18 Jan 2023

For the first time in five quarters The FTSE 250 outperformed the FTSE 100 (+9.8% vs +8.1% compared to Q3). This does not change the fact that the big-cap index with international exposure trounced its smaller more domestically exposed rival over the year as a whole (+1% vs -20%). But some recovery by FTSE 250 shares would be very welcome in the face of much public negativity about the UK economy. In my Q3 report I wrote that half a dozen shares must be long term buys. I invest in line with what I perceive as probability and necessarily one is sometimes correct. While I take a brief lap of honour I shall recite as follows – Sainsbury +40%, Tesco +20%, Halfords +39%, Kingfisher +23%, Pets At Home +27%, M&S +52%. I own all those shares but the only one that I actually bought at the end of Q3 was M&S. The government bond markets have been interesting, as I wrote here on 23 December. Over the quarter UK 10 year gilts fell from 4.23% (a peak induced by the Bank of England, not Liz Truss) to 3.67%, a normalisation from an excellent buying opportunity. US 10 year Treasuries were flat at 3.88%, summing up the unresolved debate between inflation mongers and recession peddlers. German yields rose from 2.1% to 2.5%. CHINA AND NUMBERS Finally, a geopolitical strategist named Peter Zeihan mentioned something that I have seen before – namely that China, in addition to reporting dodgy population and Covid numbers, has long overstated its GDP growth. While this might seem just the grandiose bull of an authoritarian government, it has huge mathematical implications once you take into effect the compounding effects over time. An overstatement by 3% of a number that is itself already overstated will, in twenty five years, produce a GDP number that is distorted by 100%. It could be that the reason why the world has withstood the repeated closure of the Chinese economy is that China is not as important as its official GDP numbers...

8 Oct 2022

The FTSE 250 fell by 8.0% in Q2 and is down by 25.5% year to date. The FTSE100 is down by just 2.7% year to date, a massive and, in my experience, unprecedented outperformance. On average FTSE 100 companies are larger and more international meaning that they are typically earning dollar revenues, a very good cushion in recent months. UK ten year government bond yields began the quarter at 2.06% and ended it at 4.1%, a rout that was ludicrously attributed to a trivial mini budget. As I wrote recently, this has been coming for a long time and the cause is a combination of relentless excessive borrowing, to which the nation appears to be addicted, and blundering behaviour by the Bank of England which naturally fails to accept responsibility. The overdue correction in government bond yields was certainly not confined to the UK. Ten year German Bund yields soared from 1.2% to 2.1% and US Treasuries more modestly from 3.02% to 3.8%. As those yield movements imply, Europe has a bigger inflation threat because most commodities are priced in dollars. Stock investors in the US have seen most commodity prices well off their highs and are disappointed that the Fed appears to be set on continuing to dampen an economy that appears to be slowing down quite nicely. It is worth mentioning that most US commentators see a bad recession across Europe as a given. I have been buying two year Gilts yielding above 4% in the knowledge that these represent a very viable alternative to stocks, at this difficult time, as they say when flags are flying at half mast. There is no doubt that many share prices are very low and some of them may even be cheap. I have been looking at retailers. Sainsbury, Tesco, Halfords, Kingfisher and Pets at Home all have solid balance sheets and yield between 4.5% (Pets) and 7.5% (Sainsbury).Marks & Spencer, which must be selling hair shirts, pays no dividend for some reason but its historic free cash flow yield is 33%. Barring serious management blunders, which are of course quite possible, these companies are long term buys. I am tempted to write that there...

1 Oct 2019

At the end of Q2 I wrote that part of my brain wanted to go on an equity buying spree but I wasn’t sure which part that was. It seems to have been the part that wants a quiet life because the FTSE 100 was unchanged over the last three months. The broader FTSE 250 rose by 2.4%, perhaps due to takeover activity. Sterling rose by 0.7% against the euro which is effectively also unchanged. The political noise of the last three months happened in a wind tunnel as far as the financial world was concerned (though that may change, especially if Britain’s MPs continue to risk their own legitimacy). As the global economic news continued to deteriorate government bond yields fell again. The US 10 year yield fell by about 0.25% to 1.75%. 10 year gilt yields dived from 0.86% to 0.55% and the German Bunds now have an even more negative yield (-0.30% to -0.57%). If these are unprecedented scary times, this is the reason. In my recent post entitled “Equities are the new junk bonds” I pointed out that takeover bids had favoured shares in my own portfolio no fewer than four times this year. I have been thinking some more about why this is happening and, by implication, how one might incorporate that into stock picking. Unlike purely financial investors, corporate buyers hate uncertainty. They like to know what they are buying and are put off by the thought of unquantifiable liabilities. This is one of the reasons why companies in trouble are rarely rescued. It’s far easier and safer to buy the assets from the administrator. The new accounting standard IFRS 16 is now kicking in and it invariably increases a company’s balance sheet financial debt – but it removes the uncertainty of obligations to pay future operating leases which were previously off-balance sheet. Now they are there for all to see. A business with reliable cash flow that easily covers its seasonal working capital requirements, its minimum capital expenditure needs and its annual interest payments is potentially of interest and if it is perceived as badly managed that is not necessarily an impediment. If times are tough, one...

28 Aug 2019

Anyone who cares to investigate can discover that the equities that you probably own directly or through your pension scheme are equitable only with each other. Benjamin Graham, the so-called father of modern investing, called them “common shares” which is a better clue. When a company is wound up this typically means that it has run out of money and run out of people who will lend or give it more cash. Equities represent any surplus assets that are left when all other creditors have been paid off. Every other creditor ranks above the owners of the common shares. First are secured creditors like banks or bondholders who have lent money on fixed terms. If the company defaults on those terms it can be forced into formal insolvency, though sometimes the secured creditors will accept equity in return for a further cash injection, if they judge that their best chance of getting their money back in the end is to keep the business going. In those circumstances they will be issued shares on such favourable terms that existing equity investors are diluted to the point of worthlessness. This is happening now in the case of Thomas Cook. After secured creditors have been paid in full, anything left goes to so-called preferential creditors, including employees, and then to the luckless trade creditors and HMRC. You can infer that common shareholders will usually be completely wiped out. Unsurprisingly, people who invest in equities very rarely think about the risk of insolvency and losing all their money. We all dream of the day when the theoretical value of those surplus assets explodes upwards. Bond holders may get their money plus interest back but as Benjamin Graham pointed out many decades ago, common stocks have “a far better record than bonds over the long term past”. It has widely been accepted as a fact that equities are the answer for a long term investor. Cautious share owners look for sustainable dividends that can rise as the company grows; the more optimistic hope for rising share prices as well. Those are the two elements that drive the long-term performance of common stocks observed by Graham. But stock market investors...

11 Jun 2018

When making investment decisions I try to employ pragmatism and to avoid behaving emotionally or irrationally. As a rule of thumb, most other words that end in “–ism” are not useful. Optimism, pessimism, idealism – these are all attitudes that we find appropriate or inspiring in our daily lives but when it comes to making decisions supposedly based on evidence, they load us with confirmation bias. I read a good piece about The Psychology of Money which points out no fewer than twenty common mistakes that can damage your wealth. One that I particularly liked was titled: “The seduction of pessimism in a world where optimism is the most reasonable stance”. Brexit, or the contemplation of it, appears to have plunged half of the UK into some kind of collective nervous breakdown. It is group-think of the most destructive kind and its victims wallow in anything that can be spun as bad news. Bluntly, they see pessimism as a virtuous scourging exercise because the people must pay for their sins. This is a phenomenon that is far from new. Gilbert & Sullivan wrote the Mikado in 1885. The song “As some day it may happen” is a “little list” of “society offenders” which reads rather oddly in 2018 (lady novelists?; seems harsh). But 133 years on, we are still very familiar with: “The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and every country but his own.” The current leader of the Labour Party, anyone? Moreover, anyone who is upbeat today is liable to be seen as deluded or laughable or even dangerous and fanatical.    The current President of the United States, anyone? In my report on Q4 2017, just after the Trump tax cuts had been implemented, I wrote that: Almost all the reporting in the UK mocks Donald Trump and strains to suggest that he is incompetent and dangerous. This remains mostly true though some people are beginning to contemplate the idea that Trump’s thoroughly unfashionable bullishness may be effective. He is bullish and he is demanding: put those two words together and you might come up with the word bullying – just how unfashionable can this man get?...

30 Mar 2018

In my report on Q4, I wrote that “for the third successive quarter, the markets were mysteriously calm.” The calm was disrupted in Q1 for sure: the main UK indexes fell by between 6% and 8%. The German DAX was -6.3%. Supported by a falling dollar, the US markets, though volatile, did better with the DJIA -2.5%. I hinted before that the stock markets might be vulnerable to rising interest rates or, more specifically, rising bond yields. In February it started to look as if this was happening; the US 10 year treasury yield had risen from 2.40% to 2.94%; but by the end of the quarter it was back to 2.74%. A similar pattern played out elsewhere. The 10 year gilt yield rose from 1.20% to 1.69% but ended the quarter back at 1.34%. It would seem that the wait for inflation goes on. Aside from the usual nonsensical white noise about “uncertainty” it is hard to escape the conclusion that the stock market is truly concerned about the ability of large corporations that feature in our lives daily to invest capital, service debt and pay dividends. Here is your day described in terms of dividend yields: you are woken by the ringing of the house phone (BT: 6.8%) and switch on the light (National Grid: 5.6%); you turn up the central heating (Centrica: 8.5%) and clean your teeth (Glaxo: 5.7%); you decide to go into town but your car has no petrol (BP: 6.0%, Royal Dutch Shell: 5.8%) and needs a new rear light (Halfords: 5.4%) so you decide to take the bus (Stagecoach: 9.0%, Go-Ahead: 5.8%); you do some shopping in Currys PC World (Dixons Carphone: 6.0%, Vodafone: 6.7%) and M&S (Marks & Spencer: 6.9%) before treating yourself to a pub lunch (Marstons: 7.4%, Greene King: 7.0%). Is it the end of the world as we know it? Yet, against this rather sinister background something quite different has been happening. Companies who want to buy each other seem to like these prices very much. On 22 December GVC announced its intention to buy Ladbrokes plc. On 17 January, Melrose bid for GKN; on 30 January UBM agreed to be taken over;...

13 Jan 2018

The following paragraph is not true. A neat way to value a company is to divide the share price by the earnings per share (EPS) which gives you something known as a P/E (price/earnings) ratio. A low P/E ratio (say <10x) implies that a share is cheap and a high P/E ratio (say >20) suggests expensive. Many people, some of them claiming to be investment professionals or financial journalists, still promote P/E ratios (which came to be the standard valuation method in the 1970s and the 1980s). Here are some reasons why they are wrong. MARKET CAPITALISATION IS NOT THE VALUE OF THE COMPANY The price of a share is a measure of one of a company’s liabilities (the equity owned by shareholders) but not the value of the company. The equity is what is left over after all other obligations have been met. The value of the equity is known as the market capitalisation of the company. EI Group (formerly Enterprise Inns) has 479.5 million shares trading at 143p giving it a market capitalisation of £685 million. Also with a market capitalisation of £685 million is Go-Ahead Group with 43.2 million shares at 1586p. Their earnings per share last year were 20.5p (EI Group) and 207.7p (Go-Ahead) giving them P/E ratios of 7.0x and 7.6x respectively. How cool is that? Are they both cheap and are they almost equally cheap? You will not be surprised to read that it’s not as simple as that. The balance sheet of EI Group reveals that it the business is carrying more than £2000 million of net debt whereas Go-Ahead has £200 million of net cash. Consequently, the enterprise value of EI Group is £2700 million (market capitalisation plus net debt) and Go-Ahead’S enterprise value is just £485 million (market capitalisation minus net cash). On that basis the pub leasing business is worth 5.6x as much as the bus and train operating business. This doesn’t tell us which share is more likely to go up but it gives us plenty of ideas about what might influence their prices. None of which involve reported EPS. EARNINGS PER SHARE Another reason why P/E ratios are nearly useless is that...

5 Jul 2017

The UK stock market was on a rollercoaster ride to nowhere in Q2. The FTSE 100 fell by -0.3% and the 250 managed a rise of +1.8%. Given that we had a shock election, a shock result, a hung parliament and that the shadow Chancellor thinks that democracy has failed, you could say that the stock market has been amazingly calm. Likewise the government bond market. The 10 year gilt yield was 1.23% at the end of Q1 and 1.26% at the end of Q2. This is the dog not barking in the night time. We are widely told that the pale imitation of austerity that has been attempted for the last eight years is to be abandoned but the bond market is not panicking yet. Here is a picture of gilt yields since 2007.    One of the lessons of the election was that voters under the age of fifty or so are not frightened of the things that made the 1970s rather messy. Inflation, double digit interest rates and labour unions challenging the government’s right to run the country to name but three. It remains the case that the return of inflation is what bears warn about most frequently. In the 1970s the best way to protect oneself against inflation was to buy property. House prices rose by 492% over the decade. I wouldn’t advise the same strategy now. In fact I would consider doing the opposite. The world still seems pretty deflationary to me. You can choose your own explanation and file it under “uncertainty” but it still seems to me that listed companies are still being very cautious about capex and expecting their shareholders to approve of this caution. Here are five domestically exposed UK companies that have reported March or April year-end results recently. Halfords cut capes by 11% and raised its dividend by 3%. Dairy Crest cut capex by 62% and raised its dividend by 2%. M&S cut capex by 25% and kept its dividend unchanged. Stage Coach cut capex by 18% and raised its dividend by 4%. Royal Mail cut capex by 16% and raised its dividend by 4%. All these are behaving in a risk averse...

13 Jan 2017

The UK stock market continued to climb the wall of fear or crawl forward in the sea of uncertainty or whatever you will in Q4. The FTSE 100 outperformed the FTSE 250 for the third time (out of four quarters) in 2016. Rising interest rates helped the UK banks index rise by 16% in the quarter. Some people think that lending margins will improve as interest rates “normalise”. Good luck to them. I will not be making that trade. Over the year as a whole the FTSE 100 rose by 13.9% having fallen by 4.8% in 2015. The FTSE 250 was up by 3.5% after +8.4% in 2015. The bond market was a bigger story in many ways with the 10 year gilt yield falling from 1.93% in December 2015 to 0.58% in August and then back up to 1.41% in December 2016. That is quite a rollercoaster dip. Many people believe (or hope) that the rise in interest rates will continue.  In many ways it would be helpful if they did (to help savers rather than borrowers) but I am not convinced that it is going to happen. The trading statements that January has seen have mostly been very encouraging. Marks & Spencer actually sold more clothes. I must admit I didn’t see that coming. I was less surprised that Morrisons sold more food. That has been a slow burner for me but it has started to come good. Let me say that I bought both these shares because of their financial strength (M&S’s cash flow, Morrison’s balance sheet) on the assumption that they would have the time to sort out their retailing problems. I know next to nothing about retailing but I can see that burdensome debt must make it much harder (eg Tesco). I was also amused and pleased to see that Sainsbury is now being helped by its acquisition of Argos. That stock (Home Retail Group) was my one attempt to take a view on a retail model and I just got away with it. The post that is most often called to mind at present is Four kinds of bias from May. The selective use of facts is all...

15 Sep 2016

This is a follow up to my last post about how QE is a wrecking ball that distorts financial markets and economic decision making. I have no opinion – despite a sceptical mindset – about whether QE is being applied correctly or about whether it will work. I doubt if even hindsight will allow people to agree about whether it succeeded. As an investor I need to weigh the probable outcomes of the distortion itself. Even this is not the same as making a definitive call on what will happen. That is gambling. As always, investing is about probability. THE WEALTH GAP – ONLY SHARES ARE CHEAP As long as QE carries on and the pool of safe assets shrinks further, savers in search of yield will keep chasing other assets. The stock market has been climbing the wall of fear this year. Before the referendum vote, George Soros and others forecast a decline of up to 20% in UK shares. Chancellor Osborne did not rule out suspending stock exchange trading in the face of the expected panic. With the atmosphere so full of “markets hate uncertainty”, that notorious cliché so readily embraced by third rate market commentators, many people will have assumed that the stock market would have performed its patriotic duty and dived after Brexit. But shares are cheap and quick to buy and sell, five days a week. I have just been offered a two year fixed rate bond by a building society that yields 0.95%. That’s a decision that ties up my money for two years. Were I to choose to buy Marks & Spencer shares instead I could get a dividend yield of more than 5% – and if I change my mind and decide that M&S is too racy, I can sell it in two minutes. Back in verdant Blackheath and vibrant Lewisham near to my house, yields on buy-to-let properties are between 3.6% and 4.5% (source portico.com). That seems like a lot of cost, time and risk compared to being a passive and better-rewarded owner of M&S. There is no hint that QE will be curtailed or reversed. On the contrary, the central banks of the UK...

5 Jun 2016

Back in November one of my first ever blogs was about M&S. The shares were trading at 389p and I wrote that only takeover interest could justify a higher price but I thought that the pension liabilities made that a very unlikely prospect. For reasons which were and remain unclear to me the shares touched 600p last year but M&S has not yet been taken over and they have now tumbled all the way back to 355p. A battered low-end competitor BHS has just been closed with 11,000 jobs lost and 164 stores closed. It is no surprise that it was the pension liabilities that provoked the final bullet to the head. In addition, Austen Reed is closing 120 outlets at the cost of 1000 jobs and Matalan is reportedly struggling under its debt burden. (Matalan’s founder loaded it with extra debt in order to pay himself a dividend – sound familiar?) A hard-headed analysis might suggest that the closure of a competitor is good news for the other clothing retailers but on 25 May M&S shares were hammered following publication of its 2015/16 results. Excluding last week’s ex-dividend adjustment they are down 17% (from 445p). For the nth year, M&S is having trouble with its Clothing business. The CEO was ridiculed for referring to the core customer as “Mrs M&S” though the results presentation offered the slightly surprising observation that 42% of its 32 million customers are men. I seriously doubt if there is any company on which more people have an opinion than M&S. There are millions of experts out there. I can read in the presentation what customers are complaining about. There is too much choice, too much fashion at the expense of style, too many sizes out of stock and not enough consistency about price and value. As someone burdened by little interest in shopping or retailing I must say that none of that looks impossible to fix. You can also shop at M&S online though I don’t know how well it works or whether that would appeal to the 78% of customers who are 35 or over (still reading the presentation). Following the rather negative publicity and the share...

7 Jan 2014

The FTSE 100 rose by 4.4% in the quarter for a full year gain of 13.9%. The FTSE 250 (that’s companies from 101 to 350) performed twice as well in 2013, rising by 28.8%. There are never truly hard factual reasons why share prices move but it generally remains the case that smaller companies’ share prices are relative beneficiaries of improving confidence. Large blue chips do better when investors are seeking protection. It is also probably the case that smaller companies are less well known and consequently deliver more surprises. Note that in bad times they typically deliver more bad surprises which point takes us back to why large stocks do better when investors are nervous. It is reasonable to conclude that confidence improved in 2013. The mood implied by the yields offered by government bonds rose from clinically depressed to merely grumpy – in the case of the UK this was from 2.0% in January 2013 to 3.0% now. In the US the rise was slightly sharper, from 1.8% to 3.0%, but it was much the same story. The bond markets are suggesting that we are looking at a fairly gentle, low inflation recovery. Analysts sometimes name this “Goldilocks” (not too hot, not too cold) and it feels like a very comfortable investment environment. Comfort eventually causes complacency and this is exactly why it is wrong to commit one’s investment strategy to an opinion about the future, no matter how tempting. Investment is always about how probability is priced. Consensus rarely offers compelling value. I am pleased though not surprised to say that my satellite index of companies with female executives quite dramatically extended its outperformance against the FTSE 250. After the first nine months of 2013, the FTSE 250 was +25% but the 27 companies with female executives had risen by 35%. After the full twelve months, those numbers were +29% and +46% respectively. As for the shares that I recommended this year, in Q3 I wrote that I was surprised that Enterprise Inns rose by 40% in Q3. In Q4 it was much quieter, rising by 6.5%. I am not attracted by the value of the company now and I don’t...

2 Oct 2013

The FTSE rose by 3.9% in the quarter (Q1 +8.7%, Q2 -3.0%) meaning that year-to-date it is +9.2%. I didn’t recommend a single new share in the quarter. This is partly because I was away in France, but is also because no compelling new ideas turned up. City analysts are expected to come up with recommendations (usually ‘Buy’s) regularly but real people don’t have to. To some extent, this reflects my current view of the stock market. The most likeable companies are generally priced accordingly. As I mention repeatedly, value is always relative and shares must always be compared to other asset classes. On that basis, there is not so much to worry about. UK house prices are creeping higher from unaffordable levels, encouraged by the government’s reckless Help to Buy scheme. (I heard the PM complain that the average income is unable to buy the average house. You might think that the solution is to raise the average income or lower the average house price or preferably both, but the answer from our government is to play “let’s pretend” and to forward the problem into the future, as usual). With growing numbers of people hooked up to the life support of the 0.5% Bank Rate, the chance of regular savings accounts bidding for your money are also about 0.5%. The only practical rival to equities in Q3 was, surprisingly, government bonds. On 10 September I recommended one. UNITED KINGDOM 1 3/4% TREASURY GILT 22 was trading at 92 then. This is an investment to tuck away for the long term but in the short term it has risen to 93.78, which, for a gilt, is pretty exciting. Shortly before the end of Q2 (12 June), I suggested a yield portfolio of twelve shares. From that date, they have returned 6.1% (including dividends) against 2.3% for the FTSE. So my implied caution has worked out quite well. The only stinker was Ladbrokes, thanks to a profit warning derived from its concerning failure to manage its online business. That having been said, its cash flow remains good and it has pledged to maintain the dividend. Today (167p) it yields more than 5% so I am,...

26 Mar 2013

I will review the success of my own advice every quarter because it looks like a good discipline and it feels like the chance to brag or whine, both of which could be satisfying. First, the share tips. My first ever post in November suggested that Enterprise Inns was probably worth more than 67p and suggested 120p as a possibility. Today’s price of 109p (+63%) is a nice slice of beginner’s luck. Then I suggested that Marks & Spencer could not justify a share price of 400p unless it was a takeover play. The takeover talk faded and the shares fell. Then the takeover talk restarted and it popped up to 400p again. My opinion is that it is too messy to be a plausible target but never say “never”.  In January I recommended ICAP at 327p. It had a decent jump on news of slightly better trading but then fell back when it was linked with the Libor “scandal”. So it is basically unchanged and still appears to yield 7%, albeit now with a “known unknown” risk. Then I tipped Home Retail Group, which jumped while I was writing about it. I’m chuffed to say that it has jumped again. It was 122p when I started writing about it, 140p when I published and is above 155p now. So far, so good: I expect it to go further.  Then in February I recommended Go-Ahead at 1367p. That has also lived up to its name and has risen by 8% including its half-year dividend. Obviously these triumphs are not unconnected to the fact that the FTSE rose by c.8% in the quarter. Now, the other posts. The student sub-prime loans are designed to blow up in 20 years, which is when my “model” student will start to reduce his outstanding debt. The guilty should be out of sight by then. Interestingly, RPI (now 3.2%), which is the driver for the increase in interest on the loans that students took for the first time this year (RPI +3%), will no longer be designated as a national statistic” according to the United Kingdom Statistics Authority. When I say “interestingly”, what I really mean is that I...

29 Nov 2012

In the investment rule that I call “Competing Assets” I included four ways in which investors in a company’s equity should look to get paid out. They are 1) by the share price appreciating because the value of the company increases; 2) by the equity’s share of the company increasing relative to the share of other liability holders; 3) through direct pay outs in the form of dividends; 4) through the sale of the whole business at a premium. M&S is obviously a very mature brand with a business model that some might unkindly label “dinosaur”. If it ever joins the e-commerce party it will be a late arrival. The chance of 1) (the value of the company increasing) looks modest. The same goes for 2); indeed, with capital expenditure growing this year and next, the opposite (the equity’s share of the company’s value declining) looks a risk. This leaves us with 3) (dividends) and 4) (takeover). There seems to be no serious risk to the dividend but no obvious reason why it should be increased. At present, M&S is maintaining its dividend (recent half year results). As such, we can look at the dividend yield (4.4%) and compare it to alternative investments as we wish. 4.4% is not to be sneered at but you can do better from Tesco and Sainsbury. But as the price occasionally pushes towards 400p (389p today) there is reason to think that a small takeover premium has crept into the share price. One of the obvious poison pills that a buyer of M&S would have to swallow is its pension liabilities. Any venerable, domestic company with a large workforce has potential problems with pension liabilities. As interest rates fall, the actuarial calculation of the present value of pension liabilities goes up. From that point of view, the current era of low rates is not good news. In addition, the actuaries have noticed that people are tending to live longer. Good luck for them but bad news for the pension liability. The M&S half year results (published on 1 November) were interesting reading in this respect, once you made your way to Note 10 on page 26 (of 28)....