News about Woodford and Industrial Heat

    • Official Post
    Quote from Dr Richard

    We need to publish some positive results, or promote positive work like Takahashi's or maybe the groups working under the IH 'umbrella' could publish something to stem such a loss of confidence.


    Few people associate Woodford, with IH, and therefore LENR. So if Woodford goes under -as it appears to be happening, I do not see any need for "damage control", by us countering with some positive news. Even if we did, no one would make the connection back to Woodford, unless we spelled it out for them. If we did that, that may lead them to think there is a connection...which there is not. So best IMO to keep quiet, as we idly watch the USS Woodford sink.


    Anyways, LENR has no Public Relations Department to "promote" anything, even if it wanted to. Closest thing it has, are a few of the old guard types ready to answer the phone, and this forum. Were they/we to try and promote a success, such as the Takahashi teams you mention, the public would ignore us, as they have been trained to do for 30 years. We are a bunch of loony toons as far as they are concerned. :)


    Now, I will add that the Japanese media did give some coverage of Takahashi's results. None here that I recall though.


    .

    There was a lady from Hargreaves Lansdowne on BBC radio 4 today discussing Woodford. To paraphrase what she said...


    Woodford has a good track record using his "secret sauce" to deliver growth but has limited experience with smaller unquoted/illiquid companies. We have been asking him for a awhile if this approach is appropriate for a UK Income fund.


    Think she also said something about in recent times he has delivered a -7% return over a period when other similar funds have delivered +20%.


    You might be able to find it somewhere on BBC iPlayer but I haven't looked.


    I had money in his income fund until I heard he had invested in IH so I missed he recent under performance.

    Woodford is a contrarian investor. He sees an opportunity and goes for it with conviction. This has worked very well for him over decades ... till now.

    In this case he was aiming for what he sees as undervalued UK equities and planning that Brexit would be smoother than many feared. Well Brexit is a huge mess with politicians unable to move forward. So he got that wrong.

    His strategy also was banking on the current momentum market ending. Some think we are likely at the end of the longest bull market and the state of the US bond yield curve supports a reversal of the status quo. In this case Woodford may be right but he ran out of time.

    The reason he ran out of time is that, not only was his fund underperforming as he went against the concensus, but there was a continuous stream of bad news surrounding his stock picks.

    Some of his largest investors were getting increasingly alarmed and the final straw was Kier dropping by 40% a few days ago. This prompted a large pension fund to ask for their money back triggering the current situation.


    Woodford has largely caused his own difficulties; the WEF fund is supposed to be invested in safe stocks that pay a dividend but he increasingly dabbled with more risky unquoted stocks.

    In turn this restricted the liquidity of the fund. In addition he has leveraged his funds with borrowing. All these things are fine when people are putting money in but problematic when many start wanting their money back.

    Personally I am invested in WPCT.

    I did sell some of my WPCT a year ago but am now wondering how safe my remaining investment is.

    WPCT is a closed fund so when people want their money back they just sell on the stock market. This makes the fund suitable for more illiquid shares such as early stage companies and proof against the situation with the WEF fund.

    However he has linked his funds by swapping purchases such as Industrial Heat and having his WEF fund then buy into the WPCT fund. Again, when things go well linkage may be a good thing but when things go bad then not a good thing.


    One interesting question will be what Woodford is going to do with his Industrial Heat shares. Is it possible to sell them?

    It is true that if IH goes public in the next few months with amazing news about cold fusion research then that could impact the Woodford situation. But unfortunately, even if IH have something valuable, these sort of things can take years to come to fruition.

    Woodford does not have time on his side.

    • Official Post

    I think that a presentation of some kind about IH's work was planned for the next ICCF in September. Whether they would (or even could) bring that forward or not is not going to make much different to Woodford's position - the perecentage of the fund in IH stocks is too small for a bit (or even a lot) of fairy dust to make all the other problems go away.

    Alan, I agree.


    First we have yet to find IF Industrial Heat have something worthwhile (i.e. that can be commercialised).

    Even so, any announcement in the next few months is likely to be of limited scope and not boost the fund value significantly.


    However, of all his controversial stock picks IH is the most controversial.

    Woodford has been repeatedly slated for supporting "cold fusion".

    If IH could come up with a positive and believable announcement then it would help to bolster Woodford against his many critics.

    Quote

    Or maybe a loss of confidence in the field- that apart, Woodford's serial bloopers - Theranos,

    I didn't know the bozos got swindled by such an obvious con as Theranos. Anyone with any health science background should have realized that the claims were extreme. One can not perform hundreds or thousands of tests on one drop of blood with any known or predictable technology. Any skeptical expert in medical laboratory technology could have told them what they needed to do to vet the claim just as any skeptical expert in calorimetry could have told them what to do to vet Rossi. Obviously, Woodford is easily fooled and should not be trusted.


    Quote

    Their intention was to hammer the final nail in cold fusion's coffin

    Complete nonsense. Their intention was to see if they could duplicate some of the apparently better results in cold fusion experiments.

    ZenoOfElea

    Hi. I was quoting Alan Smith who is, as far as I know, a reliable source. See his post (#419).


    Quote

    Or maybe a loss of confidence in the field- that apart, Woodford's serial bloopers - Theranos, PurpleBricks etc has eroded confidence in the fund as a whole- and the Kent CC decision to withdraw their pension fund has just made things worse.

    • Official Post

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news…woodford-devastating-blow


    'The shocking blocking of redemptions from Neil Woodford's, £3.7bn Woodford Equity Income Fund - after serial underperformance led to an investor exodus - is still sending shockwaves across the US asset management arena two days after it was first reported.

    "I can’t remember anything quite like this" said Peter Walls, veteran manager of the Unicorn Mastertrust fund, after trading in Woodford's fund was suspended. "I mean going back over decades really, there were quite a few funds that just didn’t pick up the telephone and suspended dealing in the dark days of the crash of '87 and black Monday and all that but this is quite big stuff," he said in an interview with CityWire.'

    Quote from seven_of_twenty

    I didn't know the bozos got swindled by such an obvious con as Theranos. Anyone with any health science background should have realized that the claims were extreme. One can not perform hundreds or thousands of tests on one drop of blood with any known or predictable technology.

    Again you show your lack of knowledge in a field you know nothing about. The issue with Theranos had nothing to do with the number of tests that can be done in one drop of blood. Today's technology allows the precise and accurate measurement of tens of thousands of biomolecules in one drop of blood. The issue with Theranos was not about what they were intending to measure but about the lack of any quality management system and any accreditation by an external regulatory body. You should refrain to say things you know nothing about.

    Quote

    Today's technology allows the precise and accurate measurement of tens of thousands of biomolecules in one drop of blood.


    If you mean that you can make thousands of the usual clinical tests normally ordered by physicians in the course of normal practice of, for example, internal medicine, that is totally incorrect. Such tests might include CBC, ESR, CRP, LFT's, RFT's ,, TP, A/G ratio and immunological tests, like HIV, HepB or immunity to MMR. So show me a reference that these and more can all be done on the same one drop of blood (0.02 - 0.05 ml).


    If you are speaking in broad generalities, sure. For example, it is common to use a DNA test "chip" (micro-array) with or without PCR amplification to test for hundreds of genes from less than a few nanograms of extracted DNA. The method is used, for example, by "23 and me". That sort of thing was not what Theranos claimed to do. In fact, they claimed to be able to replace the typical clinical auto-analyzer and do routine bloodwork from a kiosk, for example at Walgreen's. They never even came close.


    And please, unless you profess to be psychic, don't tell me what I know and don't know.


    Status of modern clinical laboratory science: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204236/

    Sample size considerations: https://labtestsonline.org/news/160617samples


    Both papers are from 2016.


    -------------------------------------------------------------------


    JedRothwell According to Nature's article, the claimed goal was hundreds of tests in a drop of blood, admittedly not thousands but also not dozens. And n.b.: "quickly" and cheaply as well.


    Quote

    The company’s alluring goal, which changed as it evolved, was to quickly analyse a drop of blood for hundreds of different assays, at a fraction of prevailing costs.


    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05149-2

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