This morning brings separate announcements from 888 (888) and Rank Group (RNK) on the one hand, and their desired target William Hill (WMH) on the other. The two sides continue to be poles apart when it comes to the mooted merger of the three entities. Despite the rationale put forward by the suitors, I reckon the board of William Hill are right to ignore the offer for now.

Following Speedy Hire (SDY) having on Friday published a General Meeting notice, which included hitting back at meeting requisitioner Toscafund, the asset management company has responded…

Andalas Enrergy (ADL) has announced that its chairman has launched a "blog". Paul Warwick sounds like a pompous twit and asks for some feedback and questions. Paul is no David Lenigas, who as corporate folk go, is not a bad blogger, but I am here to assist so here goes. A few questions follow and Andalas shares remain a slam dunk sell.

While we are working our way through the silly season when all sorts of rubbish zooms ahead, I see that Sound Energy (SOU) is nudging an insane market cap of £300 million while I write. It could well soon take the place of the soon to be departed Gulf Keystone as the oil stock of choice for the retail loonies.

On Friday during an interview on Wharton Business Radio, St. Louis Fed president James Bullard, who has recently moved from the Fed's biggest hawk to one of its more vocal doves, said that he sees just one rate interest in the next few years. He also confirmed that the Fed will never hike rates at a time when even one recent economic data point has printed negative, saying "the right time to move rates is after good economic news." More troubling?

Sometimes the best investment calls are made not by looking at spreadsheets but from actually kicking the tyres. Hence I bring you a note in this morning from a broker on International Consolidated (IAG). Over to the broker:

I start with a couple of landmarks reached today. Six months without a fag and four weeks to the due date for the birth of a son. Then a guilty confession, I am watching the Olympics. Then onto discussing two companies where the only questions are when does the money run out and what price the next bailout placing: FastForward (FFWD) and FastJet (FJET)

Marc Faber has been a student of markets since 1970, and has learned that the stock market is largely distorted and manipulated. The markets are no longer trading on sound fundamentals in a system where the quantity of money is relatively limited. The liquidity bubble created by central banks, paper money, interest rates, and quantitative easing are examples of this manipulation.

Lloyds Bank (LLOY) boss Antonio Horta-Osorio stands accused of having illicit relations with Dr Wendy Platt, Director General of the Russell Group of Universities, whilst at a conference in Singapore. Moralists howl for his sacking for playing away with Dr Wendy. They have it all wrong.

Hello Share Chimps. If you are a saver, the latest drop in interest rates is a bummer. How can you achieve anything like decent returns for your cash? Spend it on shares, of course. While you get nothing from your ordinary savings, you can still get up to 6% and even more by holding the right stock.

Taking a slight change of tack, today I’ll provide a brief overview of a company whose results are not due to be published until next week. Nakama, the international recruitment business, has witnessed a punishing sell-off which looks like it may have sent it into “value” territory.

Just a reminder to those who love reading the shares bulletin boards, this is the difference between them and us: bulletin boards have crank opinions, ShareProphets have the documents.

Over the weekend we revealed how Strat Aero's PR man boasted of pretending to be a Bulletin Board Moron, sayitlikeitis, to post rampatstic nonsense on the LSE & ADVFN asylums. He was paid to ramp the stock with ludicrous claims and comments but some folks do it for free!. Please nominate your BB ramper of the week posting the most ludicrous claims you can find on boards or on twitter (so Big Gob tweet ramps are eligible) in the comments section below with a deadline of midnight Sunday 15th August. Ramps on any stock are eligible.

Optibiotix (OPTI) has announced that its GoFigure® meal replacement shakes and natural snack bars products are now available for sale in UK stores of the Whole Foods Market Inc, a large ($15 billion turnover in 2015) American supermarket chain exclusively featuring healthy foods. That sounds big but in fact it means being on the shelves in just eight stores although Optibiotix says there are " opportunities for further expansion".

Or should I say, might eat their company. To say that the company has been eaten would involve making a prediction about the future and I steadfastly refuse to make predictions about what another company might do and what might happen to their share price. So this is all just analysis of what has already happened and what has already happened is that the debt monster has nearly eaten Xcite, or more precisely, Xcite's shareholders.

I have been re-reading "Empire, how Britain Made The Modern World" by Niall Ferguson this weekend and it has some quite incredible stockmarket data and lessons for us all. It is a great read as I discuss.

We are seeing a few weeks of rest in the junior mining space, and many are predicting a massive rally this fall. Markets move up when there are more buyers than sellers, and down when the opposite occurs. Both the metals, and mining equities markets are extremely well bid. If there is a break in the market it’s likely to be on the upside, not the downside. That is the key message from Rick Rule of Sprott in this week's podcast from Palisade Capital

Ever heard of The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande? It’s a brilliant book about how to get things right when you’re performing complex and important tasks - whether that’s flying an airplane, performing surgery, or even making investments.

Prodigious cash-burning machine (sorry, services platform and marketplace group), blur (BLUR) “is pleased to present its unaudited interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2016”. Hmmm – this with the shares down from a start of the year 17p (and much, much higher when we first started warning) to a current little more than 7p…

All Right. I know I am in incurable bull. But it is an attitude which has served me well over the years. Enough to make a living out of trading shares, anyway. We are in a gradual bull market now. This surprises a lot of folk, because the Brexit vote was expected to hit business hard. And yet - and this puzzles me, too - the Footsie has not been as high as it is now for a long, long time. It’s now only a whisper off its all time high record