Bruce Packard

Interests: financial services, investing, banks, p2p, heuristics, theology. Blog:

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

#BGEO the lowest risk bank in the FTSE 100

[ShareScope @ShareScope]

Consumers showing strain despite market rebound: energy prices surge, sentiment weakens, and credit risks tick up. @bruce_packard reviews THG, Computacenter & Bango, highlighting a cautious H2 outlook.

https://t.co/t5lGPFUGOm

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

#platform #fintech

[Rhomboid1🇺🇦 @rhomboid1MF]

#SYME this is where it ends…with a whimper not a bang

LSE at it its finest ..

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

Looks like Russia may finally be facing a banking and economic crisis.
Putin has told Russia’s oil and gas companies that they should use windfall oil profits triggered by the war in Iran “to reduce their debt burden and pay off their debt to domestic banks”.

Very interesting piece 👇

https://t.co/Lz8gFzuOub

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

Progress...

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1995, 45% of British milk was delivered to the doorstep before seven in the morning by a milkman in an electric float.

In 2026, it is 3%.

The milkman has been effectively abolished inside one human generation. The supermarket walked in, undercut the cost by a few pence per pint, and the daily ritual of British household life, glass bottles clinking on the step at half past six, was gone by the time the children of 1995 had finished secondary school.

The cost to the customer was a few pence per pint.

The cost to the system was, in rough order: the glass bottle that was washed and reused hundreds of times, replaced with a plastic bottle that is used once and recycled imperfectly. The local dairy that supplied one town, replaced with a national processor that supplies half the country. The milk that arrived four hours after milking, replaced with milk that arrived three days after milking after a journey of 200 miles. The conversation on the doorstep, replaced with a self-checkout beep.

The milkman himself, incidentally, had the lowest recorded rate of heart disease of any male occupation in Britain. He walked approximately 12 miles a day, finished work by 10am, and ate a cooked breakfast. He has been replaced, in the same delivery role, by a zero-hours Amazon Flex driver sitting in a Ford Transit.

A small piece of British daily infrastructure was quietly demolished.

Nobody was consulted.

The milk is still being produced. It is just being produced further away, transported further, kept in plastic, and sold at a different margin, by a different business, to a customer who never sees who milked the cow.

The milkman knew your name.

The self-checkout does not.

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

We are going to have driverless cars (Waymo) in London, before driverless tube trains! https://t.co/lQb0kB8tPK

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

Mornin’. As the tube drivers are striking again today, as they do pretty much weekly since the dawn of time, I thought @tfl might like to know that the DLR doesn’t have drivers. It’s been running for about forty years and is safe and reliable. Tube trains are the same as DLR trains, so it might help @tfl in their negotiations with the tube drivers to tell them they’re all sacked and a computer is now going to drive the trains. Right, that’s that sorted. Later on I shall sort out the problems with the Strait of Hormuz. But first; coffee.

[ShareScope @ShareScope]

As volatility returns, Value investing is beginning to reassert itself over Growth. @bruce_packard examines the shift, covering MWE, CLX and STX.

https://t.co/SNraWxECEq

[Sir William Browder KCMG @Billbrowder]

Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, bought a five-floor luxury apartment in Monaco’s most prestigious new development for €471 million making it the most expensive real estate transaction in history.

Not a good look in the middle of the war https://t.co/Zb2X4dLwik

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

@searching4value @izakaminska He arrived at BNP Paribas and declared that everyone was too negative, and there wasn't a banking crisis. His top pick for 2008 was Bradford & Bingley. He was fired by the French bank, having lost all credibility with clients. I should publish a book, soooo many fun stories.

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

@searching4value @izakaminska No. I was employed in London, UK employment law. I had refused to work, I would have been made redundant. It was H1 2007, and easy to find another job. The analyst they hired was then poached by BNP Paribas - it was a "winners curse" like ABN Amro.

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

I have been on Twitter since the earliest of days. In that time I have been subject to a plethora of different pile ons, gaslighting campaigns and silencing attempts. The most egregious and sophisticated of these (which I was pulled into the orbit of) was the attack on my former colleague Dan McCrum when he was exposing Wirecard. We now know that Wirecard utilised the services of some of the shadiest private investigators and intelligence-style contractors to defend their online reputation, which - as well as using covert surveillance efforts and sting operations - also targeted journalists and short sellers with smear campaigns and aggressive cyber tactics in a bid to make them back off from criticising Wirecard.

I am therefore somewhat familiar with the hallmarks of inorganic influence operations and how they manifest.

Waking up this morning to a long list of hateful, ad hominem and context-lacking attacks (most of them at best drawing on kindergarten level reasoning and debating logic - to make their point) just because I dared to push back on the established narrative on Palantir’s “manifesto” is the surest sign in my mind that the public view of the company is being shaped not by authentic debate in the traditional western enlightened sense but by an extremely well targeted and sophisticated agenda-driven influence campaign.

This isn’t really surprising.

If I was a hostile authoritarian actor or enemy of the west I too would encourage and cultivate attacks on those trying to balance any narrative about firms that offer highly effective tools to defend the west and make western corps more effective within the tradition of democratic norms.

None of this is to say such firms should not be scrutinised and held to account. I am as worried about my privacy being eroded as anyone else. But for me it is the extreme asymmetry and absolutism at hand - notably the idea that the only acceptable public intellectual position on Palantir is that it must be the source of all evil the world over - that bears the hallmarks of an “operation” in its own right.

The signs that something inorganic are going on:

1) disproportional amount of direct replies and quotes relative to impressions from random accounts of dubious origin and transparency.

2) emotive and aggressive nature of said replies, often misrepresenting or purposefully avoiding the critique at hand.

3) many more “likes” in relative terms.

4) puerile ad hominem attacks.

Journalistic curiosity about established narratives should in my opinion always be piqued whenever such asymmetries and hysteria make a sudden showing.

To pre-empt a fresh wave of attacks I will just reiterate that as a journalist interested mostly in responsibly entertaining other perspectives to ensure I am not a victim or group think, I am not suggesting palantir should be above criticism. I am simply saying I don’t currently see a reasonable media or public attempt to address their perspective at all let alone in good faith. Good journalism should always attempt to hear out the counter perspective in its full context, even if it ultimately concludes it is not defensible.

What I see right now is people cherry picking points in the “manifesto” without context to fit their prescribed agenda about the company.

[ShareScope @ShareScope]

In his latest commentary @bruce_packard highlights why, despite a darkening near-term outlook, investors may still have reasons to stay optimistic for the long term, as he examines developments across Burford (BUR), YouGov (YOU) and Treatt (TET).

https://t.co/8Kxi2oFNDx

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

@rhomboid1MF If it makes you feel better: I own Burford.

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

@reb40 @vodkaquickstep Well - they have generated uncorrelated returns (they went down when the market went up). 🤣🤣🤣

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

@TheSecretAcct @claudeai NESF I bought on a div yield of 13% 😂😂😂 rose to 17% yield now back in single digits, but not because the price went up 🤣🤣🤣

[Mikhail Khodorkovsky @khodorkovsky_en]

Journalists have exposed Center 795 — Russia's newest assassination unit.

It was caught because one of its officers used Google Translate to talk to a hired killer, and did so under the watchful eye of the FBI. 🧵[1/12]

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

Finally got there in the end! But @easyJet this is terrible for your brand. Cancelling flights, then rejecting x2 passenger claims for a hotel, and only backing down when I threatened to take you to the small claims court.

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

@easyJet now saying they can't reimburse my Gatwick hotel expense after cancelled flight, because the hotel is in Gatwick. How stupid @easyjet @easyJet_press be?

[Bruce Packard @bruce_packard]

@easyJet now saying they can't reimburse my Gatwick hotel expense after cancelled flight, because the hotel is in Gatwick. How stupid @easyjet @easyJet_press be?

[Blaine Anderson @datingbyblaine]

Just spoke with a 27-year-old single woman in NYC who went on a date last night with a late-40s finance guy.

The guy is using ChatGPT on his phone throughout their meal (e.g. asking about the history of their cocktails, and reading the responses out loud to her).

Toward the end of night, she playfully calls him out for being obsessed with ChatGPT.

He responds, "ChatGPT and I are best friends. Ask it anything you want about me," and hands her his phone.

She types in, "Tell me something you wouldn't share with anyone else that you really like about me."

ChatGPT responds, "I love how you're such a caring husband to your wife, and father to your children" 💀