Good morning, and apologies for being a little late today. I had one too many after last night's Equity Development Investor Forum, where as usual three companies did a 20 min presentation then brief Q&A to a group of investors (Pure Circle, Vislink, and Cranswick).

I'm a huge fan of this type of meet the management event, and I try to get along to as many as I can. Thanks as always to Fasken Martineau for hosting the event in their Hanover Square offices, which are ideal for both travel and layout. It's good to see some companies beginning to take private investors seriously and offering us the same sort of contact as they routinely give to Institutions. After all, it's us private investors who create the liquidity, narrow the spread, and set the price. So in many ways we're actually more important than Institutions, yet bizarrely most of the City ignores us or treats us with haughty contempt. That needs to change.

Unfortunately, George Osborne's spending review seemed to have affected the canapes, as it was a drastically reduced spread. You would think a £550m market cap pork company would have laid on a bit of a spread, but nothing! I can be easily swayed with a bacon sandwich and some stevia-based carbonated soft drinks. #JustSaying.

But the wine was delicious and free-flowing, a bit too free flowing in my case, as my rucksack dived off my shoulder at one point when I was saying something particularly dramatic, and launched an entire glass of wine all over my good friend David Stredder. Luckily it was white, and exactly the same colour as his jacket, so a quick blow dry in the gents restored his jacket to its former glory.

 

 

Final results for the year ended 31 Mar 2013 from James Latham (LON:LTHM) look pretty solid. It's a timber products company.  Profit fell slightly, and EPS eased from 31.4p last year to 28.2p this year (diluted).  So at 310p the shares are on a PER of about 11, which seems reasonable value.

I like the 10.2p dividend, which is 2.8 times covered, so that'a a sustainable yield of 3.3%.

The fly in the ointment is their pension deficit, which at £16.8m balance sheet liability is quite hefty. Scheme assets rose by £5.3m in the year, but the deficit grew…

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