Very late comments

I apologise for being late today, slept through my alarm, due to a very enjoyable evening at the inaugural Small Cap Awards at BAFTA on Piccadilly, or as Siri (on my iPhone) interpreted as "bath tub" when I needed directions there. Do I have a northern accent?! Maybe Apple should engage the voice recognition services of Eckoh, for more accurate results?!

Sadly, I didn't win "small cap analyst of the year", it went to George O'Connor of Panmure Gordon, who by all accounts was a very worthy winner, so congratulations to him. I was thrilled just to have made it as far as the final shortlist of three (the other being Simon Thompson of Investors Chronicle), so in my view the shortlist was well chosen in having one City person, one journalist, and one blogger, which reflects the new reality.

Also it was great to chat to many interesting & colourful characters from the small cap world!

 

There are lots of trading statements and results today, so I'll stagger through the wreckage and see how far we get before I need to lie down in a darkened room and take an alka seltzer.

 

Not a small cap, but £400m market cap Dialight (LON:DIA) reports upbeat trading - which they need to, to justify the historic PER of 30, which falls to 23 times for 2013 estimates, and 18 times for 2014 estimates. The growth is coming from LED lighting. This is a Mark Slater stock, and have today confirmed their confidence in meeting full year expectations.

 

Norman Broadbent (LON:NBB) is a £4.5m market cap recruitment company which I've not heard of before, but am tentatively looking at sub-£10m market cap companies, because the risk of de-Listing seems to be receding, at least for companies which are profitable.

It's funny how the same names pop up at new companies, and I note that their Chairman is Pierce Casey, who I met years ago when he was Chairman at IT distributor, Fayrewood. He sticks in my memory because he behaved very oddly in a results presentation years ago, and we found out why shortly afterwards - he had sold all his shares, and made it perfectly obvious from his body language that he didn't give a damn about the company!…

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