Good afternoon.
It's been a rather difficult morning here, we had a medical emergency, so I've been looking after the patient, and had to go into hospital with her, after the Doctor called an ambulance, due to some worrying signs.
Unfortunately, the impact of 50 years smoking is now making itself known. What an absolute scourge on humanity tobacco is - I've never bought shares in any tobacco company, nor will I ever do so.
So somewhat belatedly, here is today's report. Sorry for the delay.
Redde (LON:REDD)
Share price: 177p (up 8.4% today)
No. shares: 302.2m
Market cap: £534.9m
(at the time of writing, I hold a short position in this share)
News release - the company issued a statement last week, on Fri afternoon, in response to the Govt's Autumn Statement, which included action to be taken to rein in the compensation culture, in particular in relation to (often false) whiplash claims after car accidents.
Shares in REDD fell in sympathy with other companies involved in personal injury claims. Although reading through REDD's statement on Friday, it seems that very little of their business is likely to be affected by the changes. Therefore it's looking increasingly likely that the sharp fall in share price last week might have been unjustified.
This last sentence from REDD's announcement in particular, suggests that the group appears to have little exposure to problems in this area;
Redde further notes that the activities of the Group which would be covered by legislation of the sort proposed by the Chancellor contribute less than 2.5% of the Group’s revenue.
This set me thinking that 2.5% of group revenues isn't much, but what if it's a lot more profitable than the other group activities? So for this reason, I downloaded the accounts for every group company within REDD, from Companies House (which is now free) and had a quick look, to get a better feel for where the group's main activities and profits come from.
In this case, the main activity seems to be replacement vehicles for accident victims, which has always been the case with this company, from when it was HelpHire, although for some reason I thought it had broadened out much more into other areas, such as whiplash. That doesn't seem to be the case particularly, so it looks like I made a mistake by opening a short position on this share late last…
