Haynes Publishing interims (HYNS)

Weakness in the dollar and US consumption mean flat results
Haynes Publishing (HYNS), which produces the eponymous do-it-yourself car maintenance manuals, came out with interim results today. Pre-exceptional net profit was down from £2.053m to £1.854m for the six-month period.
The main culprits are weak US revenues, down by 3 per cent in local currency terms, and […]

Sharemark Auctions Jan 25th

Dairy Farmers of Britain looks set for record highs
There are monthly auctions for a range of stocks on Sharemark tomorrow, notably the Dairy Farmers of Britain loan stocks, Countrywide Farmers, and the weekly auction for Share plc.
There has been an unusual level of bidding in all of the Dairy Farmers stocks and they look likely […]

Fun & games in the markets

This - with a bit of luck - is when the value style pays off
I apologise for the lack of updates recently - particularly given the liveliness of the markets - but I’ve had a lot of other things going on.
I don’t have anything useful to say about the overall market. My general view […]

After Harry Potter (BMY)

What is publisher Bloomsbury going to do in 2009?
For the last decade, investment in Bloomsbury has been a game of ‘Guess when the next Harry Potter book will be published’. But after FY2007, which will have the HP7 sales, Bloomsbury is going to have to find a new wonder franchise.
Two telling numbers are the 2005 […]

Preference shares in 2007

A horrible year - but might 2008 be worse still?

I noticed this broker list of UK preference share performance in 2007. The first number is the fall in the offer price between 3rd Jan 2007 and 14th Jan 2008; the second number is the yield at today’s offer price.
Abbey National 10 3/8% pref […]

Paragon rights issue (PAG)

About as deeply discounted as it is possible to get
Paragon has announced a 25 for 1 rights issue at a discount of 90 per cent. For every £1 share you own in Paragon you get to buy 25 new ones at a price of 10p.
This outcome was pretty much inevitable given the continuing credit squeeze […]

New companies and goodwill

One reason not to invest in start-ups
Yesterday I used the example of a Japanese restaurant to try and show how the goodwill value of a new business builds over time.
“Imagine that I open a restaurant. I start with zero goodwill. But over time people pass the restaurant and remember where it is - that is […]

What is goodwill?

The stuff that makes a company worth more than the sum of its parts
I wrote yesterday (and not very clearly, reading again) about how the problem with an asset-based valuation of a company is goodwill. Accurate valuation of the tangible assets can be tricky, but it’s possible. It’s the difference between the book value and […]

Why worry about goodwill?

The mysterious stuff that underlies most of the stockmarket’s value
OK, so the accounting definition is simple enough: goodwill is the difference between the acquisition price for a company (or its market value) and the value of its assets.
But the question that often bothers me is what this weird, intangible stuff called goodwill actually is? How […]

A catalyst for Dairy Farmers?

First action to close the discount on DFoB loan stocks

A boring note on one of my own investments today. I’ve just noticed that Dairy Farmers of Britain slipped out an important announcement on December 24th:
“A number of important Board-proposed changes to our capital structure to better reward and support committed members has been passed from […]

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