Glencore death spiral

[Paul]

I am partial to BrotherJohnF's analysis of the markets and this makes for interesting reading/listening 

it sounds like another possible Enron / Leman / Bear Stearns unfolding could be occuring

[Pipers]

He makes some good points, i think what we are seeing is a system under stress and these companies will fail with ever more frequency.  I have noticed other miners are reducing debt and implementing strong cash balances.   

[KDave]

Glencore is basically finished, it took on too much debt and didn't respect it. Their solution to debt was to sell income producing mines and issue more shares. Despite that I did not expect to see it reach penny share status. The other miners share prices are suffering by proxy I think. BLT is doing ok and is still making profit but its share price is still dropping with the best of them. After a few bankruptcies it will be time to go long on mining stocks. I already have a small holding of BLT, RIO and ANTO and am down a fair bit. Oil and gas isn't doing too well either. These sectors are where the bargains will be found if and when this turns around.

I have never had much luck at timing my investments

[redrug]

I would not write off Glencore just yet. Although we are very unlikely to see a return to the ipo price of 530p anytime soon, the price has picked up from a low of just under 70p on Monday to close on Friday just over 94p.  

Monday 5th Oct close at 115p,  21% up on the day.

[shemyaza]

Glenron vs Vedanta, if you want to speculate, do some trend analysis, it slaps you in the face. Buy around 420p sell 500p+ Vedanta, almost as good as printing money. Glencore has almost no fundamentals whatsoever unless $98bn of debt is useful to you. Be careful with Glencore.

[shemyaza]

Note: Vedanta ended it's Dividend policy during the current transition phase so both of these have withdrawn from the hold and earn mantra. Bonds are quietly moving back into energy. Keep an eye on this over the coming months.

[Cointreau]

@shemyaza Vedanta down to 280p. Just shows how difficult it is to get your timing right. I'm short Brent crude at the moment.

Why are you bullish on Vedanta? 

[Lindeman]

All I can say is that I bought Glencore shares @ £1.79 back in August thinking they had bottomed - and sold them all in November  @£1.11 a share. Lesson learned the hard way - "never try and catch the falling knife"!!! I am staying out of Glencore now, but open to some bargain hunting in the oil /dividend stocks.  

[KDave]

It looks like RIO is the winner out of my mining losers this year. Glencore is still drowning in its debt, Anglo American has ended its dividend and both BLT and ANTO have suffered man made and natural disasters that will likely heavily affect the bottom line. Both RIO and BLT are still making money and paying a dividend but I am sure everyone has heard about the terrible tailings dam disaster in Brazil. BLT has paid dividends for the last 35 years so if it did cut dividend now it would be utterly disastrous for the share price, unless of course, the dividend cut has been priced in along with the financial liabilities it will now rightly suffer in Brazil. 

I recently heard that RIO could be using its relatively positive position to buy Glencore's copper assets on the cheap but I do not know how true that is. It might be old news by now or it may just have been rumour - I have not been paying much attention beyond watching the price of almost every commodity keep falling. Personally any further investment in any of them looks like a bad idea until that very important factor changes direction.