Roger Lawson

ShareSoc has recommended voting against the three non-executive directors at the forthcoming AGM of Intercede Group. They all sit on the Remuneration Committee that awarded the LTIP - the source of many complaints. They are not truly independent and corporate governance is generally poor at this company. See www.sharesoc.org/Intercede_Update_4.pdf for a full explanation. Roger Lawson

Tesco issued their preliminary results this week, and there were few major surprises in the financial numbers. As expected, the UK business had a comparatively poor year against its major competitors, offset by good growth in the rest of the world. But the US “Fresh & Easy” business still looks rather sickly. Group sales were up 7.4% which is not bad for most retail businesses…

RM (LON:RM.) is an IT company which operates in the education sector but which has recently faced major difficulties. With the company primarily focussed on the UK public sector market, it has faced a downturn in revenue in several of its operations. To quote from the new Chairman’s statement in the Annual Report: “In recent years, while recognising the market was changing, the severity of…

A takeover bid for Group NBT was announced this morning – a cash offer of 550p per share from Hg Capital. On a quick analysis it does not look particularly attractive – a prospective p/e of 15 and 2 times revenue for what is a high growth company in a hot sector. Talking to the chief executive, it seems the bid came out of the…

Emptyend: Re the RBS article comments: your analysis was very perceptive and perhaps you should offer your services to the legal and advisory teams working on their cases. Of course with both Barclays and RBS bidding for ABN-AMRO, some might say that the then experts viewed the company as worth acquiring with their full knowledge presumably of what you state. Shareholders did have a right…

The Wurgler paper is certainly interesting but it ducks out of the question of how much of the market is actually held by index tracking funds, and hence what their likely influence might be. It tends to examine some of the distortions that index tracking might create without tackling the key issue. To my mind this is: what percentage of the market has to be…

Not only was John Kay more provocative than in his published report, but my headline was also provocative to stimulate debate. But he has a good point in that there are many things wrong in essence in financial markets that could be rectified by a few simple steps and an associated change of culture. His report was not particularly revolutionary, and yes there is surely…

Well at least I am holding a few of the screen of screens stocks already!

Hang on, the Bill Miller screen is definitely "concentrated" as the article puts it. In fact at the current time it only suggests three stocks - Dart, Standard Chartered and Air Partner. Nobody with any sense would run a portfolio of 3 stocks, particularly when 2 of them are very small companies. Maybe what we need is a "screen of screens" so we can get…