Many subscribers will have attended Mello last week. I always find it a particularly enjoyable couple of days. The combination of engaging company presentations, quality educational talks and socialising is tricky to find elsewhere. It is fair to say that in difficult market conditions, companies are not always keen to come out and present to individual investors. There appears to have been no respite in the outflows from UK equity funds recently:
[Source: Calastone]
However, as I've written about recently (and presented at Mello), the discount in valuation for smaller UK companies looks compelling:
I suspect many management teams feel the same way, as the roster of companies presenting last week looked quite interesting, with the majority having a StockRank above 50:
[Note: I have excluded companies that attended to present their funds instead of themselves as an investment from this list.]
Attending conferences such as Mello is one of the times when I find the StockRank particularly useful. I often find that I am a sucker for the story a management team tells. So if a stock has a particularly low StockRank, I won't even attend the presentation to avoid my weakness in this area. I may miss the odd great opportunity that isn't reflected in the numbers, but on average, I do much better by focusing on companies that fit my normal investment criteria. So it will come as no surprise that I have nothing to report from Clean Power Hydrogen or Thercryf! These are a few of the more interesting companies I saw present:
Manx Financial (LON:MFX)
Kudos to Manx Financial for understanding the psyche of the average investor so well. They brought Manx Tea, Manx Fudge and some nice notebooks to hand out to investors, and brought enough such that everyone who wanted one could take some. I am not crediting this as the only reason that Manx was the best performing stock last week of those that presented at Mello:
However, it surely helps that as I sit at my desk writing this, I am looking at a notebook with Manx Financial written on it, reminding me to look at this in…
