Ann: FY16 Earnings Guidance-SGH.AX, page-102

"You will learn the hard way. Like I did"..............

..........you don't appear to have learnt anything remotely useful about anything financial, Fike - least of all interpreting imprecise information people a lot cleverer and more experienced than you will ever be are understandably struggling to draw any meaningful conclusions from.

This 'guidance' doesn't really guide us on anything except that debt has reduced materially from the peak it reached just before the new facilities were announced in May. The increase between 1 Jan and 30 April was probably mostly caused by spend on business restructuring (closures and personnel reduction) in the UK (costs will have been mostly provided in H1) although it is impossible to be certain of this. It's just what seems most likely. We'll have to wait until the full results are released before judging likely underlying trading performance in H2.

Putting yourself in BH's shoes, what would there be to gain by doing anything other than taking an ultra conservative view of y/e WIP, debtors and provisions? With revenue falling against H1 (some UK branches have closed but I was certainly expecting slightly higher numbers) I'm not sure what conclusions to draw - particularly on NIHL claims. Maybe it will all be explained next week. Regardless, if I was BH, I'd want to make 2015/6 about the worst year it's possible to imagine having. I'd be thinking: SGH had a cracking H1, so let's get everything we can think of out on the table and hit 2016/17 running and put the past behind us once and for all. I doubt the auditors will have complained about anything that erred on the side of caution. Nor the AASB or whoever was moaning about prior years' accounts.

Cash is always king. It gives away underlying trends and performance and is my personal barometer of most trading companies' state of fitness. The full analysis of movements given next week in the results presentation should tell the full story. Not sure how big the effect of sterling devaluation post Brexit will be but it shouldn't be huge (as an aside, I don't think the disingenuous UK govt has the slightest intention whatsoever of triggering Clause 50 - Brexit doesn't in fact mean Brexit at all imo)

The likes of Fike, haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of understanding anything that's presented next week, although this probably won't stop him giving us his valuable opinions - along the lines of everything about and within SGH being bad and there being no hope. Set your stop losses cautiously, Fike, people would have to be particularly ignorant to follow yor advice based on what you've told us so far.

We're just going to have to wait longer than many (me included) were expecting for eventual significant reward I fear, but I'm often wrong. A 'normalised' $200m bottom line doesn't seem out of the way to me when everyone starts looking to the future instead of the past. It's important to have got everything without real value out of the system and my guess is that this has now happened. Looks as if NIHL might have been a dud after all, unless there something in the full figures that causes surprise.

The short term price seems to be under attack again. There's still doubt about what will be said about future prospects in next week's release however so, depending on the stance the media takes, shorting SGH might be a dangerous business. Hope so - I like the smell of burning.

GLAL