Sainsbury (j) Share Discussion Threads

[muffinhead] 02/2/2021 13:00

Once there were corner shops with a few hundred items of stock with good turnaround.

Supermarkets replaced the corner shop with 1000's of items, fresh with good turnaround.

The internet goes further and offers infinite choice from mega warehouses located anywhere with fast delivery.

Technology is driving deflation and expanding consumer choice.

[muffinhead] 02/2/2021 12:52

Supermarket clothes will never be high fashion

The problem with selling clothes is that technological change has changed the way people shop. Infinite choice, good price, convenience and online sales is the future.

ASOS and Boohoo bought the Debenham and Arcadia(Topshop etc) brands/websites so that the fashion labels NEVER return to brick and mortar shops again

No shop can compete with the infinite choice and deflation offered by the internet

[chc15] 02/2/2021 12:30

Strange this is dropping back, maybe pzena are dumping more shares. Might top up slightly here..

[loganair] 02/2/2021 10:44

net - I couldn't disagree with you more.

c40% of people are not into fashion and over the years there are less and less retailers serving this sizable part of the population.

Sadly Fashion may look good but all to often fits very badly and like many others, I would not touch Jaeger. I like timeless, well fitting, long lasting comfortable 100% cotton clothing, none of this man made fibre, skinny, slim, carrot fitting over priced poor value rubbish which on the whole is absolute tat.

[netcurtains] 02/2/2021 10:19

loganair: I 100% disagree with you.

I think M&S buying Jaeger for £6m just a few weeks ago is a REAL scope.
Sainsburys should do likewise. Make Sainsburys a place to actually buy
clothes.

[loganair] 02/2/2021 10:05

Sainsbury's going into Fashion I feel would be the stupidest thing for them to do as like with M&S they do not have the expertise in this area.

Going into Fashion in the 1990's was the downfall of M&S and sadly over the past 30 years they've so far haven't managed to recover from it.

[netcurtains] 02/2/2021 09:46

It would be interesting to see if Sainsburys decides to buy a big fashion label.
It needs to boost its clothing side and this is the time to do it.

[netcurtains] 02/2/2021 09:33

Sainsburys looking cheap on the turn.
Good NAV
Miles cheaper than Tesco - insane valuation difference.

Sainsburys has Argos! Got to be a long term winner.

Other retailers doing well today...

[pjleeds] 29/1/2021 15:58

If you can't back a horse to loose a race, how come you can back a share to loose. Maybe loose should be lose. Grammar rules.x

[netcurtains] 29/1/2021 15:34

QANTAS:
You can borrow money to go LONG....
So by the same token you can borrow shares to go SHORT.
There is no real difference.
One is money the other is share certificates.
Borrowing is the foundation stone of capitalism.

[chc15] 29/1/2021 15:28

Not sure, but a Canadian company recently tried to buy carrefour and failed, maybe they'll try sainsbury's??

[qantas] 29/1/2021 10:01

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
·
13h
u can’t sell houses u don’t own
u can’t sell cars u don’t own
but
u *can* sell stock u don’t own!?
this is bs – shorting is a scam
legal only for vestigial reasons



Please do your own research as always.

[netcurtains] 28/1/2021 13:42

Be great to break 360 again.

[poikka] 28/1/2021 08:45

Interesting stuff, spob, bloody musical chairs, innit.

[spob] 28/1/2021 01:32

" making life more difficult for the investor class working hardest to keep markets honest "

HaHaHa... don't make me laugh

[spob] 28/1/2021 01:30

Hedge funds feel the heat as Pearson catches day-trader fever

Bearish bets unwound as US exuberance crosses the Atlantic


Bryce Elder

Lombard

Financial Times

27 January 2021




It is a measure of dysfunctional markets that day traders delivered a bigger return for Pearson shareholders within 90 minutes than John Fallon ever managed in seven years as chief executive.

An early morning pile-on lifted shares of the textbook publisher by nearly 20 per cent to their highest since July 2019. Had the long-rumoured private equity bid approach finally arrived? It appears not. Instead, Pearson was one of a handful of companies to catch the secondary effects of stonk-mania, the US-led fashion among retail investors for using collective brute force to soak up liquidity and pressure short-sellers into closing their bets.

Cineworld and Petrofac caught the same bug, as did J Sainsbury. A cinema chain, a refinery engineer and a grocer have little in common other than being among the most heavily shorted stocks on the London market, with Financial Conduct Authority data showing 8 per cent or more of their total share capital out on loan.

It is too easy, however, to write off these moves as a direct consequence of investment gamification via internet message boards and commission-free trading apps. Stock markets remain a niche pursuit for Britons, who have free access to many other forms of legal gambling, and the social media chatter on Wednesday gives no hint of a cross-border mob assembling that would have the heft to move FTSE 100 stocks. Yet more than 6m Pearson shares changed hands within the first three hours, about treble the daily average.

Instead, events on Wall Street appear to have triggered a broad and undifferentiated risk-off trade among hedge funds. Very few will have direct exposure to the likes of GameStop, a flagship investment for the day trader armies. But after Melvin Capital Management required a bailout for being on the wrong side of the GameStop trade, fellow hedge funds are facing higher borrowing costs and more constraining volatility metrics.

Do not expect much sympathy for the short-sellers. They make convenient villains, particularly on the internet forums that set the current mood. Yet in a market powered largely by algorithms and technical signals, the bears play a valuable role in improving corporate transparency and accountability. Financial incentives have helped expose numerous frauds, from Enron and Wirecard to NMC Health, as well as putting pressure on countless other companies to clean up their operations.

It is hard to know exactly how much credit to give the amateur trader armies for each day’s gyrations. Nevertheless, their involvement is making life more difficult for the investor class working hardest to keep markets honest, which is an unfortunate unintended consequence.

[spob] 28/1/2021 00:47

Sainsburys shares on loan currently around 8%

but that is just declared positions around 0.5% and above

total shares on loan for Sainsbury will obviously be higher

[spob] 28/1/2021 00:43

‘Short squeeze’ spreads as day traders hunt next GameStop


White House is ‘monitoring the situation’ after surge in targeted stocks on both sides of the Atlantic

European companies targeted by Reddit traders include Poland’s CD Projekt, maker of the Witcher series of video games, the pharmaceuticals group Evotec and the battery maker Varta


Robert Smith, Laurence Fletcher and Madison Darbyshire in London and Eric Platt in New York




Financial Times

27 January 2021



A “short squeeze” that started on Wall Street swept across the globe on Wednesday, triggering another day of frenetic moves in the share prices of companies with large bets levied against them.

The White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration was “monitoring the situation” as shares of companies including GameStop, the hard-hit cinema owner AMC and BlackBerry surged in a volatile day of trading.

The dramatic moves highlight the growing influence of retail traders, who have organised on the message board site Reddit. The group has focused on pushing up stocks that are the subject of large short bets by hedge funds. Their success in rallying the stock price of GameStop has vindicated a group now targeting companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Stocks such as US home goods retailer Bed Bath & Beyond, Finnish telecoms group Nokia, German pharmaceuticals company Evotec, former Financial Times owner Pearson and Polish games developer CD Projekt rose sharply in intraday trading.

Shares in AMC, which earlier this week clinched a rescue financing, rose 301 per cent on Wednesday, while the retailer Express more than tripled in value. GameStop, which has been at the centre of the retail trading bonanza, shot up 135 per cent.

We are recently detecting some European stocks being touted as 'the next GameStop’ among retail investors

Ivan Cosovic, Breakout Point

The gains stood in stark contrast to a broad market decline triggered by concerns about the rollout of vaccines and pandemic risks to the economy. The US S&P 500 index and tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite both slid 2.6 per cent.

“It’s like a wolf pack seeking out the weakest member of the herd,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist for Interactive Brokers.

The flash rallies prompted TD Ameritrade to put trading restrictions in place for several securities, including GameStop and AMC. The company said the limits could include restricting short sales or requiring 100 per cent margin for certain trades, moves it said would mitigate risks for itself and its clients.

“We made these decisions out of an abundance of caution amid unprecedented market conditions and other factors,” the brokerage said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday said it was aware of the volatility across equity and options markets and it was “working with our fellow regulators to assess the situation and review the activities of regulated entities, financial intermediaries, and other market participants”.

William Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth who last month sued the trading platform Robinhood for “gamifying” investing and failing to protect its users, said trading in GameStop should be halted. “At the present time, the best action is to prevent this from being traded,” he told the Financial Times. (Robinhood has denied the allegations in the complaint from the Massachusetts securities division.)

Some of the companies whose shares surged were targets of Melvin Capital, a hedge fund that has been singled out by day traders. Those included Evotec, which was up 9.6 per cent; CD Projekt, which rose 5.3 per cent; and the German battery manufacturer Varta, which rose 12 per cent before trimming its gains to trade up 6.2 per cent.

Melvin on Wednesday revealed it had closed its GameStop position, having sustained a multibillion-dollar loss on its shorts since the start of this year.

Retail investors are using “a tried-and-true hedge fund strategy of swarming crowded trades held by weak-handed investors”, said Andrew Beer, managing member at fund firm Dynamic Beta Investments.

In contrast to the US, which has limited disclosure on short bets, hedge funds and other investors have to disclose when they have shorted more than 0.5 per cent of a company’s stock in the EU and the UK, making it easier to target a fund’s positions.

Melvin’s latest disclosure shows it has bet against more than 6 per cent of Evotec’s shares, making it the largest single wager against a European company by percentage of shares shorted, according to the data provider Breakout Point. The US hedge fund’s bet against Varta is the fifth largest.

The “short squeeze phenomenon fuelled by retail investors’ discussions is spilling over to Europe”, said Ivan Cosovic, founder of Breakout Point. “We are recently detecting some European stocks being touted as ‘the next GameStop’ among retail investors.”

The targeting of hedge funds will be viewed with irony by many financial market insiders, given that such funds are often the protagonists in short-selling attacks on troubled companies.

Heavily shorted shares with no link to Melvin also rose on Wednesday. Shares in Pearson, the British education publishing company that is the third-most shorted stock in Europe, according to IHS Markit, climbed 14 per cent to close at its highest level in 16 months. Daniel Sundheim’s New York-based hedge fund D1 Capital Partners, which has also been shorting Varta, has the biggest bet against Pearson, at 3.8 per cent of its share capital.

The real estate company Wereldhave, in which Woodson Capital has disclosed a 4.2 per cent short position and London-based Adelphi has a 3.6 per cent bet, rose about 5 per cent.

Hedge funds in Europe are now fervently scouring lists of most-shorted stocks and message boards such as Reddit for any signs that their short bets could be in trouble.

“Any good hedge fund group will be looking at this,” said the head of one multibillion-dollar European hedge fund group.

One European hedge fund manager who specialises in short selling described the recent stock market rallies as “insane”, but said the elevated share prices of troubled companies would “make a great opportunity” for short sellers that survived the week’s mayhem.

Additional reporting by Patrick Temple-West

[poikka] 27/1/2021 18:29

What's in a day.

[netcurtains] 27/1/2021 16:48

Not a brilliant ending to the day, but a profit is a profit - nice to be up.

[paulo435] 27/1/2021 11:13

Possibly on the banking side - the sale

[imperial3] 27/1/2021 11:00

Something cooking then?

[quepassa] 27/1/2021 10:54

Astonishing performance since September.

180p to 265p.

Wondering the same as several other posters.

Is something going on.

ALL IMO. DYOR.
QP