Pre 8 a.m. comments

Just a few relevant trading statements today, as it's mainly larger caps reporting today, including Tesco, Burberry, and Marston's.

Speedy Hire (LON:SDY) announce a positive year-end (31 Mar 2013) trading update, with the key sentence being that they expect to report profit before tax marginally ahead of their previous expectations. The outlook sounds cautiously optimistic.

At 49p the shares look fully valued, given broker consensus of 2.5p EPS, so that's a PER of almost 20 times 2012/13 earnings, falling to 15 times next year's forecast earnings. Not exactly bargain basement. The dividend yield is only just over 1%, again not good value in my opinion.

 

Sepura (LON:SEPU), a global leader in "TETRA" radios for the emergency services, issues a positive trading statement, with revenues and profits for the year ended 29 Mar 2013 expected to be ahead of market expectations. Sales are up 25% over prior year, which is pretty impressive, in the range E103-105, whereas Stockopedia shows E100.6m as the consensus forecast.

This should make the valuation less than the PER of 16.5 shown on Stockopedia for this year consensus forecast earnings, but it's not clear how much cheaper, at a guess it might bring the PER down to 14-15? So not cheap enough to spark my interest, although it does look a quality company.

 

It's more of a mid-cap really, but JD Sports Fashion (LON:JD.) issues its preliminary results for the 53 weeks ended 2 Feb 2013 (note the extra week, which is likely to slightly flatter results). EPS has come in bang on forecast, at 88.5p, putting the shares on a very reasonable PER of 8.4, which drops to 7.2 next year's forecast earnings.

There is also a healthy 4.2% dividend yield. I like the look of this, it always looks cheap & still does. Whereas most shares have shot up in the last year, this one hasn't, so could well be worth a look. There is a major shareholder with 57%, which creates issues - are minority shareholders' interests safe? Also it makes the shares very illiquid given the size of the company.

 

Post 8 a.m. comments

It looks as if the sorry chain of events at

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