burn was in response to investor demand to keep growing the business.
Terry has his defenders. Among them is Davide Serra, founder of Algebris. He claims his fund, which specialises in finance companies, owns 2% of Quindell. “I’ve been to their offices. I’ve met their executives. [Terry] has done enough to prove that what he is doing is transformational,” he said.
“We’re well aware of his track record,” Serra added. “But everyone gets a second chance. That’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur.”
And the golf course? Quindell sold it last year to Skylark Golf and Country Club, a company run by Jonathan Stretton-Knowles, the 33- year-old former head of sales at Quindell.
Short-sellers strike again
Carson Block, founder of Muddy Waters (Bloomberg) Chalk up another victory for the short-sellers.
Gotham City Research’s mugging of Quindell knocked £1bn off the company’s market value in a matter of hours last week. The insurance claims processor took three days to respond to the catalogue of alleged misdeeds highlighted by the shadowy American firm. Its shares recovered a little, closing on Friday at 24p, but were still a third lower than before Gotham’s attack.
Whether the damage is permanent will become clear only with time. If recent history is a guide, the prognosis for Quindell shareholders is worrying.
Short-sellers make money by selling shares on the assumption that their price will collapse and they can be bought back cheaper. Critics deride them as amoral mercenaries who delight in destroying companies as long as they make money. Others say they are a critical element of the market who root out the bad guys.
Gotham, apparently headed by a publicity-shy investor called Daniel Yu, is one of a small band that take the most aggressive approach: they spend months investigating a company and then tell the world what they find.
The most prominent exponent of the tactic is Carson Block, the man behind Muddy Waters. The firm made a name for itself in 2011 when it published a damning report into Sino-Forest, which claimed to manage millions of acres of commercial forest in China. Muddy Waters said it was a “multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme” that vastly inflated its earnings and land. Sino-Forest filed for bankruptcy nine months later.
Gotham has had success before. Last summer American authorities opened a criminal investigation into Ebix, a US company which, like Quindell, develops insurance software. The inquiry was launched four months after Gotham published a scathing dossier.
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