In all respects save one, the report was in line with...

In all respects save one, the report was in line with expectations - the tax bill was noticeably higher than pcp.

It's also possible that some of the reaction is due to the amount of rationalisation going on with a number of assets being sold and significant investment in others - it makes for a slightly messy set of accounts.

On the plus side, the current share price is cum-dividend (9 cps fully franked) and before the share buy-back starts.

Quite frankly, we see a lot of companies dressing up bad results by talking about normalised numbers etc. and shifting the best part of the story into the headline of the press release - with ING it seems like they've put the worst aspect of the results into the headline and left us to dig for the good stuff. If they are trying to drop the share price ahead of the share buy-back, I applaud the strategy.