H-L coming on radio 4 very shortly to discuss Woodford. (Notification only)
They should discuss themselves. While I totally own my decision to invest in Woodford, I was certainly influenced by their constant banging of the drum for him even while more and more people were asking questions. Their entire Wealth 50/150 thing stinks, since they only give you easy access to detailed info on those funds, and slyly imply that all others are not necessarily dogs. As several people in the FT comment today, they never had the Fundsmith fund among their reccos and the only reason is clearly that Terry Smith would not give them the volume discounts they demand. So I hope H-L get the kicking they deserve, and mend their own ways a bit. Of course the fact that Peter Hargreaves stuck £17m into the Brexit referendum campaign has nothing to do with my antipathy :-).
But I read that St James Place have even more blood on their hands than H-L on this one...
I would expect a major regulatory investigation will be launched to look into amongst other things whether:
a) Woodford breached the terms of the fund prospectus by investing to such a material degree in less liquid/private investments; and/or
b) whether fiduciaries like HL and SJP breached their duty to investors by continuing to recommend the fund after information came to light which rendered any ongoing recommendation inappropriate.
I'd be curious to know how much of his own net worth Woodford personally had invested in the funds, the most important question any investor should ask and know the answer to.
I came within a whisker of signing with SJP in March and that chap mentioned this fund. Would have been my first real investments after being nervous for years. Bullet dodged!
Hi @newyorkaddick, it would be an education for me and others to know why you still hold that Merian Absolute Return fund. I first bought into it sometime just over a year ago and topped up in July. It has reletnlessly gone south over the entire period. Now I know one year is not a long enough time to evaluate a fund but I was concerned by the fact it was pointing downwards so consistently when everything else was going up. I assumed that was the hedge element at work, but when markets went south, and the Merian fund did not respond in the other direction, I thought that this looks like a turkey. I was looking at losses of 15% when everything else apart from Woodford was showing green on my H-L platform, including bond funds. That, and the high fees made me ask myself, why. It has gone up a bit in the last couple of months but I thought I will just cut my losses at this level of-10%. I could not easily find the info that would explain to me how this fund was investing, and particularly the nature of the hedge. This of course is a reminder not to invest in anything one does not fully understand. But I would be interested in your comments on it, would be educative.
I invested the proceeds in Rathbone Ethical Bond and Vanguard Life Strategy 40% Equity. Conservative and low cost. Well this is all in my SIPP, so I should not have been messing with stuff I didn't fully understand, with a SIPP and at my age.
Prague, in the short-to-medium term I like to view my investments on a 'full portfolio' basis rather than spend too much time worrying about the individual movements therein - the Merian fund has a particular role in my 'uncorrelated/hedged' bucket and whilst it has not delivered great returns in recent months, the general rise in the equity market means my directional investments have done fine (as you'd expect). Then a month like May comes along when equities are in the doghouse and the fund kicks in nicely with a 3%+ return as it benefits generally from a pick-up in volatility and is uncorrelated to equity markets.
In my day job I come across loads of market neutral funds that I'd rather own but unfortunately they're not typically available for the retail investor, so one is left looking at a handful of retail ones like Merian (and others I can mention if desired).
Everytime I look at absolute return funds I convince myself that the time is right or clients need diversification etc etc.......and then I'm let down (again). Last time is was the CF Absulte Equity fund (that soft closed a few months back but has now re-opened) & also the JPM Global Macro Opportunities fund. Think I'll stick to the basics.....
Rathbone Ethical is a good one Prague. It's in my own Pension fund & a lot of my clients portfolios too. I use the Vanguard fund where I want a bit of "cheapness" in a portfolio......especially the LV pension proposition as some of their funds are a bit pricey AMC wise.
Everytime I look at absolute return funds I convince myself that the time is right or clients need diversification etc etc.......and then I'm let down (again). Last time is was the CF Absulte Equity fund (that soft closed a few months back but has now re-opened) & also the JPM Global Macro Opportunities fund. Think I'll stick to the basics.....
Rathbone Ethical is a good one Prague. It's in my own Pension fund & a lot of my clients portfolios too. I use the Vanguard fund where I want a bit of "cheapness" in a portfolio......especially the LV pension proposition as some of their funds are a bit pricey AMC wise.
City Financial (CF) have gone bust so I'd steer clear of that one even though the fund might be transitioned to a different investment manager.
Everytime I look at absolute return funds I convince myself that the time is right or clients need diversification etc etc.......and then I'm let down (again). Last time is was the CF Absulte Equity fund (that soft closed a few months back but has now re-opened) & also the JPM Global Macro Opportunities fund. Think I'll stick to the basics.....
Rathbone Ethical is a good one Prague. It's in my own Pension fund & a lot of my clients portfolios too. I use the Vanguard fund where I want a bit of "cheapness" in a portfolio......especially the LV pension proposition as some of their funds are a bit pricey AMC wise.
City Financial (CF) have gone bust so I'd steer clear of that one even though the fund might be transitioned to a different investment manager.
Yes I am aware of it. When the fund re-opened under another name a few weeks later I moved the 3 or 4 clients (including myself) out of it. I'd only gone into it as a hedge against fails in UK stocks because of Brexit. As that hasnt materialised I thought it best to go back into the market again.
Everytime I look at absolute return funds I convince myself that the time is right or clients need diversification etc etc.......and then I'm let down (again). Last time is was the CF Absulte Equity fund (that soft closed a few months back but has now re-opened) & also the JPM Global Macro Opportunities fund. Think I'll stick to the basics.....
Rathbone Ethical is a good one Prague. It's in my own Pension fund & a lot of my clients portfolios too. I use the Vanguard fund where I want a bit of "cheapness" in a portfolio......especially the LV pension proposition as some of their funds are a bit pricey AMC wise.
City Financial (CF) have gone bust so I'd steer clear of that one even though the fund might be transitioned to a different investment manager.
Yes I am aware of it. When the fund re-opened under another name a few weeks later I moved the 3 or 4 clients (including myself) out of it. I'd only gone into it as a hedge against fails in UK stocks because of Brexit. As that hasnt materialised I thought it best to go back into the market again.
As a matter of my education do either of you understand exactly how the Merian fund hedge works? Or "should have worked", from my 14 month perspective?
As expected, H-L coming under a lot of scrutiny re its relationship with Woodford, good article yesterday in the FT and more today which I have yet to read.
Everytime I look at absolute return funds I convince myself that the time is right or clients need diversification etc etc.......and then I'm let down (again). Last time is was the CF Absulte Equity fund (that soft closed a few months back but has now re-opened) & also the JPM Global Macro Opportunities fund. Think I'll stick to the basics.....
Rathbone Ethical is a good one Prague. It's in my own Pension fund & a lot of my clients portfolios too. I use the Vanguard fund where I want a bit of "cheapness" in a portfolio......especially the LV pension proposition as some of their funds are a bit pricey AMC wise.
City Financial (CF) have gone bust so I'd steer clear of that one even though the fund might be transitioned to a different investment manager.
Yes I am aware of it. When the fund re-opened under another name a few weeks later I moved the 3 or 4 clients (including myself) out of it. I'd only gone into it as a hedge against fails in UK stocks because of Brexit. As that hasnt materialised I thought it best to go back into the market again.
As a matter of my education do either of you understand exactly how the Merian fund hedge works? Or "should have worked", from my 14 month perspective?
As expected, H-L coming under a lot of scrutiny re its relationship with Woodford, good article yesterday in the FT and more today which I have yet to read.
The fund is highly diversified (at 30 Apr, it had 314 long positions and 347 short positions) and is typically invested 100% long and 100% short with effectively zero net market exposure. However there is some modest sector exposure (for example the fund is positioned net long healthcare and industrials, and net short consumer discretionary and financials currently).
Gross performance (before fees) will be driven by the 'long/short spread' (the degree to which the long portfolio outperforms the short portfolio) which in turn will be determined by their overall stock-picking ability but also the aforementioned slight sector 'tilts'. The performance of the overall market should have no bearing on performance (so-called 'beta' will be zero).
Over the long term, if one accepts that they have some skill and thus ultimately an ability to 'beat the market' on both sides of the portfolio (ie. generate so-called 'alpha'), then I might reasonably expect them to be able to eke out say 3% pa outperformance on each side after trading costs (but before fees). Given the sheer diversification, to use a baseball analogy their success or otherwise will be determined by having a consistently high 'hit rate' rather than regular 'home runs'. This is broadly consistent with their returns to date of 4.9% pa net of fees (achieved with similar volatility of 4.9%).
Sorry to get technical but if the returns of the fund are normally distributed with 5% average pa returns and 5% volatility then one should expect that in 95% of all 12-month periods the fund should be up no more than 15% (5% + (2 x 5%)) or down no less than 5% (5% - (2 x 5%). We are currently in one of the latter periods so it's clearly been an unusual and hopefully rare period of such returns.
Obviously this outperformance does not occur in a linear fashion but will tend to be mean-reverting; thus I'd be minded to add (not reduce) after the fund has had a period of underperformance similar to the past few quarters. The longer the underperformance continues then the more likely it is that they ultimately don't have skill though this cannot be determined in anything other than a multi-year period.
These types of market neutral funds will tend to do best in a relatively rational market environment (where stocks move mainly on their fundamentals) and worst in market environments where stock intra-correlation is high (ie stock dispersion is low) and/or are very macro/top-down driven. Importantly it's been achieved with zero correlation to equity markets which is key as mentioned to your overall portfolio.
Their stock-picking is undertaken almost entirely systematically using various quantitative screens by the way. This lack of emotion is an important trait of systematic funds and explains why bad performance can become self-reinforcing at more traditional fundamental firms (where a bad period of performance causes the manager to become less confident and more risk-averse etc. thus encouraging more disappointing performance etc.). I wouldn't expect them to be able to outperform the world's very best boutique quantitative investment firms/hedge funds since they simply can't attract that sort of programming/coding talent.
I might consider myself a little rash to have sold based on what you write, however, looking at my platform now, I am reminded of another reason I was unhappy. At around the same time I invested in IFSL Brooks MacDonald Defensive Capital (currently up 1.95%) and Newton Real Return (currently up 5.90%) whenreas the Merian fund was down around 10.5% over the same period, and had touched -15% in Spring, that added to my angst.
I don't know either of those funds well but a quick glance emphasizes that they are quite different to the Merian fund.
In particular with regard to the Brooks MacDonald fund, be aware of their heavy use of structured products like autocalls which have very high negative 'tail risks' in a market crash scenario; these types of products have become increasingly popular since the crisis precisely because we haven't had a severe equity market downturn. In other words it's not a good product to defend your portfolio in an market meltdown whereas the Merian one would likely hold up fine.
The Newton fund is what I would describe as a diversified multi-asset product and thus could justify a fairly large allocation for a conservative investor (but again I wouldn't view it as an 'absolute return' product even if it describes itself as such).
Prague, the attached graph of the long-term returns of the Merian fund shows just how unusual the current period of underperformance has been (I put the trend lines on there). Due to the natural mean-reverting characteristics of this type of product again I'm personally minded to add here.
NYA so I bought into it just in time to catch its longest downward swing in ten years. I guess you can at least understand why I lost my nerve on this one.
By the way when you want to examine a fund in more detail, such as major holdings, where do you go? Is it usually the fund's own website or is there a good general site for this?
NYA so I bought into it just in time to catch its longest downward swing in ten years. I guess you can at least understand why I lost my nerve on this one.
By the way when you want to examine a fund in more detail, such as major holdings, where do you go? Is it usually the fund's own website or is there a good general site for this?
Either the managers' own websites or else somewhere like HL or a general information provider like Morningstar.
NYA so I bought into it just in time to catch its longest downward swing in ten years. I guess you can at least understand why I lost my nerve on this one.
By the way when you want to examine a fund in more detail, such as major holdings, where do you go? Is it usually the fund's own website or is there a good general site for this?
I generally use Trustnet. You should always look at the fund factsheet which should give you the asset allocation (if multi asset) and top 10 or so stocks. Will also give you both discreet & cumulative performance figures over the last 3, 6 & 12 months as well as 3,5 & 10 years (if that old) for the fund and its sector.
Couple of people at work were tipping this company in the new year when price was a couple of p. Just looked and nearly 12p now. Impressive,
It looks suspiciously like a pump and dump scheme.
It’s no pump and dump scheme it’s taken 10 years developing patent protection on the reformed drugs that their technology facilitates. The surge in price is down to achieving the first milestone of independent verified data on test results of the cancer treatment drug they have modified to be more effective.
It’s because it’s not being pumped up by anything other than incontrovertible proof of concept data that make it stand out from the usual Bitcoin type waffle and hype.
Suggest you look at the people behind this company and the large drug companies looking to buy licences to bring it to market.
My view is based upon:
the company has been listed since 2015 but there is literally not a single piece of news about it on Bloomberg;
there is an extremely thin free float implying small transactions have a disproportionate effect on the share price (a pre-requisite for a 'pump and dump' scheme);
the auditors resigned in May 2019;
the stock is a darling of the typical penny stock bulletin boards with various anonymous posters pumping it up;
despite no news announced until May 30, the stock rose 300% between mid-March and yesterday amidst a sudden spike in volumes - looks suspiciously like some leaky inside information - suspect the regulators may want to take a look;
the news announced yesterday which caused the subsequent price spike seems completely immaterial to me (eg "pilot study in healthy subjects") and certainly not justification for £40m of additional market capitalization;
the company only had £0.3m in cash at 31 Mar 2018 even after a £2m share placing;
tens of millions of directors' share options struck at 4p are now suddenly very much in-the-money.
I have no view on the quality of the people behind the company and note perfectly legitimate companies can inadvertently be the subject of such schemes.
Good luck :-)
(Edit @10.06am: I partly stand corrected as there was some news in mid-April concerning a cannabis-related partnership with a Canadian entity.....)
Just out of interest, how do you compile your research on potential investments? I only ask as a complete novice who has just started to invest in stocks.
I have only bought stock in companies I know a fair bit about, for example I work with the DotDigital Group (DOTD) and am aware of the landscape so have had a bit of a punt on them.
Couple of people at work were tipping this company in the new year when price was a couple of p. Just looked and nearly 12p now. Impressive,
It looks suspiciously like a pump and dump scheme.
It’s no pump and dump scheme it’s taken 10 years developing patent protection on the reformed drugs that their technology facilitates. The surge in price is down to achieving the first milestone of independent verified data on test results of the cancer treatment drug they have modified to be more effective.
It’s because it’s not being pumped up by anything other than incontrovertible proof of concept data that make it stand out from the usual Bitcoin type waffle and hype.
Suggest you look at the people behind this company and the large drug companies looking to buy licences to bring it to market.
My view is based upon:
the company has been listed since 2015 but there is literally not a single piece of news about it on Bloomberg;
there is an extremely thin free float implying small transactions have a disproportionate effect on the share price (a pre-requisite for a 'pump and dump' scheme);
the auditors resigned in May 2019;
the stock is a darling of the typical penny stock bulletin boards with various anonymous posters pumping it up;
despite no news announced until May 30, the stock rose 300% between mid-March and yesterday amidst a sudden spike in volumes - looks suspiciously like some leaky inside information - suspect the regulators may want to take a look;
the news announced yesterday which caused the subsequent price spike seems completely immaterial to me (eg "pilot study in healthy subjects") and certainly not justification for £40m of additional market capitalization;
the company only had £0.3m in cash at 31 Mar 2018 even after a £2m share placing;
tens of millions of directors' share options struck at 4p are now suddenly very much in-the-money.
I have no view on the quality of the people behind the company and note perfectly legitimate companies can inadvertently be the subject of such schemes.
Good luck :-)
(Edit @10.06am: I partly stand corrected as there was some news in mid-April concerning a cannabis-related partnership with a Canadian entity.....)
Just out of interest, how do you compile your research on potential investments? I only ask as a complete novice who has just started to invest in stocks.
I have only bought stock in companies I know a fair bit about, for example I work with the DotDigital Group (DOTD) and am aware of the landscape so have had a bit of a punt on them.
Firstly define why you want to invest in stocks (eg income, growth etc) and how much risk you are willing to tolerate. Remember risk is (or should be) permanent capital destruction not short-term ups and downs which are inherent to stock investing.
Read everything you can in the investor relations sections of the website in the first instance. Since a company will always put a positive spin, try to find balance via news stories, analyst reports etc..
However none of the above will tell you anything about the stock’s valuation - for that you will need some general stock market sites eg Yahoo finance to compare to the general market, peers, historical precedent etc. and some common sense.
Realistically a retail investor will never get the information edge that a professional investor will (from management meetings, detailed analytics etc), so maintain diversification, stick to what you understand, rebalance your portfolio etc..
Couple of people at work were tipping this company in the new year when price was a couple of p. Just looked and nearly 12p now. Impressive,
It looks suspiciously like a pump and dump scheme.
It’s no pump and dump scheme it’s taken 10 years developing patent protection on the reformed drugs that their technology facilitates. The surge in price is down to achieving the first milestone of independent verified data on test results of the cancer treatment drug they have modified to be more effective.
It’s because it’s not being pumped up by anything other than incontrovertible proof of concept data that make it stand out from the usual Bitcoin type waffle and hype.
Suggest you look at the people behind this company and the large drug companies looking to buy licences to bring it to market.
My view is based upon:
the company has been listed since 2015 but there is literally not a single piece of news about it on Bloomberg;
there is an extremely thin free float implying small transactions have a disproportionate effect on the share price (a pre-requisite for a 'pump and dump' scheme);
the auditors resigned in May 2019;
the stock is a darling of the typical penny stock bulletin boards with various anonymous posters pumping it up;
despite no news announced until May 30, the stock rose 300% between mid-March and yesterday amidst a sudden spike in volumes - looks suspiciously like some leaky inside information - suspect the regulators may want to take a look;
the news announced yesterday which caused the subsequent price spike seems completely immaterial to me (eg "pilot study in healthy subjects") and certainly not justification for £40m of additional market capitalization;
the company only had £0.3m in cash at 31 Mar 2018 even after a £2m share placing;
tens of millions of directors' share options struck at 4p are now suddenly very much in-the-money.
I have no view on the quality of the people behind the company and note perfectly legitimate companies can inadvertently be the subject of such schemes.
Good luck :-)
(Edit @10.06am: I partly stand corrected as there was some news in mid-April concerning a cannabis-related partnership with a Canadian entity.....)
Price has stabilised around its high point and moved in a narrow range of a few pence since then, so no evidence of pumping and dumping. Taken some profits but happy to hold a bit for when the next update on progress towards market delivery is released.
Your analysis is spot on for investing in an established trading company, but we are talking about a speculative start up which was backed into the current listed vehicle after several years of providing proof of concept. Evidence of a huge investment in human capital on the part of its founders.
It looks like its founders are hanging in to win a bigger prize than dumping shares for a quick buck.
This is my only venture into penny shares based on a tip off purely because you can't obtain the sort of empirical evidence you describe to support a serious rational investment.
Comments
I would expect a major regulatory investigation will be launched to look into amongst other things whether:
a) Woodford breached the terms of the fund prospectus by investing to such a material degree in less liquid/private investments; and/or
b) whether fiduciaries like HL and SJP breached their duty to investors by continuing to recommend the fund after information came to light which rendered any ongoing recommendation inappropriate.
I'd be curious to know how much of his own net worth Woodford personally had invested in the funds, the most important question any investor should ask and know the answer to.
Trust your local IFA.....
I invested the proceeds in Rathbone Ethical Bond and Vanguard Life Strategy 40% Equity. Conservative and low cost. Well this is all in my SIPP, so I should not have been messing with stuff I didn't fully understand, with a SIPP and at my age.
Prague, in the short-to-medium term I like to view my investments on a 'full portfolio' basis rather than spend too much time worrying about the individual movements therein - the Merian fund has a particular role in my 'uncorrelated/hedged' bucket and whilst it has not delivered great returns in recent months, the general rise in the equity market means my directional investments have done fine (as you'd expect). Then a month like May comes along when equities are in the doghouse and the fund kicks in nicely with a 3%+ return as it benefits generally from a pick-up in volatility and is uncorrelated to equity markets.
In my day job I come across loads of market neutral funds that I'd rather own but unfortunately they're not typically available for the retail investor, so one is left looking at a handful of retail ones like Merian (and others I can mention if desired).
Rathbone Ethical is a good one Prague. It's in my own Pension fund & a lot of my clients portfolios too. I use the Vanguard fund where I want a bit of "cheapness" in a portfolio......especially the LV pension proposition as some of their funds are a bit pricey AMC wise.
City Financial (CF) have gone bust so I'd steer clear of that one even though the fund might be transitioned to a different investment manager.
As expected, H-L coming under a lot of scrutiny re its relationship with Woodford, good article yesterday in the FT and more today which I have yet to read.
The fund is highly diversified (at 30 Apr, it had 314 long positions and 347 short positions) and is typically invested 100% long and 100% short with effectively zero net market exposure. However there is some modest sector exposure (for example the fund is positioned net long healthcare and industrials, and net short consumer discretionary and financials currently).
Gross performance (before fees) will be driven by the 'long/short spread' (the degree to which the long portfolio outperforms the short portfolio) which in turn will be determined by their overall stock-picking ability but also the aforementioned slight sector 'tilts'. The performance of the overall market should have no bearing on performance (so-called 'beta' will be zero).
Over the long term, if one accepts that they have some skill and thus ultimately an ability to 'beat the market' on both sides of the portfolio (ie. generate so-called 'alpha'), then I might reasonably expect them to be able to eke out say 3% pa outperformance on each side after trading costs (but before fees). Given the sheer diversification, to use a baseball analogy their success or otherwise will be determined by having a consistently high 'hit rate' rather than regular 'home runs'. This is broadly consistent with their returns to date of 4.9% pa net of fees (achieved with similar volatility of 4.9%).
Sorry to get technical but if the returns of the fund are normally distributed with 5% average pa returns and 5% volatility then one should expect that in 95% of all 12-month periods the fund should be up no more than 15% (5% + (2 x 5%)) or down no less than 5% (5% - (2 x 5%). We are currently in one of the latter periods so it's clearly been an unusual and hopefully rare period of such returns.
Obviously this outperformance does not occur in a linear fashion but will tend to be mean-reverting; thus I'd be minded to add (not reduce) after the fund has had a period of underperformance similar to the past few quarters. The longer the underperformance continues then the more likely it is that they ultimately don't have skill though this cannot be determined in anything other than a multi-year period.
These types of market neutral funds will tend to do best in a relatively rational market environment (where stocks move mainly on their fundamentals) and worst in market environments where stock intra-correlation is high (ie stock dispersion is low) and/or are very macro/top-down driven. Importantly it's been achieved with zero correlation to equity markets which is key as mentioned to your overall portfolio.
Their stock-picking is undertaken almost entirely systematically using various quantitative screens by the way. This lack of emotion is an important trait of systematic funds and explains why bad performance can become self-reinforcing at more traditional fundamental firms (where a bad period of performance causes the manager to become less confident and more risk-averse etc. thus encouraging more disappointing performance etc.). I wouldn't expect them to be able to outperform the world's very best boutique quantitative investment firms/hedge funds since they simply can't attract that sort of programming/coding talent.
Thanks for that insight, as always.
I might consider myself a little rash to have sold based on what you write, however, looking at my platform now, I am reminded of another reason I was unhappy. At around the same time I invested in IFSL Brooks MacDonald Defensive Capital (currently up 1.95%) and Newton Real Return (currently up 5.90%) whenreas the Merian fund was down around 10.5% over the same period, and had touched -15% in Spring, that added to my angst.
I don't know either of those funds well but a quick glance emphasizes that they are quite different to the Merian fund.
In particular with regard to the Brooks MacDonald fund, be aware of their heavy use of structured products like autocalls which have very high negative 'tail risks' in a market crash scenario; these types of products have become increasingly popular since the crisis precisely because we haven't had a severe equity market downturn. In other words it's not a good product to defend your portfolio in an market meltdown whereas the Merian one would likely hold up fine.
The Newton fund is what I would describe as a diversified multi-asset product and thus could justify a fairly large allocation for a conservative investor (but again I wouldn't view it as an 'absolute return' product even if it describes itself as such).
Prague, the attached graph of the long-term returns of the Merian fund shows just how unusual the current period of underperformance has been (I put the trend lines on there). Due to the natural mean-reverting characteristics of this type of product again I'm personally minded to add here.
By the way when you want to examine a fund in more detail, such as major holdings, where do you go? Is it usually the fund's own website or is there a good general site for this?
I generally use Trustnet. You should always look at the fund factsheet which should give you the asset allocation (if multi asset) and top 10 or so stocks. Will also give you both discreet & cumulative performance figures over the last 3, 6 & 12 months as well as 3,5 & 10 years (if that old) for the fund and its sector.
I have only bought stock in companies I know a fair bit about, for example I work with the DotDigital Group (DOTD) and am aware of the landscape so have had a bit of a punt on them.
Read everything you can in the investor relations sections of the website in the first instance. Since a company will always put a positive spin, try to find balance via news stories, analyst reports etc..
However none of the above will tell you anything about the stock’s valuation - for that you will need some general stock market sites eg Yahoo finance to compare to the general market, peers, historical precedent etc. and some common sense.
Realistically a retail investor will never get the information edge that a professional investor will (from management meetings, detailed analytics etc), so maintain diversification, stick to what you understand, rebalance your portfolio etc..
Your analysis is spot on for investing in an established trading company, but we are talking about a speculative start up which was backed into the current listed vehicle after several years of providing proof of concept. Evidence of a huge investment in human capital on the part of its founders.
It looks like its founders are hanging in to win a bigger prize than dumping shares for a quick buck.
This is my only venture into penny shares based on a tip off purely because you can't obtain the sort of empirical evidence you describe to support a serious rational investment.
have any any of you heard of seventy seven wealth management and have any views on them?