Shareholders in virtual queuing system company Lo-Q (LOQ) will be pleased with more good news - Dolly Parton's "Dollywood" theme park has extended the duration of an existing contract, and is to also install the system in a second theme park. I was tempted to make a joke about water parks and buoyancy aids, but thought better of it.

I totally understand that LOQ is a terrific growth company, but that valuation is looking really stretched now - almost 3 times sales, for a company with a fairly standard, sub-10% profit margin. 25 times 2012/13 forecast earnings is pretty eye-watering, but the market clearly believes strong growth will continue.

Ubisense (LON:UBI)

Badly-worded RNS of the day award goes to Ubisense (UBI) with their schizophrenic trading update, which starts off sounding like a profits warning, gradually warms up, and then ends up sounding positive. It's just all wrong.

Take this sentence for example:

"The Group has displayed good momentum in the second half of the period but timing of some projects has led to revenue growth below market expectations and profitability in line with consensus expectations for the full year."
You start reading it and think, oh here we go, timing of projects, revenue below market expectations, so this is a profits warning. Right? Wrong! They finish the sentence by saying that profitability is in line with market expectations.Surely they should have inserted a full stop after the statement about revenue being disappointing? Then started a second sentence saying, "However, profitability will be in line with consensus expectations for the full year." That would have been so much clearer.
It then finished with a really upbeat commentary from the CEO, so some very muddled messages here, and I suspect they will pay the price for that with a softer share price today. The shares look priced very aggressively too, at least double the price that would begin to get me interested. I cannot see why this company has a mkt cap anywhere near £50m, given that it's only forecast to break-even in 2012, and make under £1m profit in 2013.

Craneware (LON:CRW)

The ridiculous quote-driven market for small caps is just not working. Yesterday  was another example, where I wanted to buy shares in Craneware (CRW), but…

Unlock the rest of this article with a 14 day trial

Unlock with Email
Unlock with Google

Already have an account?
Login here