jonah

Oh dear, so after 2 years of silence whilst a bunch of clowns and mercenaries run the club irresponsibly to the verge of administration, Duncan is back on the old "it's all Lowe's fault" bandwagon. Seems a little hypocritical to accuse RL of being divisive whilst speaking on radio shows urging shareholders to vote out the chairman! Of course I'm sure an alternative plan was proposed for after we've burnt the heretics at the stake? I remember the last one went along the lines of "anyone would be better" and that worked out just great with Wilde & Co...

Can't say I agree with your take on this GM. Commercial property loans typically require a 20-25% deposit and rent should be at least 130% of loan cost. For SLH it was a 100% loan and the "rent" came from within the same parent company - we were what would now be called "Sub-Prime" in terms of commercial property "mortgages"! Commerical property mortgages typically ranged from 1-5% over BoE base rate at that time (*), and at the time the base rate was 5.75%, so I think 8.35% was actually pretty good given our situation. Also, we offset the £560k against the loan so it's amortised over 25 years, and we also negotiated a capital repayment holiday of 1 year. The original loans with Fortis and DG Bank were 10 year floating rate notes for £17m - nobody wants to run a cash-critical business on a floating rate do they? Far far easier to budget with a fixed rate - if they want to take a mix of fixed/floating they can always take out an Interest Rate Swap but why would they want to other than taking a punt on short-term rates? I don't think it makes that much sense, especially as we have floating rate exposure in the other loan. As far as the short-term interest rates go, well yes they are low at the moment if you simply look at the BoE Base Rate, but that's not overly relevant unless you are lucky and have a genuine base-rate tracker - the real rate that matters is 3 month LIBOR which is at 5.84%, which is pretty much where we were when they first took that loan out (LIBOR was 5.75% at the start of 2001). Also many commercial loans based upon BoE rate have caps and floors on the rate range so no guarantee it would go much lower, and floating rates are usually negotiated on shorter terms - we would not want to be trying to renegotiate our debt in this market, we would be absolutely crucified. (*) At that time LIBOR was only 20-30bps over BoE base rate - nowadays, as mentioned above, LIBOR is incredibly higher, a full 284bps - and it's the LIBOR rate which is important, so 1-5% over BoE rates then is more like 3-7% over BoE rates now given credit conditions. PS. If our short-term floating rate loan is with Barclays, you'll find they usually have small print to the effect that they don't use BoE base rate at all but rather the "Barclays Base Rate" which is not guaranteed to be the same... there's always a way out for the banks!

I've never heard Keith Wiseman referred to as a "Beloved Leader"! Or did you mean Lawrie Mac?

I am still here and still in the City, but that's only because they have locked the windows to stop everyone jumping out. The NMS (Normal Market Size) for Saints shares is only 2,000 - the NMS is the minimum number of shares which the market makers must provide a guaranteed quote for. This figure is derived from the volumes traded over a period of time - ie. because our shares are only lightly traded the NMS is low. Currently you can get a firm price for 7,500 @ 27.63p. So whoever just bought 1k @ 28p has a crap broker! In terms of trying to buy 35,000, again they need to get a better broker :-) To be fair it will be tricky to get that quantity in the market, hence why the market makers are quoting a high price, but the thing to do is to phone the house broker and see if they have a willing seller - chances are there is someone wanting to offload 50k or 100k but has the opposite problem - they are being quoted a really low price to sell. The house broker (in theory) could be able to match up interested parties, although the size is a bit low to be honest. It's a bit weird that people are buying shares just now - given the markets are in a state of panic with indiscriminate sell-offs (down another 8% today), it seems odd for anyone to buy a football club share just now, let alone Saints! There's not much correlation between our price and the main markets, but even so it's hardly the time to be having a punt on our shares!

That would be great Steve (cheeky request: black on white would be even better if that's poss, it blends so nicely with Excel ;-)). I will check when I'm back from hols!

Ahhh, I finally see what's happened now. When I pay the £5 am I going to end up with avatars against every post/userid or can that be switched off/configured? I want to make sure I have a "low res" option which is a bit more discreet for work! (PS. Well done for getting it all switched over!)

What £5? And what happened to TSF? Did I fall asleep?