will it crack the 57 next week, page-8

Big week for VBA, the AGM is being held in Brisbane on Thursday. I'm hoping that they provide some pretty positive comments about the outlook for 2010. Godfrey last week spoke at the QLD media club and it seemed to be positive, although he did play the get out of jail free card. He said they "have been encouraged by what we have seen in the past few months" - my take is he is refering to the pick up in sales and stabilisation of yields, with some upside, the appreciation of the currency, fuel and hedging strategy etc. "We are still doing relatively well but we have a ways to go" - my take is he's either talking about their performance relative to other airlines or last financial year. One piece of good news is he expects the cost base to be down this financial year - no doubt thats coming from fuel.

Other news which was positive for VBA was MAp's Sydney traffic numbers for October. A 13% increase in international passengers and 4% in domestic relative to last october. Total traffic up 6%. The important point is that the market expected 2 to 3%. So i'm sure all those so called CFA educated and highly intellectual analysts/brokers/fund managrs will have to revise sale numbers in their complex models for VBA. I'm hoping VBA captured a large part of the action.

The markets pretty soft at the moment so it would be good to hear some positive news.