It's that time of year when people think about getting away from the grind and disappearing from their daily business.
However, it's not every day that a business itself seeks to disappear.
Yet, that's what beleaguered Retail Food Group is seeking to do. Of course, CBD can understand why a business in RFG's position might want to hide under the counter at one of its Donut King, Gloria Jeans or Michel's Patisserie outlets and pretend the world doesn't exist.
After all it has spent most of the weekend watching on as a Fairfax Media investigation pointed to widespread angst in its franchise network about the difficulty of making money.
In response RFG locked up its twitter account and shut down its Facebook page. Poof!
The company, which wasn't keen to answer too many of Fairfax Media's questions, did have to front a query from the ASX on Monday as its share price tanked as much as 27 per cent.
It insisted that Fairfax's reporting contained errors but did not detail any specifics.
The dive means that over the course of this year more than half the market cap has been wiped from the company - one could argue RFG's leadership is certainly on the way to making shareholder money disappear.
By CBD's reckoning more than $600 million has now been torched as RFG starts to look more hole than doughnut. Gone!
Of course former boss Tony ''Cabbage Patch" Alford will be watching with some interest having once been a big shareholder.
However, having ''decoupled'' his ownership interests in September, when he held 11 per cent of the company, it's not clear how much of Alford's stake has disappeared as he no longer has to post significant shareholder notices with the ASX.
Tony Alford smoke-bombed and left as chief executive last year after 20 years in the gig and handed the job to his brother Gary Alford. Gary, though, didn't last long. He resigned in November and passed the patissirie to new comer Richard Hinson. Hinson starts in January and must be super excited at how things are panning out.
To recap - the company has vanished legions of franchisees, its long serving chief executive (and his stake in the company), his replacement and hundreds of millions of dollars in market value.
Hang on we missed one - its chairman is heading out the door.
Colin Archer told investors at the annual meeting that he would not serve again beyond this current term.
Winning formula
It's been described as white gold by some observers, and it has already made some Australian investors very rich, very fast.
And today, it seems the investor love affair with infant formula companies continues to blossom, with news from the goat milk infant formula company Bubs Australia providing another snapshot of just how keen investors are to get their hands on infant formula stocks.
In a series of announcements in early November, Bubs Australia unveiled a $5 million Share Purchase Plan to eligible shareholders. The move gave Bubs shareholders a chance to buy up to a maximum of $15,000 shares, at a price of 60 cents each in the small but expanding company.
And investors gobbled up the offering, so much so that it was more than 470 per cent oversubscribed. The deal closed on December 8, with Bubs revealing on Monday it had receiving applications worth in excess of $28.7 million.
It followed the company's experience with its recently completed institutional share placement, which raised $15 million and was also oversubscribed.
Shares in Bubs Australia rose 2.5 cents on Monday, to close at 78.5 cents.
Bubs listed on the ASX in January at 10 cents per share, and after a stable start to the year the stock price kicked up from June. It even broke through the $1 mark in November, before easing. The company now has a market capitalisation of about $214 million.
Shares in the major infant formula companies a2 Milk and Bellamy's Organic have also surged this year, with a2 more than tripling on its value at the beginning of 2017.
One wonders how much stamina is left in the infant formula bull run.
