Good morning!

Here is yesterday's report, which I wrote overnight, so most people won't have seen it yet. I recapped on the interesting takeover battle for Lavendon (LON:LVD) , plus tried to understand the situation at Trakm8 Holdings (LON:TRAK) after poor interim results. Also a quick look at Stride Gaming (LON:STR) . 

On to today.



Crawshaw (LON:CRAW)

Share price: 24.1p (up 7.2% today)
No. shares: 79.2m
Market cap: £19.1m

(At the time of writing, I hold a long position in this share)

Trading update - my heart sank when I saw this, as I assumed it would be another profit warning - given how the share price has been almost in freefall of late.

Overall though, it's actually not that bad, when you consider that the share price has now dropped by 74% in the last year. This spectacular fall from grace is because perception changed from it being a sexy retail roll-out, to being a small chain of barely-profitable butchers.

The first paragraph of today's update reassures;

Crawshaw Group plc ("Crawshaw" or the "Group") (AIM: CRAW), the fresh meat and food-to-go retailer, notes the recent movement in its share price and confirm the Group continues to trade in line with management expectation.

Sales trend - this has improved, as you can see below, but is still negative;

Previously reported on 29 Sept 2016, LFL sales;

Q1 (Feb, Mar, Apr):  down 0.8%

Q2 (May, June, July):  down 7.8%

Q3 (Aug, Sept, Oct) - first 7 weeks only: down 15.8%


Reported today (29 Nov 2016), LFL sales;

4 weeks ended 27 Nov 2016:  down 8.1%.

Clearly, a decline of 8.1% in LFL sales for the most recent 4 weeks is still a poor performance. However, the trend is improving from the disastrous performance earlier in Q3.


The company's self-help measures appear to be slowing down the decline in sales. It emphasises today that full year results still rely on the key festive season;

The Board are confident in the actions taken so far and are encouraged by the early improvements in sales, but note the importance of this progress being maintained through the key winter and festive period to deliver full year profit expectations.


Forecasts - I've not seen any updated broker figures yet this morning. So based on the existing…

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