Liams Last Post: Markets drift on little news , Irish Life in the shakeup for the EBS.

Good Afternoon ,

 

The valley period for news in Ireland continued today.

 

The amazing price Jump of CRH was not held and the stock gave up -2% during trading today. The stock is still 80c higher than it was during the early part of the week.

 

The Betfair IPO was a big success but had no follow on impact on Paddy Power today. Paddy Power has looked a tad overbought this week and has struggled in terms of upward momentum.

 

There was some re-assuring news for Tullow shareholders today as press reports this morning indicated that CNOOC and Ghana NPC have recently made a joint bid of $5B for Kosmos' assets offshore Ghana. This would top the $4B ExxonMobil bid that was previously blocked by the Ghanaian government.  Kosmos' assets in Ghana differ somewhat from those held by Tullow but the reported bid gives us comfort in our estimate of the value of Tullow's Ghanaian assets.  For Jubilee we currently have a c.$4.4B value in our net asset value for Tullow (£11.04p/share) while risked exploration upside complements this.

 

The Department of the environment also released the findings of a study relating to unfinished or ghpst housing estates. The official estimates of 33 – 43,000 completed and commenced vacant houses is somewhat lower than prior estimates of some commentators (up to 345,000 empty homes were reported in some stories earlier this year. This may serve to underpin sentiment somewhat that the problem while big is not as dramatic as guestimated.

 

Irish Life and the consortium led by Cardinal Asset management and Wilbur Ross were officially named as the short listed bidders for the EBS building society. It is likely that Irish Life will be involved in the final resolution to the EBS even if the Cardinal consortium wins the bid. The market may move to looking at the prospects for Irish Life to proceed with its own fund raising to bolster its balance sheet if it feels that it may take part in a transaction to separate out the Bank component. 

 

At the close in Dubklin the Eurostoxx 600 index is down -0.3% , The Dow Jones is down -0.23% and the ISEQ is down -1.1% reflecting the pullback in the price of CRH after the suspicious closing price of yesterday.

 

It's the Bank Holiday weekend… Have great one

 

Talk Tuesday

 

Good evening

 

Liam

 

 

 

___________________________________________

Liam Boggan

　

Merrion Stockbrokers

Tel.: 353-1-2404171

Mob:353-87-2313505

www.merrion-capital.com

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