Pre 8 a.m. comments

What an excellent evening, seeing many friends at the monthly Mello investor evening in Beckenham last night. It was very well attended, must have been approaching 100 of us there for dinner, and a very interesting talk from Gervais Williams, the guest speaker from Miton (LON:MGR) - I must look again at their results from yesterday, even though financials are normally off my radar. An experienced and successful small cap fund manager, keen to grow assets under management, strikes me as a pretty good place to start.

I was most encouraged by his value message, and his belief that reasonable value small caps, and steadily increasing dividends are the way to go, which very much validates my approach of eschewing investing fads and focusing on decent fundamentals.

Quite a few results this morning, so I shall report back shortly. Apologies for the slow start this morning, slightly muzzy head!

 

Post 8 a.m. comments

I am looking firstly at results from Hydro International (LON:HYD), which is a company making niche products for the management of waste and storm water. The shares have opened down 7p at 92/95p, so looks like results have not impressed. 

Adjusted EPS is reported down 1% at 12.7p, it has net cash of £2.9m and a maintained dividend of 3.6p, so at sub-100p that looks interesting to me. The big problem is in the Outlook statement, where they reiterate previous comments that, due to the ending of large contracts, "revenue & profitability for 2013 will be materially lower than 2012 levels".

So, it's really very difficult to value, and a PER basis on historic figures which are not going to be repeated, is not valid.

 

dotDigital (LON:DOTD) has been on my radar for a while, although I've not properly looked into it yet. The shares have come off 6% this morning on an announcement that they are winding down part of the business (their services division). However they do say that, "the core SaaS business continues to perform very strongly and we are optimistic about the outlook for the year". Sounds encouraging. If anyone has the time & inclination, do let me know what you think about DOTD.

 

I see that shares in

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