A quarter of the companies on the London Stock Exchange's main board have disappeared in four years. Private equity keeps paying 50 and 60 percent premiums and still walking away with a bargain, because the starting valuations are broken. Swen Lorenz of Undervalued-Shares has spent the last few months writing open letters to UK boards telling them to stop waiting to be rescued and start pulling the levers they already have.
I have been calling the UK an emerging market on this podcast for three years, and my problem with the trade is right there in the setup: if the only way you make money is owning the one company that happens to get taken out, that is not alpha. So we spend the first half on what would actually fix it. Swen puts most of the blame on the big domestic funds, in outflow for a decade, pushing companies toward dividends to fund their own redemptions. I put most of it on boards that own no stock, treat the seat as a club membership, and check the dividend box every year. Then we get concrete on two names. ZIGUP (ZIG), which I own a little of, has a plan that pays seven executives up to 69 million pounds if the share price re-rates, trades under four times EBITDA, and still has not bought back a single share. And Craneware, which turned down a 26 pound approach from Bain last year and now trades at 13.
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