Been away for 5 weeks and what a disaster.Karl and his team are...

Been away for 5 weeks and what a disaster.

Karl and his team are just not up to the job but I can see Karl has such an ego he won't be taking responsibility and doing anything differently.

This is truly a nasty situation.

• The buy back is very half hearted - only 190k of shares to date in 18 days. To buy back the maximum over the next 12 months they would need to average 127,000 share per day.
• Karl talks of the problems of liquidity - purely of his own making. These figures are pretty rough and I have adjusted the daily average sales figures to cover for any days of unusually large buying but they give an idea of how difficult it would be to scale out of these positions.
• ARQ 10.40% of portfolio 20,000,000 shares daily volumes 120,000 166 days if only seller
• MNY 5.60% 7,716,000 132,000 58 days
• CIA 4.9% 4,421,000 535,000 8 days
• NBL 4.70% 4,749,000 60,000 79 days
• RMC 2.50% 11,388,000 50,000 228 days
• SHJ 2.40% 9,700,000 50,000 194 days
• XIP 1.90% 2,600,000 340,000 8 days
• MAH 1.38% 21,400,000 2,000,000 11 days
• 8 of the top 20 positions I would deem to be a liquidity risk - even 8 days would in fact probably take a month and a lot of damage can be done in a month
• ARQ is a real problem - no moat, the digital services unit is people intensive and it appears the best talent is walking. Have not managed the growth in heads to match the work. What was Karl thinking?
• With ARQ, I can only hope they can turn it around but could be 2 years before we see results.
• I will contact the company re the above table (first get them to agree it is roughly right) and let you know the response.

As Peejay said there needs to be some pretty solid communication regarding what has gone wrong and a plan to address it.

Sentiment is to sell at least half my holding. I don't see any quick fixes.

Cheers