News about Woodford and Industrial Heat

    Quote from seven_of_twenty

    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).


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


    Seems you don’t know about a company called Genalyte. 128 tests on 0.05ml, fast results. Unlike Theranos they have published lots of information about their technology works and given demonstrations.


    Not much point in fishing out a link for you SOT, the avid non-reader, but those with an interest can google ‘Genalyte 128’ or something similar.

    • Official Post
    Quote from Shane D.


    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.


    That's why Cold Fusion Now! stepped in to profile the science in a positive perspective for the general (scientifically-literate) public back in May 2010.


    We did some good, but will be ending the effort after ICCF22.


    Infinite Energy was Eugene Mallove's attempt, but that has suffered from lack of support. E-Cat World has good articles, though the bias shows for Rossi. LENRIA is around, but they do a calendar which is very positive, but not widely distributed as digital media. Who else am I missing????

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Comment by market watchers and regulators suggest that the capital resilience of other Investment funds need examining 'they have been taking too many risks'...some say another bear market is signalled, since the closure of a fund to withdrawals against the backdrop of a bouyant market is unprecedented.


    Alan. Clearly this was Woodford's plan all along. To precipitate the next bear market so that all the momentum funds plummet and his defensive shares surge and he wins. :/


    On a more serious point; to try to answer my question earlier about Woodford's IH shares a couple of possibilities occur. He could try to offload some of his IH shares to the "Laurene Powers Jobs Trust"

    Or failing that actually offer some for sale on the Guernsey International Stock Exchange, assuming anyone would be interested.

    Quote

    That's why Cold Fusion Now! stepped in to profile the science in a positive perspective for the general (scientifically-literate) public back in May 2010.

    We did some good, but will be ending the effort after ICCF22.

    It's a lot of mostly thankless work, isn't it?

    • Official Post
    Quote from ZenoOfElea

    Or failing that actually offer some for sale on the Guernsey International Stock Exchange, assuming anyone would be interested.


    The brave thing would be for IH to buy them back at close to par, or if they can, persuade somebody else to buy them. That would prevent Woodford dumping them for a low price and thus devaluing the rest of the shares IH and family hold, after all, right now all they have is 'hope value'. And Hope is like Lady Luck, a fickle jade.

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Back to Woodford.


    Comment by market watchers and regulators suggest that the capital resilience of other Investment funds need examining 'they have been taking too many risks'...some say another bear market is signalled, since the closure of a fund to withdrawals against the backdrop of a bouyant market is unprecedented.


    I wouldn't quite say it's unprecedented. Any time you put illiquid positions in an open end structure, you can and likely will get into trouble. Woodford's problem, in so far as I understand it, is that as they receive redemptions, they have to sell the liquid positions, which, in turn, concentrates the portfolio into the illiquid positions. There are regulatory limits to how concentrated they can be in the illiquid investments and they've been bumping up against those limits. Also, this is an income fund in name only. It's not a portfolio of stable, staid blue chips. Nobody on an institutional investment committee would be at all interested in taking the career risk of giving them the benefit of the doubt, nor taking the risk of winding up with an allocation that can't be redeemed.


    I also don't think it's at all unusual that the Patient Capital Trust is suffering. Woodford made his name as a value investor, and these investments are very far outside his wheelhouse. Diametrically opposed, even. They're impossible to value objectively. Others have noted that parts of the yield curve are starting to invert, market participants are, generally, starting to look around and wonder how much longer things will last, which can't help.

    Quote from Shane D.

    orsova


    Thanks. Sounds like you know what you are talking about. Do you see any downside for IH in this, when/if Woodford goes down? Seems to me, they are just one of those "illiquid positions" he took on, and that should be the end of it as far as IH is concerned.


    I'm not an expert by any stretch, so I could be wrong, but I read the situation the same way you do. I find it very hard to understand how this could impact Industrial Heat. In a situation where the funds were wound up, it would be up to Woodford to find a buyer for their stake in Industrial Heat. I can't see Industrial Heat having any obligation to make a market in the shares.


    It's worth noting that the performance of the Woodford funds, whilst not particularly good, hasn't been catastrophic thus far.


    Total return:

    Equity Income: 11%

    Income Focus: -8.65%

    Patient Capital Trust: -17.1%


    Which is something to keep in mind. When media reports use words like 'collapse', what they're referring to is the assets under management of the fund manager, as opposed to the performance of the underlying funds.


    Were these kinds of outflows to occur at a fund manager like, for example, Lindsell Train, you likely wouldn't hear about it. Their investments are in big, stable companies like Nintendo, PepsiCo, Unilever, Diageo, Disney & Heineken. They'd simply sell their stakes in these companies to fund their withdrawals and that would be it. They'd stabilise somewhere at a lower asset base and life would go on, or they'd wind up the management company and take up golf.


    I think the press is making a lot of this because there's been a confluence of things: he's considered a guru, he's strayed dramatically from his historical approach to investment, the process of redemption management is far more disorderly than the above example, structuring the funds the way he did was a questionable move, trying to list stakes in Guernsey likely raised some eyebrows, and he's seemingly embarrassed Hargreaves Lansdown and St James' Place.


    I thought these two FT pieces were helpful:


    https://www.ft.com/content/5da…06-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2

    https://www.ft.com/content/3cf…33-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2


    My apologies if I'm belabouring obvious points.


    edit (9/6): The performance numbers quoted in this post are till April 30 only, and understate the magnitude of the problem at Woodford. I think the general thrust of my argument is still intact, but there is a legitimate performance question that I failed to account for.

    I also am not an expert but my reading is that, while the facts have not changed the sentiment has changed radically.

    Because Woodford was seen as an investment star over decades, who took contrarian strategies but ultimately was successful, this has exaggerated the confidence (or faith) that investors put into him.

    Events that would have been red flags against run of the mill funds had a blind eye turned to them.

    However the nervousness has increased until the redemptions have forced Woodford to gate the fund.


    So now it is exploding all across the media.

    Journalists are making hay with this story, and it is a big story.

    So in my view the sentiment has changed and yesterday’s hero has become today’s pantomime villain.

    Facts and reality can go out the window. Investor greed has turned to fear.

    This is like a run on a bank. Nobody wants to be stuck at the end asking for their money back when all the good stuff has been sold and only the junk is left.

    This will likely be a process over some months, due to the size, but I think this fund is dead.

    The spill over is affecting his other funds. The Woodford brand is becoming toxic.



    Additionally all Woodfords investing colleagues are distancing themselves and sharpening their knives.

    They fear that the negative sentiment will cause many average Joe investors to think twice before giving their savings to Fund Managers to manage. These guys pay themselves a big bonus from the profits when things go well and still take a hefty fee even when things go badly.

    So it is in their interest to try to turn Woodford into some kind of crazy, villain and not at all like the normal, professional, prudent, over-remunerated fund manager.


    What will happen to his other funds is a matter of some debate online. Can they be saved or not?

    • Official Post
    Quote from we_cat_global

    ...Poor PhD's..once you have Dewey Weaver and Industrial Heat on your back it will be hard to shrug them off..


    JB


    You do an injustice to this important paper Doctoral student Lu, and his mentor Hagelstein's wrote. It is much more than Dewey and IH, as one would think from your comment. It reads more like a book. 13 Chapters, and it covers all of Hagelstein's work going back to his initial theory, and the false leads that eventually led to the important May 2017 experiment. Very good read. It starts with this from Lu:


    "During the past three decades, there were approximately 25 different anomalies in the field of condensed matter nuclear science reported by researchers. One example

    involves collimated X-rays coming from metal samples with vibrations without a clear explanation or understanding of the underlying physics involved. Another example

    involves unexpected non-exponential decay of radioactive sources.
    These anomalies have motivated a research effort by my Ph.D. advisor at MIT,

    Professor Peter Hagelstein, to investigate the physical phenomena involved. Hagelstein came up with a theory predicting coupling between phonons and internal nuclear states,

    leading to excitation transfer between nuclei. The aim of this Ph.D. thesis is to experimentally test Hagelstein's theory.


    In this research, we used Co-57 as the sample to investigate the nuclear excited states. Unexpected non-exponential decay was seen in the first attempt to look for excitation

    transfer effect. Heat pulse can trigger X-ray signal increments. We performed angular anisotropy experiments which appears to support the conjecture that slow resonant

    excitation transfer occurs for the 136 keV excited state of Co-57. We also performed delocalization experiments which appears to support the conjecture that fast excitation

    transfer occurs for the 14.4 keV excited state of Co-57. Our conclusion is that the experimental data are not inconsistent with Hagelstein's theory"


    And ends with this:

    "It cannot be overemphasized how important the May 2017 excitation transfer experiment hasbeen to our research effort."


    With much more in between, and after. If he says this is important, then it *IS* important, and everyone should take notice and read the paper. At the least, it is a good guideline to follow for others doing the meticulous research of syncing up theory, with experimental results.


    Good find by Ahlfors This one goes in the library.

    • Official Post

    For those that are interested, these are the current holdings in the Woodford Patient Capital Trust -well, the 'top ten' anyways.


    Top 10 Holdings

    Benevolent AI 8.53%

    Autolus 8.14%

    Oxford Nanopore 7.23%

    Atom Bank 7.01%

    Proton Partners International6.38%

    Industrial Heat A2 Pref 5.74%

    Immunocore A 4.90%

    Oxford Science Innovations 4.0%

    Industrial Heat A1 Pref 2.54%

    Prothena Corp PLC 2.34%


    And -selected quotes taken from 'Investment Trust Insider' - gathered at a fund managers annual dinner in London a couple of nights ago...



    ........ the serious topic that dominated conversations all evening. (was) what the hell is going to happen to Woodford Patient Capital Trust (WPCT) ??

    On the one hand the suspension of the £3.7 billion Woodford Equity Income fund –while a shocking and worrying move for its many investors

    gives investment trust folk an open goal in terms of highlighting the advantages of their ‘closed-end’ structures over their more numerous ‘open-ended’ fund

    rivals. With their fixed pools of capital, investment trust managers are never forced to offload investments just because a lot of investors are selling their

    shares, they proudly proclaimed.... And yet the same week has seen Patient Capital, a former flagship turned embarrassment for the sector, sink ever further

    below its flotation price four years ago. This has left its mostly private investors nursing losses of nearly 40% if – like me – they bought the shares at 100p in the initial
    public offer.


    It seems a very long time ago now but in a much-hyped launch in 2015, Woodford raised what was then a record £800 million from his loyal army of
    investors. The former star fund manager enthused his followers with a pledge to only charge a fee if he made them more than 10% a year from
    backing Great British start-ups.
    This week the already depressed shares shed another fifth of their value, tumbling nearly 21% from 77.5p to 61.5p. This leaves them standing at a
    devastating 26% discount below their supposed net asset value....
    ...Bluntly, Patient Capital could be engulfed by a wave of selling by Woodford, if he is forced into a fire-sale of everything of value in his Equity Income
    fund, smashing the prices of shares held by the investment trust in the process...Naturally, much of the talk between the City pros last night was

    whether Patient Capital in its distressed state was a buying opportunity. One or two experienced investors I talked to believed the trust’s battering

    was overdone and there might be more value in the portfolio than people gloomily assumed.


    Overall, however, the mood was grim: the expectation was that the shares were likely to fall further and would probably need to be on an even bigger
    discount to net asset value to be attractive. Such is the scale of the ‘haircuts’ many expect Woodford to take as he endeavours to sell big stakes in
    early-stage companies such as Benevolent AI and Industrial Heat

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