Good morning! It's Paul here.

First day of the new tax year. I've already seen some Tweets from sensible private investors that I follow, saying that they're about to deploy their freshly invested cash in ISAs and SIPPs. So perhaps that might provide some support for small caps? (the amounts are probably too small to make any difference to larger caps).

I'm hearing that AIM IHT fund managers are seeing good cash inflows from clients too. So that's also a positive for decent AIM shares, because they'll generally keep buying more of their existing holdings in the market.


Today I shall definitely be reporting on: FreeAgent Holdings (LON:FREE) , Mothercare (LON:MTC) and MySale (LON:MYSL) .

Time-permitting, I also hope to cover some or all of these: Epwin (LON:EPWN) , Motorpoint (LON:MOTR) , Findel (LON:FDL)




FreeAgent Holdings (LON:FREE)

Share price: 121.5p (up 4.3% today, at 09:26)
No. shares: 40.7m
Market cap: £49.5m

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

Trading update - for the year ended 31 Mar 2017

This is a recent float, with the shares listing on AIM in Nov 2016.

The company provides cloud-based bookkeeping software, specifically designed for micro businesses. It's important to grasp that this software is very user-friendly, and easy for non-accountants to use. Hence it's ideal for the smallest businesses - often one person bands, like consultants, or self-employed tradespeople.

The closest competitor is probably QuickBooks, which is advertising a similar product on TV at the moment.

Other cloud-based software products like Xero, are not really direct competitors, as they are much more feature-rich, and less user-friendly (I use both Xero & FreeAgent personally, for small businesses that I'm involved with).

As part of researching the share, I took a free trial of FreeAgent. After playing with it for an hour or two, I liked it so much that I transferred my limited company accounts onto it permanently. It drastically simplified my tax year-end. So I'm a very happy, paying subscriber. It's a terrific product, which is remarkably easy to set up and use.

I've also asked several firms of accountants what they think of…

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