Good morning!
It was a very exciting day yesterday, with the news that J Sainsbury (LON:SBRY) approached Home Retail (LON:HOME) with a mooted takeover deal in Nov 2015, but was rebuffed. As this situation is not really relevant to these small caps reports, let's park that to one side, and I'll write a separate article about it here on Stockopedia a bit later, when time permits.
Check out Ed's NAPS for 2016, selected using the StockRank system, which achieved brilliant results last year - a staggering 43.4% return. As he says, it may not be possible to replicate such a strong performance in future years, but it's a highly impressive first year.
It adds great credence to the idea that "farming" as an investment approach, using StockRanks, is a terrific way for investors to make good returns without having to do a lot of work - ideal for people who have full-time jobs which limit the time available for investment research.
Carr's (LON:CARR)
Share price: 159.2p
No. shares: 89.8m
Market cap: £143.0m
Trading update - this is an agriculture, food, and engineering group. It has an end Aug year end, so yesterday's update covered the 18 weeks to 2 Jan 2016, so 69% of H1, in terms of time.
The key sentence says;
Carr's continues to trade in line with the Board's expectations for the full year.
A lot more detail is given, and it seems impressive that the agriculture division has coped with various issues, including extensive flooding in the North of England, yet still managed to produce an in line performance. Insurance is in place for one feed mill which has been affected by flooding.
The food division was also affected by the flooding (or rather, a major customer was, with a knock-on impact), but this is covered by business interruption insurance.
Margin pressure is noted in the supply chain for bakery category.
There's a good article in today's Questor column in the Telegraph, giving additional useful background on the company.
The engineering division notes a slower than expected start to H1, with the dreaded H2 weighting comment - often a deferred profit warning. Therefore readers would need to check how material the engineering division is to overall profitability.
Net debt was £31.9m at 28 Nov 2015, up £1.5m against prior year. It seems…
