Daily Stock Market Report (Thur 25th June 2026) - HFD, ING, MOON, VLX, III, EZJ, AMS, TIME

The big overnight mover is the oil price which officially returned to pre-war levels. The spot price for Brent crude has fallen to $72.50.

Although talks between the US and Iran still have a long way to go, the reopening of Hormuz has massively increased supply. I think we’ll be able to refer to the Iran situation and the oil price much less frequently in these preambles from now on!

Overnight market movements:

• The FTSE is set to open down 0.3% at 10,425

• S&P 500 is up 0.6% at 7,405

• Brent crude (August) is down 1.8% at $72.50/bbl

• Gold is down 0.3% at $3,987/oz

• Bitcoin is up 1.2% at $61,700

Signing out now, thank you.

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Companies Reporting

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Graham's Section

Ingenta (LON:ING)

Down 17% at 69.98p (£10m) - AGM Statement - Graham - AMBER ↓

This is a “leading provider of software and services to the publishing and media industries.”

It looked cheap to me in April, but unfortunately it has only gotten cheaper since then, with the market cap falling from £15m to £10m since then:

A quick summary of this AGM statement:

• Over £2m of new business wins this year (context: historic annual revenues of c. £10m).

• Encouraging pipeline of further opportunities across core markets.

The £2m figure relates to a 3-year period, so this is really just £700k p.a.

New guidance is not great in terms of profitability:

As a result of this new business momentum, the Company is expecting to deliver increased revenues in 2026 compared with 2025. The management team is continuing with previously announced plans to invest in building our sales and marketing resources, and the additional costs being incurred by the Company will result in EBITDA for the current year being a little lower than in 2025, despite the increased revenues.

Adjusted EBITDA last year was £1.6m.

Estimates: I am going to record today’s news as “BLACK” for profit warning, as the market is clearly disappointed by the news that 2026 EBITDA will be lower than the prior year.

However, for completeness, I should note that there were no 2026 forecasts for Ingenta as of yesterday. So it could be argued that it’s not a real profit warning, as there were no official consensus estimates.

That changes today with the release of forecasts from Cavendish:

• 2026 revenue £10.6m (up £0.3m)

• 2026 Adj. PBT £1.4m (down £0.2m)

• 2026 adj. EPS 8.8p (down 1.4p)

Further ahead, there aren’t any 2027 estimates and the company included the following paragraph in today’s statement:

Looking beyond the current year, as previously noted, there is ongoing attrition of some longer-term customers currently on our legacy platforms who have been seeking to move to global whole-enterprise software platform providers. Some of the larger customers in this group have requested to move to shorter term contracts, which reduces our visibility over future revenue streams, and introduces a greater risk level to 2027 revenues and beyond. As a result, we are prepared for the new business wins described above to be subject to an offsetting impact from reduction in revenues from these customers in 2027, although some degree of mitigation will be achieved in future years by reducing costs related to the servicing of these customers.

Graham’s view

I have to downgrade our stance on this for a few reasons today.

Firstly, the news that profits will be lower this year than last year has clearly disappointed the market.

The Cavendish forecasts are helpful but in P/E terms the stock is now trading at 8x 2026 earnings, which is a little higher than the StockReport’s trailing 7x figure.

Also, the note that there’s less visibility and a higher risk level around 2027 revenues leads to the conclusion that we can’t expect growth here in the short-term.

Ingenta is considered a Super Stock by the computers but I think that a neutral stance is the right call for me today, downgrading just one notch from my previous view.

Software companies at this small scale are vulnerable to lumpy, contract-driven revenues and management here has explicitly warned us that they can’t predict their 2027 results with much certainty. It says something that Cavendish waited until now to give us 2026 estimates.

All of that being said, I still think that deep value arguments could be made here. The cash balance at December 2025 was £5m. Cavendish are forecasting that the closing net cash figure for 2026 will be £4.9m.

So my position is as follows: I am neutral on Ingenta due to the lack of visibility and the downward pressure on its earnings.

At the same time, I think that it would easily be worth more than its current market cap if it was acquired in its current condition, due to the cash balance. But I can't guess at the likelihood of this happening.

I am therefore AMBER on it today, reflecting the pressures it is likely to face in the short- and medium-term.

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Moonpig (LON:MOON)

Up 7.5% at 240.8p (£728m) - Final Results - Graham - GREEN ↑

I’ve gradually come round to the idea that this might be a QARP-type of share (quality at a reasonable price). The reasons are clear enough: it’s a well-known consumer brand earning high gross margins in a niche where it controls the majority of the market (online cards).

FY April 2026 was a good year:

• Revenue +6.5% (£373m)

• Gross margin down 1.2 percentage points to 58.4%

• Adj. PBT +13.4% (£76.5m)

• Actual PBT £68.9m.

Lots to like here, with profits growing faster than revenues and revenue growth itself quite good. The Moonpig brand grew 8.6% while the Dutch brand Greetz was slower at 1.5%.

The main driver of revenue growth was order value (5.7%) rather than the number of orders (2.1%).

Dividends and buyback: the total dividend for the year is 3.75p, covered well by earnings per share of 18p.

There was also £60m of buybacks, with another up to £65m planned this year.

CEO comment:

"These results demonstrate the strength of Moonpig Group's brands, customer proposition and business model. The Group delivered good growth in revenue, profitability and cash generation whilst continuing to invest in the capabilities to support our future ambition.

Outlook: expectations unchanged.

Graham’s view

I’ve been a little nervous about the balance sheet at Moonpig, and that’s the main reason I’ve not been fully GREEN on it yet.

However, the company reports £73.5m of free cash flow today - that’s enough to fund the year’s £60m buyback while still having enough left over to fund 4.5p of dividends (the actual dividends for the year are only 3.75p).

In the company’s words:

We maintain high gross margins, operate with negative working capital and manage capital expenditure within a disciplined return-on-investment framework. Combined with low inventory risk and operational leverage across fulfilment and technology, these characteristics enable the Group to consistently generate strong Free Cash Flow. This Free Cash Flow exceeds the reinvestment requirements of the business and provides flexibility to invest in organic growth, maintain leverage within our target range and return capital to shareholders.

The leverage multiple for the end of the financial year was 1.03x, which is modest.

And as the leverage multiple uses adjusted EBITDA as the denominator, it’s worth pointing out that the company has done a great job of converting adjusted EBITDA into real profits - or at least, it did in FY26. £105m of adj. EBITDA was converted into pre-tax profits of £68.9m.

Last year, the company suffered a very large impairment charge (£56.7m), which dragged down the statutory profit numbers.

Checking the balance sheet, I see that there are still £130m of intangibles. If we remove them from the picture, this leaves balance sheet equity of minus £180m. This is due to the the combination of a) financial leverage; and b) the “negative working capital” business model referred to above.

I’m leaning towards the view that it’s time for me to be fully positive on Moonpig now. I usually don’t look past balance sheets with such deep negative equity, but in this case I think it’s probably ok, and I’m willing to break one or two of my rules if I perceive that I’m looking at a very high quality business.

For some history: this is a 2021 IPO where the offer price was 350p.

With the share price at 240p today, it’s clear that a great deal of optimism has been squeezed out of the valuation over the past five years.

Some of that is the company’s own fault: it overpaid for buyagift.co.uk in 2022, and has taken the hit for that now. But given where it stands today, perhaps it’s time for the market to look at it a bit more optimistically?

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Roland's Section

Halfords (LON:HFD)

Up 16% at 209p (£458m) - Preliminary results for the 53-week period ended 3 April 2026 - Roland - AMBER/GREEN =

Some headlines this morning have suggested that Halfords has beat FY26 profit forecasts, but I don’t think this is correct. In my view these results are in line with FY26 expectations; I will explain why below.

What is true is that the company has nudged its FY27 guidance higher this morning, triggering a round of euphoria from investors:

We now expect FY27 underlying PBT to be around the top end of the consensus range, with performance weighted towards the first half of the year.

Shares in this motoring and cycling products and services group have now risen by 50% this year, thanks to rising forecasts and growing investor confidence:

However, the stock remains a long way below its historic highs – 10 years ago, the share price was 342p.

Can CEO Henry Birch engineer a durable renaissance for this business? Let’s take a look at today’s results.

FY26 highlights

Warning - confusing accounts: the year-on-year percentage change figures I use below reflect 52-week comparative figures provided by the company, but the financial figures I’ve quoted are for the 53-week year reported today, unless I specify otherwise.

In addition, FY25 profits have been restated today to reflect a new accounting policy, so they do not map onto last year’s results.

Rising employment costs and subdued consumer spending form a tough backdrop for consumer-facing businesses such as Halfords. Sales growth remained relatively weak last year:

• Revenue of £1,801.7m (+2.9% YoY)

• Retail revenue: £1,062m (+3.4% YoY)

• Autocentres revenue: £739.7m (+2.1% YoY)

• Gross margin: 52.9% (FY25: 50.7%)

• Underlying pre-tax profit: £50.0m (+4.1% YoY)

• Underlying EPS: 17.4p (the 52-week EPS figure is 15.7p, which is +0.6% higher than the restated figure FY25 figure of 15.6p)

• Dividend per share: +2.3% to 9.0p

Have earnings beat forecasts? Consensus forecasts for FY26 were for adjusted EPS of 13.9p. At first glance today’s results suggest a strong earnings beat, but I don’t think this is correct.

The new accounting policy introduced with these results now excludes the amortisation of acquired intangible assets from the calculation of underlying profit. Although I’m not always a fan of this approach, it is quite a common approach and has its merits.

However, in this case the impact is quite significant, as Halfords has made a number of mid-sized acquisitions in recent years:

• Applying the new policy transforms FY25 adj EPS from 13.8p to 15.6p.

• FY26 52-week adj EPS provided today of 15.7p is only a 0.6% increase from 15.6p.

• Adding 0.6% to 13.8p gives me a figure of 13.9p – in line with FY26 consensus expectations.

When companies change their accounting policies I think it’s always worth asking why – and what would have happened if they hadn’t.

In this case the revised policy has the effect of lifting the headline measure of profit, making Halfords shares look cheaper on the most commonly used metric of adjusted P/E.

When brokers incorporate the new accounting policy into their models, this change will also feed through to a nice bump in FY27 forecasts. Happy Days!

While I can see the appeal of this change for Halfords management, I don’t think it offers much benefit for shareholders. This revised view of earnings does not reflect any underlying improvement in the performance of the business.

Trading commentary: sales growth was minimal last year and was offset by a 7.6% increase in operating costs, reflecting higher labour costs and cost inflation.

What drove the increase in underlying pre-tax profit last year was a 2.1% increase in the group’s gross margin, to 52.8%. Management says this reflects a number of factors:

This very strong performance reflected the continued success of our Better Buying programme, improvements in pricing and promotional effectiveness, and an FX tailwind as movements in the US dollar rate over the last 18 months benefitted the hedged rate coming through in cost of goods sold. Changes to our contractual arrangements with suppliers also resulted in a 30bps YoY increase in Group gross margin with a corresponding increase in operating expenses.

It would have been nice to see the improvements in gross margin split out so we could see, for example, the contribution made by FX. But it’s good progress all the same.

Looking across the group’s two divisions, performance seems to have been stronger in the Autocentres division than in retail:

• Retail: revenue rose by 4.1% to £1,039m, with motoring sales +2.9% and cycling sales +6.4%. But the increase in gross margin was much smaller than in the Autocentres business and was not enough to offset a 7.6% increase in operating costs. Retail underlying operating profit fell by 3.8% to £37.5m.

• Autocentres: revenue rose by 5.8% to £725m, while underlying operating profit rose by 20.1% to £18.9m. Gross margin improved by a full 3% to 55.6%, driving a £30m increase in gross profit – sufficient to offset the £27m increase in operating costs.

As far as I can see, both sides of the business are delivering some incremental improvements in difficult market conditions. However, while retail will always face tough online competition, that’s less true for Autocentres. There’s no online substitute for a physical workshop and trained mechanic. Perhaps this side of the business has a more durable future?

Profitability: these improvements translated to a modest increase in margins for the group as a whole:

• Underlying operating margin +0.2% to 3.4%

• Reported operating margin: 3.1% (FY25: n/a - statutory loss)

The returns being generated by the business also improved:

• Company-reported return on capital employed (ROCE) up 1.6% to 14.2%

Cost of capital: Halfords says its cost of capital last year was 10.6%. It’s very rare for companies to report this figure in my experience. For anyone building a DCF model for Halfords, it would make sense to use 10.6% as the required rate of return. A figure of 10% might also be a good estimate for many other small/mid caps.

The figures provided by the company suggest Halfords is generating returns in excess of its cost of capital.

However, the more standardised and statutory approach that I prefer (and which is used in the StockReport) suggests the situation is more borderline:

• Return on capital employed: 7.7%

• Return on equity: 6.4%

One key difference between the two approaches is that Halfords excludes goodwill from its ROCE calculation. The issue I have with this is that goodwill reflects capital allocated to past acquisitions. In my view, it’s important to gauge whether companies are generating attractive returns on acquisition spend. I think the evidence here is mixed, so far.

Cash flow & Balance Sheet: Halfords ended the year with £19m of net cash, excluding lease liabilities. That’s a strong result, although it’s worth noting that this figure received an £8m boost from the 53rd week, due to timing effects. On a 52-week basis, net cash was £11.2m (FY25: £10.1m).

With so many profit adjustments floating around, I’m keen to see how much cash the business generated last year:

• Free cash flow: £33.3m (FY25: £43m)

The company says that the decrease last year “was due in part” to the payment of performance incentives for FY25 in early FY26, but doesn’t provide any detail on this.

On the assumption that performance incentives might be due in the future, too, I am inclined to see the £33m figure as a fair representation of last year’s performance.

Applying this to today’s increased market cap of £458m gives me a free cash flow yield of 7.3% – potentially decent value.

Outlook

The company says it has not yet seen any changes to customer behaviour due to the situation in the Middle East, but believe there’s still a risk this could happen in the second half of 2026.

FY27 guidance: Halfords has restated its FY27 profit guidance to reflect the change in accounting policy:

The change in accounting policy outlined above will increase company-compiled consensus for underlying PBT in FY27 from £45.3m (with a range from £42.0m to £48.6m) to c.£49.0m (with a range from £45.7m to £52.3m). There will be a similar increase in FY28 and FY29.

FY27 underlying pre-tax profit is now expected to be “around the top end of the consensus range”, with a weighting towards H1.

I don’t have access to any broker notes today to see how analysts are addressing the 52/53-week issue. But assuming this guidance is for comparable 52-week years, then this suggests Halfords underlying PBT could rise by c.14% this year, to perhaps £52m.

Prior to today, consensus forecasts suggested a 12% rise in earnings for FY27, so this seems like a relatively modest upgrade – not necessarily enough to justify today’s 15% share price gain.

Roland’s view

Based on today’s guidance, I estimate Halfords could be trading on <12x FY27 forecast earnings.

However, without the change to accounting policies, I estimate this would be >13x.

I can’t help feeling some of today’s share price bounce may have been driven by the market revaluing the stock based on its revised formula for earnings.

Despite this, I think the current valuation could be reasonable if Halfords can continue to improve profitability and deliver above-inflation sales growth.

However, I wouldn’t personally want to pay much more than this. After all, this remains a slow-growing, low-margin business whose longer-term chart suggests continued structural pressure:

The StockRanks are fairly positive here and view Halfords as a Super Stock:

On balance, I think it’s fair to leave our previous moderately-positive view unchanged today. AMBER/GREEN

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Volex (LON:VLX)

Down 2% at 573p (£1.06bn) - Preliminary Group Results FY26 - Roland - AMBER ↓

Volex has been one of the AIM market’s stronger performers in recent years as CEO Nat Rothschild has built a decent-sized industrial group and benefited from strong demand, notably for data centre cabling.

However, today’s full-year results have met with a measured response from the market, perhaps because there’s no change to FY27 expectations today.

FY26 highlights

We covered Volex’s full-year update in March and today’s figures appear to be consistent with the guidance provided then. The numbers themselves look fairly strong to me, with the caveat that much of last year’s revenue growth was driven by a single part of the business – and possibly a single customer.

• Revenue up 14.4% to $1.242.6m

• Underlying operating profit up 19.9% to $127.3m

• Reported pre-tax profit up 45.3% to $93.4m

• Underlying EPS up 19.8% to 43.5 cents

• Dividend per share up 6.7% to 3.2p

• Net debt excluding leases down 4.6% to $121.5m

This is a capital-intensive business, but checking my preferred profitability metrics suggest Volex’s performance improved slightly last year, probably due to operating leverage and strong sales of higher-margin products:

• Operating margin: 9.7% (FY25: 7.6%)

• Return on Capital Employed: 15.4% (FY25: 13.8%)

Trading commentary: as I’ve flagged previously here and discussed at Mello in November, Volex has been one of the UK-listed beneficiaries of the AI Data Centre boom.

My impression is that this drove the vast majority of last year’s profit growth, offsetting declining revenue in two of the group’s five divisions:

• Complex Industrial Technology: revenue rose by 56.3% to $382.9m, “including strong Data Centre demand from a leading hyperscale customer”. The $139m increase in revenue from this division last year largely covers the $156m increase in group revenue for the same period. While it’s great to see Volex benefiting in this way, demand may not remain this strong indefinitely. I’m also intrigued and slightly concerned by the reference to a single customer – my assumption had been that the company was selling to a number of data centre customers.

• Off-Highway: this was the only other part of the business to deliver material growth. Revenue rose by 20% to $279.3m, “supported by a significant defence vehicle programme” and a ramp-up of activity in North America.

• EV & Electrification: revenue +4.8% to $181.8m, supported by a major charger programme “with a European manufacturer”.

• Consumer Electricals: organic revenue fell 7.8% to $242.4m, against a strong prior year performance and “intensified Chinese competition in Europe”...

• Medical: revenue fell by 10.5% organically to $156.2m, “reflecting some anticipated customer destocking”. New programme wins offer the potential for a return to growth.

Cash flow & Balance Sheet: free cash flow was actually quite poor last year due to a $55m increase in working capital, reflecting a large increase in inventories. The company says this was largely due to investment to support the growth in Data Centre demand:

However, stripping out working capital movements suggests to me that underlying cash generation was still strong.

I don’t have any serious concerns about the balance sheet. Net debt excluding leases looks manageable, at 0.8x EBITDA despite last year’s outflows.

Outlook

Trading to date in FY2027 has been strong and in line with the Board's expectations

Volex says demand “across key end-markets remains robust”, with good forward visibility and continued strength in Data Centres.

The medium term targets set out in April also remain unchanged, as I’d expect:

The Board is confident that the Group is well positioned to deliver the medium term targets set out at the Capital Markets Day in April 2026, including revenues of $2 billion and a 12% underlying operating margin

Broker update: as far as I can see, broker forecasts are unchanged today.

The latest note from Singer Capital (in late April) included the following EPS forecasts:

• FY27: 43.4c

• FY28: 46.6c

These forecasts put Volex on a FY27E P/E of around 17.

Main Market listing: Volex has confirmed the details of its move from AIM to the Main Market today – the relisting is expected to happen at 8am on 24 July 2026.

One risk is that the stock could see some short-term volatility as AIM IHT managers are forced to sell their holdings in the fifth-largest AIM-listed company. Our shareholdings page suggests some of this selling has already been underway, with two large IHT fund managers showing recent sales:

In a note on 27 April, Singer estimated that £120-180m of shares might need to be sold by AIM IHT funds – potentially c.15% of the total share capital.

Although some of this selling may be offset by the ongoing £40m share buyback, any boost from potential index fund buying could take a little while to feed through: as far as I can see, Volex could potentially join the FTSE 250 in September.

Roland’s view

I’ve been AMBER/GREEN on Volex for some time now. I think this has been is a fair reflection of the stock’s High Flyer status and solid profitability:

However, several parts of this business saw declining revenue last year and there’s no doubt in my mind that last year’s results were primarily underpinned by strong Data Centre demand. Without this (seemingly from a single customer), the picture would have been much weaker.

Today’s outlook doesn’t suggest to me that there are any near-term catalysts to support a more widespread increase in profit. I wonder if another acquisition might be in the offing. Volex has handled these successfully in the past, but increasingly big deals will always carry some risk.

While the recent share price pullback from 700p has eased some of the pressure on valuation, the share price still looks up with events to me.

I still think Volex is a decent business, but I’m going to cut our view by one notch to AMBER (neutral) today to reflect my view on valuation and the potential for some further near-term weakness in the share price.