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It started with a kiss

 Never thought it would come to this is no doubt what Odey is thinking about his cummulative borrowings of Tullow shares. Perhaps he hasn't worked it out as he's had some successes in other areas. Despite the 120 odd changes in their short position over 5 or 6 years I found that I could search and filter through short tracker.co.uk and Tullow's list of Total voting rights to get the numbers.

Methodology: The changes in the short position are exact. The share prices from Google are to within a week or so as it wasn't listing them all (hence you'll see a few records in a row with the same share price). This is the same for the total voting rights, I've broadly got the total number of shares right. I would say overall it's at least 95% accurate. It took an hour as it was (where do I find the time?) but would have taken much longer to get that last 5% accuracy.

It's worth pointing out that some large financial institutions short companies in certain sectors not because they think that they will go down, but as insurance against the oil market tanking. Of course the other reason to short a company is that you think it's over leveraged. Cast your mind back to 2015 and Tullow had net debt from memory of $4.8bn. It has worked away at that and has reduced it to $2.4bn at the end of 2020.

I don't really need to add much commentary to the data, as a) there's too much of it and b) the graph says it all.

I can't be sure of the share price used for the initial position (I've just taken the prevailing price)

I've added a line at the end showing Odear bying back all of his borrowings (which it hasn't yet done, but will need to... eventually?)

I've spared you from all the rows in the table but have shown the first set of records, which looks like a great investment to start with:


With a break and then the last set, not looking so good now methinks:


It might be easier to see the picture of cummulative gains/ losses on a graph


In summary here are the changes in the cummulative number by year:

2015 + £41,890,464
2016 + £  1,868,225
2017 -  £48,576,837
2018 - £22,842,054
2019 - £     753,151
2020 + £ 6,282,427
2021 -  £11,253,196 (to date, and not yet closed)


I really don't need to comment any more on this other than to say by the beginning of 2018 things weren't really going that well; the graph says it all. Please do your own research; remember rule 101 - don't borrow to invest. It might start out well, but then you may end up with confirmation bias described in this post. We've all probably been there at one point and aren't quite sure why we have a certain position anymore. I own shares in Tullow Oil. This isn't investment advice. Perhaps an offsite brain storming might come up with some new ideas; lest the promise of a kiss turns out to be more like a dementor than hot chocolate.





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