Pre 8 a.m. comments
Good morning! Just one announcement from my portfolio & watch list, being a $16m software contract win (over 7 years) announced by KBC Advanced Technologies (LON:KBC). I've got mixed feelings about this company, and recently cut back on my long position in it, although I still hold some.
Whilst they have announced a series of positive contract wins & trading updates, there was unexpected bad news concerning a very high tax charge with the last set of results. Now arguably tax issues can be fixed, and it's the underlying performance of the business that matters more. On the other hand, they have net cash (although mostly up-front payments from customers), and intend to resume dividend payments in 2013.
As you can see from the massive screen shot below, KBC shows strong green bars (i.e. positive) on most valuation & growth measures. So if the broker forecasts turn out to be correct, then these shares should go up. However, I'm not convinced that broker forecasts are necessarily reliable, given KBC's tendency in the past to deliver nasty suprises.
Also note from the screen shot below how I'm using the "Notes" button to jot down my own thoughts on companies, which is a really handy way of keeping your info in one place & to hand, without having to keep separate spreadsheets, etc.
Kentz (LON:KENZ) is a much larger company than I usually look at, £465m market cap at 395p per share. However, it is looking interesting on several levels. Firstly, check out this superb track record, from the "Graphical History" section of the Stockopedia StockReport:
I really like the way profit & EPS are in a lovely smooth trend upwards, yet the valuation graphs actually show the PE range coming down, and the dividend yield range edging up. These graphs are a fabulous way of really quickly absorbing a company's track record & valuation in a couple of seconds.
NB. Please note that Kentz reports in US dollars, so the charts above are shown in dollars!
The forward PER of 8.9, and dividend yield of 2.8% look good value to me (these are correctly converted into sterling by the way!).
Their IMS this…
