Good morning!

As I'm sure most of us have, I've been following the crisis in Russia with great interest. It looks as if a full-blown currency crisis is now happening, with the Ruble crashing against other currencies, despite a huge hike in interest rates to 17%. Surely capital controls are now inevitable, to stop bank runs & capital flight?

It's unpleasant for the Russian people, but I can't help feeling a degree of schadenfreude towards Putin - who overplayed his hand, and has lost. Mind you, it does mean there's a much higher risk of some military crisis occurring - after all, when backed into a corner, Soviet-era dictators can be unpredictable - what better way to drive up the price of oil again, than to trigger some sort of military action in an oil-producing area? Or he could turn off the gas supplies to Europe, and then demand negotiations/help?

So these could be dangerous times. I'm looking at oil services companies, and like the look of some of them at these depressed levels. Plexus Holdings (LON:POS) and Pressure Technologies (LON:PRES) are on my do-more-research list over Xmas, both being companies that I have previously liked, but got too expensive. Now they look more sensibly priced again. Although who knows what the impact on earnings will be, from this much lower oil price?


Xaar (LON:XAR)

Share price: 299p (up 13% today)
No. shares: 76.5m
Market Cap: £228.7m

This was one of my worst stock ideas for 2014. I jumped in too early, only to be clobbered by two more profit warnings. With Chinese demand for its tile printheads in sharp decline, I did wonder if it had another profit warning in it.

However, the trading update today is a little better than feared. So it seems that things are stabilising at any rate. Here are the main points (I am having to copy them here as pictures at the moment, as the software is playing up, and won't let me copy paste the text & highlight bits, as I used to);

5491486eefd4fxar.PNG

So it seems as if sales have stabilised around a run rate of £100m p.a., at which level the company is still decently profitable (helped by recently laying off 20% of its workforce).

My opinion - having…

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