Pre 8 a.m. comments

Good morning. A fairly quiet morning today for results. I'm looking at reasonably good results from Networkers International (LON:NWKI), an AIM-Listed recruitment company. It looks good value to me. They have delivered 4.7p EPS for the year ended 31 Dec 2012, which is ahead of broker consensus forecast of 4.3p. It seems to have been higher gross margins that has driven the out-performance, up from 16% to 18%.

The market cap is £39.5m at 43.5p per share, plus there is £6.9m of net debt, although that relates to invoice discounting. With a net current asset position of £14.2m, the balance sheet looks fine, so seems to be a question of customers being a bit slow in paying, rather than there being any problem level of debt.

With a PER of 9 times 2012 earnings, and a dividend increased 25% to 1.25p (for a 2.8% yield) this looks reasonably priced, although there doesn't seem to be much growth in evidence. That could change in a recovering economy though, so in my view reasonably priced recruiters are a good place to invest right now. Most have re-rated in the last year, some substantially, whereas this one has only risen from a 12 month low of around 35p in Oct 2012 to 43.5p now. Hence could be more upside to be had here, possibly?

They mention upside from the roll-out of 4G networks.

 

Post 8 a.m. comments

As an aside, if you use MoneyAM for live streaming prices, as I do, then my friend MrContrarian has come up with a really neat innovation that lets you view twice as many share prices on one page, by presenting it in two panes. I find it very useful indeed, especially on a smaller screen, the URL to use this is: http://sharedata.mobi/moneyam2f/

Many thanks to MrC for sharing that useful facility with others.

 

It's becoming clearer by the day that Gold is anything but a safe haven, but is actually a volatile & highly sepculative bubble. The price has dropped about 10% in the last two trading days now. I will not be revisiting that, after my failed attempt at hedging my equities around the time of the Cyprus Eurozone crisis by going long of Gold. It didn't work, and I clearly don't have any expertise in that area,…

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