Right, following on from part 2, let's wrap this up:

7) Halfords - HFD


I first bought Halfords (LON:HFD) in 2011 at ~295p on a very simple thesis. The share price had fallen significantly after 2011 profits were a bit disappointing (and it too has the 'retail' stigma attached to it), however HFD offered a) a business with high long term ROEs, b) a large yield of over 7% at the time and c) a low historic P/E. I thought that the decline in profit was likely to be relatively short term and the company would carry on growing in the future as it also had an auto garage business that was expanding to offset the retail slowdown.

I didn't really expect what happened next, when profits looked to have another year of -20% falls. I'm still not entirely sure what caused it, but the share price reaction was to knock a further ~35% off the price down to ~190p. I topped up again, at 210p, but was still kind of unsure as to why profits were falling so fast. Halfords then decided on a CEO swap, and together with a big boost in cycling sales from the British Tour de France success the share price swung back up as high as 355p. I got pretty lucky as I sold out completely at 351p basically because the shares looked much worse value given profits were still expected to fall significantly and, importantly, I don't really get why the decline is so drastic nor why it should reverse. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any further light to shed on this situation.

8) Staffline - STAF


I don't have a great deal to add on Staffline (LON:STAF) beyond Paulypilot's summary of his meeting with management here and MaxCashflow's share competition write up here. It ticks the boxes of a) good long term growth b) decent level of management ownership and c) an attractive valuation. It's gone up ~30% since I bought it so I've trimmed a bit at ~300p but I still hold a good chunk for the longer term.

9) 21st Century - C21


£C21 is an interesting one. I got in…

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