Did you buy Billabong shares at our behest last year? You're rich!
Most stock-market advice is shaky as hell. Ask the real money and they’ll tell you not to jump in unless you have some kind of insider trading, illegal as that theoretically might be. ‘Cause if you don’t get in, or out, early, you can’t even get close to licking the spoon.
On behalf of our readers, last year BeachGrit sought advice on the likely trajectory of Billabong shares, then trading at what seemed a cheap sixty-ish Australian cents apiece.
So why buy ’em now at sixty cents?
Billabong have halved the number of retail stores and sold off a few of their biz’s, reducing debt, but, tellingly, a couple of hard-nosed US private-equity companies have bought hard into Billabong.
And the CEO is Neil Fiske, who was instrumental in driving the fortunes of the king of US retail Les Wexner, turning Victoria’s Secret and A & F into the dirtiest of money spinners.
On the creative side, Billabong has hired Roxy’s head designer to help drive Billabong gals, RVCA is starting to soar and Tiger Lily is still an unfulfilled buy.
Most interestingly, Billabong’s founder Gordon Merchant recently dropped $2 million upping his share parcel from 8 to 10 per cent. It’s a move that hints that he is finding the price too good to refuse.
As soon as the market works out the new management with their PE Backers have a plan to restore their old margins and and with Billabong still turning over one billion a year hit makes a share price of little over a dollar likely.
Is it worth a punt? Yeah, if you’re going to stick around for a few years. It’ll jump around, as shares do, but don’t torture yourself by watching the share price on your phone every few hours. Take a long-term view.
Set, forget, and come back when it’s around a buck. Then sell.
Bullish? We weren’t bullish enough.
Today shares sell for $1.23.
You could’t turned that ten k into twenty, fifty-k into a hundred, five hundred into a mill.
And, if you’d got in a little earlier, say, late 2014, you would’ve made a 300 per cent profit.
Did you buy? Are you rich?
Umm in case you didn’t notice, Bong did a stock merge in the interim. Your 5000 60c shares should now be 1000 $3 shares. Except they’re not are they. No.
…that’s what I figured…but then I read this:
“Shares in surfwear retailer Billabong have surged as much as 5 per cent after the group announced a new debt facility with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The $US100 million ($131.5m) asset-based credit facility overrides a similarly sized offering from GE Capital that Billabong entered into back in December, 2013.
The deal with GE Capital came a month after it tapped funding from Oaktree Capital and Centerbridge Partners in return for a large slice of the firm’s equity, with the deals crucial to helping it stay afloat.
The firm has since made great strides in its rebuilding process, with its share price more than tripling from 45c at the time of the GE Capital agreement.”
http://www.theaustralian.co…
Well tragically The Australian has fucked up. In May 2015, being an idiot, I bought six thousand Billabong shares at 71c apiece, i.e. about $4300 worth. Some time later they conducted their stock consolidation and briefly I had twelve hundred shares worth around $3.60 each. I now have twelve hundred Billabong shares worth $1.23 each, about $1480 worth. This is not a threefold increase I am sad to say. Indeed it is almost the fucken opposite. Now there are analysts’ projections out there suggesting that in the next two years or so, Billabong will turn its current quite negative balance sheet into an impressive positive. Perhaps one day those shares will eventually regain their lost ground. But in the deathless words of Aragorn in “The Two Towers”: “It is not this day!”
You bought in May, 2015… that means… oh, Nick, did we sell you up the river? Didn’t you know? I’m a financial imbecile!
Well, let us ride the waves of our imbecilic wave pool together then.
It’d be a smart person who’s never lost money buying shares. But – you haven’t lost the money till ya sell.
Grimly holding on like a doomed rock climber.
By the shreds of my belief in the surfing industry.
Do you guys understand the the concepts of opportunity cost and and time value of money? then you would’d know not to invest in Billabongs and likes.
now now Cubey, nobody likes a financial advice armchair quarterback.
Do you need one of those financial disclaimer foot notes?
In my hood they’ve been converting struggling independent stores into 80% Billabong stores by offering cash for a rebuild and very relaxed terms for inventory (net 90, some consignment and buying back what doesn’t sell). I should have realized this would work. Need to pay more attention.
Just logged in to TD to realize you’re looking at AUS market – my shares still showing 90 cents last trade.