Good morning! Ed held another Webinar on Stockopedia yesterday, and it was I think the busiest yet, with about 250 people registering. I listened in, and as usual it was chock full of useful information - and for those who missed it, the video of the webinar is now live. Well worth a listen - e.g. it flagged up a useful feature on Stockopedia that I hadn't even noticed was there - "run a checklist", which I shall experiment with later.

The US market had a noticeable pullback last night, for the first time in a while. This is what we need - a bit of fear coming back into the market, and taking the top off the most frothy valuations, which are in abundance. That is the way a healthy market should work, otherwise bull markets just soar out of control, and we end up with a market crash.

So we are forecast to open down about 30 points here in the UK, with the FTSE 100 Future indicating 6,486 at the moment. Why do I mention that? Just because it sets the background for what we can expect at the open.

 

 

 

 

It's fairly quiet for news today. Moss Bros (LON:MOSB) has issued an IMS covering the period 28 Jul to 7 Dec 2013, so that's the bulk of its H2, as the year-end date is on or around 26 Jan 2014. They have been trading surprisingly well for a while now, at least in terms of sales performance anyway. That trend continues, with an impressive H2 performance so far, with the key LFL ("like-for-like", i.e. eliminating the impact of new stores & closed stores) sales being up 5.3% against last year - that really is impressive, in an economy that's growing at nothing like that rate.

LFL sales for the 45 weeks of the year to date are up 2.2%, so this points towards an improving sales trend in H2 so far. Gross margin is 70 basis points down on the equivalent period in H2 last year, which will negate just under a quarter of the sales gain, in profit terms, by my rough calculations:

 

 H2 performance to date Last Year This Year  
Turnover 100.0 105.3 +5.3%
Gross…

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