I struggled home last night under the weight of the bumper December issue of GQ, wondering why there never seems to be a native bearer in sight when you need one. Magazines for the dapper and style-conscious man about town are not a regular read at Francis Towers, as evidenced by the fact that the man...

Back on my hobby horse again... it's a measure of the strange times we're living in that I became terribly excited earlier today when I saw that St Ives' share price had "leapt" 28.75p to 107p. That's an increase of almost 37%. But it remains a travesty that the shares are trading...

I'm completely confused now. On Friday morning I checked St Ives' share price and the 52-week low had been re-stated as 82p. By Friday afternoon it had reverted to saying the low was 10p (as per the erroneous trade mentioned in my previous blog ), and that's what it's still saying now...

A short follow-up to yesterday's post on the erroneous 10p trade in St Ives shares. The Stock Exchange trading system obviously does have an element of common sense to it, and 10p is no longer appearing as the 52-week low. Unfortunately this morning's trading has seen the group's shares hit...

Regular readers will be aware that I spend rather too much time studying St Ives' share price . Everyone needs a hobby. Well, today (16 October) was certainly a red letter day in this respect. I know the share price has tanked in recent weeks, but when a message popped up saying it had hit a new...

While Gordon Brown was explaining the Great £50bn Bank Bail Out yesterday, he stated "we will insist on bank credit lines being extended to small business on a normal basis". How exactly will the PM's insistence manifest itself, I wonder? The FSB has already warned of the potential devastating...

International expansion. It's a tricky old game, isn't it? Well at least it has been for St Ives. This week's news that it has offloaded its loss-making Uden multimedia printing business to the plant's management marks the latest step in its retreat from problematic overseas operations...

News that St Ives has closed its final salary pension scheme to future accrual will, I'm sure, be of interest to print bosses at companies that are still trying to find ways to tackle the pension scheme nightmares that have unfolded over the past 15 years or so. Talking to management at the group...