March has been the busiest month at the UK Value Investor head offices (the spare bedroom) for a long time. There's been reports from Mallett and J Smart, a report and strategic review from French Connection (I love their new website) and dividends from Waterman, Gleeson, Northamber and Titon. Then there's the somewhat infamous purchase of Luminar, a company so scary it seems that almost no one will touch it.
Results
I've updated the Benchmark, Holdings and Trades pages so you can see how things have evolved since last month. The total book value is up by over 14% and the market value is up by just over 7%. This compares quite well with the benchmark FTSE 100 ETF, with over 13% out-performance over 3 months. However, I won't get too excited as that could vanish in no time. I'm looking forward to getting some 6 and 12 month comparisons which will be a bit more meaningful, and one thing to remember is that these 3 month figures are helped out somewhat as the portfolio was coming out of a bit of a lull a few months ago.
Annual and Interim Reports
French connection's latest report provided some information on their strategic review of how the management are going to turn things around. I don't really look into these sorts of things too deeply, preferring instead to leave the running of the company to the professionals. Book value was down slightly.
J Smart, the property investment and development company, said (via the Chairman) "There seems to be little prospect of an increase in turnover here over the next twelve months". Book value was effectively unchanged.
As mentioned in the last post, Mallett's situation is improving somewhat and book value was down only a small amount.
Dividends
First up is the very large dividend from M J Gleeson (over £1,000). Since they have basically shut the business down into hibernation mode to sleep out the recession, they've built up excess cash which they gave away in this dividend. For now this is going to stay as cash although I expect to invest it somewhere more exciting during the month.
After…
