Good morning! Firstly, apologies again for being late - I cannot blame it on the sunshine, nor the moonlight, not even the boogie. So it can only be blamed on the good times. Luckily I put those good times to good use, and decided to massively upgrade my charity fundraising target for Sunday's Half Marathon, from five hundred quid to £3,000, and put my own money where my mouth is! We're over half way there, at £1,610 including Gift Aid, so today I beg readers to dig deep and cough up a bit more if you can, for Scope. Our collective wealth must run into not just millions, but hundreds of millions of pounds, so surely £3k is not an unrealistic target for me enduring a painful & unpleasant Sunday morning hobbling at an accelerated pace around London's leafy enclaves?
Anyway, let's crack on and have a look at the morning's trading results. It's a very quiet day, thankfully. Amazingly quiet actually, there's hardly anything of note. Maker of specialist foils and packaging materials, API (LON:API) has issued a trading update. The key bit seems to be this;
The Board's most recent guidance, provided at the time of the AGM on 11 July 2013, remains unchanged overall. Full year results are still expected to show progress over the previous year despite first half trading having been weaker than anticipated and very strong comparables at the interim stage last year.
So a bit vague, in that it doesn't refer to how they are trading relative to expectations (which is what matters!). There really needs to be a standardised required format for trading statements, so that companies are required to state (1) what market expectations are, and (2) how they expect to perform against them. Furthermore, companies should be required to give a likely range of profits - a single number is ridiculous, few companies can be that precise in forecasting, but every company should be able to give a range of likely outcomes for profits. Something for the regulators (although you sometimes wonder if they actually exist, as anything seems to go!) to ponder.
Here is their 2 year chart - you can clearly see the bid premium go into the price, and then come out again, bringing it back…
