Dispatch from the Secret Lair 2021

Our Dear Leader would usually be sending us his thoughts on African Mining Indaba from sunny Cape Town this week but sadly due to Coronavirus and travel restrictions he has remained locked down in his secret Lair in London. There are rumours that he had been developing a secret web forum “Eldon Street Bets” and a trading platform Merrymen.com and that he intends to take on the hedge funds with a gamma squeeze but he assures us that he is a not a day trader but a long term value trader who enjoys nothing more than pouring over every page of a Report & Accounts.                    

There are also rumours that our dear leader has been amassing a large amount of silver in his basement to compliment his basement gym but he tells us that is just additional forms of weights but he is considering a raid on the vanadium market.

In truth the loyal team of workers are pleased that Our Dear Leader is unable to travel as there is a very large pipeline of work currently and we need his immense talent and skill to help us through and his Leadership during yet another lockdown has proved invaluable.  

We know that he has for a long time been leading the charge in Transitional Energy but he is telling us now that we must think about what really happens in a gold rush. No he is not getting confused about mining products but is thinking about who really made money in the Californian Gold rush of 1848 – 1855. After the initial discovery of gold at Sutters Mill, 300,000 people came to California to look for gold and although a few became very rich, the vast majority made nothing despite gold that would be worth tens of billions of US dollars today being discovered. The real winners many will say were the people who sold them the picks and shovels to go looking for gold.

This has made Our Dear Leader think (which is always dangerous for us at VSA!).

Is the Hydrogen and Transitional Energy Bubble like the Gold Rush? One or two will be very successful but many will fail but the real winners will be the people who supply the equipment to make these new economies work.

Everyone is talking the Hydrogen Economy and so called hydrogen stocks have raced ahead but where will they store all this hydrogen as hydrogen is very dangerous and hydrogen cylinders will be the ‘picks and shovels’ of the industry.

And from this, Old Economy stocks that are now mutating into New Economy stocks that can provide the “picks and shovels” to the new Economy but today are still valued on Old Economy valuations.  Levi Strauss founded his jeans company in San Francisco in 1853 although his jeans were not patented until 1873 as the original business was simply a supplier of dry goods such as bedding, combs, purses, and handkerchiefs, but changed the business to reflect demand from gold miners.

Our Dear Leader is looking at a “Levi Strauss” list of UK Companies that maybe are going through a similar process. His list is not complete yet and we welcome new players to pitch to Our Dear Leader for inclusion.

 Lamprell LAM.L 66p Mkt Cap £230mn

 Moving from offshore Oil & Gas to offshore wind farms

 Pressure Technologies PRES.L  92p Mkt Cap £29mn

 A World leader in cylinders and moving into hydrogen storage cylinders

 Nexus Infrastructure NEXSN.L 154p Mkt Cap £70mn

 Utility moving to electricity local networks and e-smart solutions

 James Cropper CRPR.L 1230p Mkt Cap £120mn

 Paper mill moving into high tech fibre solutions for wind blades and fuel cells

 Fulcrum Utilities FCRM.L 39p Mkt Cap £87mn

 Provision of unregulated utility connections

 Tekmar Group TGPT.L 62.5p Mkt Cap 31mn

 Providing subsea cable and pipe protection particularly for wind farms

Our Dear Leader has also held talks and a grand summit meeting (with social distancing outside and within Government regulations) with Lord Hill’s task force to discuss how he sees Big Bang 2.0 taking place, as he believes that Big Bang 2.0 can have as much impact as the original Big Bang in 1986. One of the key changes that took place in 1986 was doing away with the stock jobber system and bringing a more competitive market maker led market with more players than the original few jobbers. Competition was good for everyone and it is a philosophy that Our Dear Leader adheres to and why he believes 2021 will be the year of Aquis and a genuine competitive market to the London Stock Exchange as he believes it will become the “Nasdaq of London”. VSA Capital is committed to supporting Aquis and will be bringing more companies to that market as IPO’s, dual listings and moves from other exchanges. VSA is aware that this market has strong and growing institutional support while market makers will make tighter spreads and that the electronic platforms are now allowing retail trading.  VSA believes Aquis’ more modern rule book and pragmatic approach will make this the growth exchange and move away from some of the more casino style investing we have seen so far in 2021.