The Week Ahead: 30 September

30th Sep by Megan Boxall

12 comments 1816 reads

For the last few weeks, two of Stockopedia’s tech gurus have been building a dashboard to help us generate more and better market insights. It’s a brilliant system which we’re hoping to use to improve both the quality and the depth of our companies and markets analysis.

The plan is to keep building and adding new screens and insights to the system, but to start with, we’ve put together a screen to identify companies reporting financial results in the coming week. The dashboard also shows us the consensus analyst expectations and the companies’ track record for meeting expectations. There are still some creases to be ironed out, but here is a preview of the screen results for the rest of the week.

Company	Event	Date	Last normalised EPS	EPS Forecast	6m price change
James Halstead	Annual results	01/10/2024	10.2p	9.9p	-12%
JD Sports Fashion	Interim results	02/10/2024	12.1p	12.9p	15%
Pinewood Technologies	Interim results	02/10/2024	11.9p	10.1p	-53%
Tesco	Interim results	03/10/2024	24.8p	25.8p	22%
Galliford Try Holdings	Annual results	03/10/2024	18.6p	22.8p	26%
J D Wetherspoon	Annual results	04/10/2024	102p	43.1p	1.1%

Allergy Therapeutics - still waiting on the numbers

Allergy Therapeutics (LON:AGY) was one of the first companies that I covered when I became a financial journalist. On paper, it’s not a terrible small cap pharma company. Although it has never been shy of investing in innovative new drugs, it had a suite of already approved medicines which actually make money. In fact for a brief period between 2019 and 2021, the company was profitable.

For anyone with the fortitude to invest in the small cap pharma space, it’s important to look for companies with an ability to fill their coffers without simply leaning on their investors (or, worse, their debtors - because no bank is going to offer generous rates to a loss making pharma company). Allergy Therapeutics’ medicines for (you guessed it) allergies have kept the company alive despite multiple disappointing drugs trials.

At the time of writing, the company is one of our top ranked Momentum stocks. It’s had a good year, despite the woes of Aim - the market on which it is listed - and the share price is up 144% in the year to date.

But that is only small comfort to anyone who has held Allergy Therapeutics for longer than a year. The shares were suspended for six months at the start of 2023 after the company failed to put together its annual results.

Investors who have enjoyed the momentum of the last 12 months should be concerned that the latest set of numbers (which were…

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simoan

30th Sep

Saga (LON:SAGA) Interim results on 02/10.

Epitychia

Thank you.

What would be exceptionally valuable would be the ability to download historical Stock Ranks for individual companies, in order to assess their track record.

FREng

You can look at a selection of previous stockreports in pdf format by clicking the Print dropdown menu button underneath the stock ranks.

Graham Wells

1st Oct

Thanks Megan and the team!

This screen looks really interesting and a great initiative. Especially for the less experienced investors.

J D Wetherspoon (LON:JDW)

But the thing about Wetherspoons that the numbers fail to convey is that its customers love it. The people who work for it love it too. And it’s hard to deny that Tim Martin is passionate about preserving the institute that is the great British pub.

One of the local Weatherspoons small pubs near me has just closed because the Landlord has put the lease up too much and Weatherspoons refused to pay the increase. The customers are gutted because (as you rightly state they are a particular type, not all young, but people who want real value) they have lost the cheap pub they love and the place where they used to meet and have good value food and drink with like minded friends. I too, was also disappointed at the closure. By the way it was taken over the next day by a Sports Bar, obviously serving more expensive food and drink! How long will they last, paying the increased lease?

There are several small (usual for Spoons) pubs in the suburbs around this area in London like the one that closed and they are all always packed! The themed nights, Curry and Steak nights etc' are always popular and very busy. It definitely pays to have the App' on your phone to be able to order drinks at the table on these nights as it gets very busy at the bar. So obviously no shortage of customers and not overstaffed, in which to profit from. The question then, is just are they making enough money from the sales? I would say he's careful with the costs, taking into account the pub that closed because of the raised lease and the fact that when the energy costs rocketed, they turned the heating down or off! but that didn't deter the punters because there's not many other pubs that can offer the same value! They obvious have busier times than others, but I've never been in an empty one.

But like I said before, it's all about the numbers for us, as to whether it's a good investment and not just a good value place to get something to eat and drink?

I don't hold at the moment but would like to if I felt the price was right? Last time I looked I thought the SP was a little too expensive. But I might buy on a decent dip in the SP. It should be quite easy to increase the margins by just adding a couple of pennies to the food and drink and still be cheaper than all or most of the other general pubs in the area? But maybe it's not that easy otherwise they would've done it!

By the way the busiest pub that takes the most money in the country is the Weatherspoons in Gatwick Airport, which is always absolutely packed and always has a que waiting to be seated. It's also far cheaper than all the other food outlets in the airport!

Welcome your thoughts..........?

kind regards, Graham.

The Scribe

Thank you Megan. This looks interesting and can provide investors at a glance at what is coming up in the following week. A welcome addition to all the other financial metrics and data that is available on the website.

Lord Gnome

2nd Oct

A great initiative. I will definitely use this. I’m sure it will prove popular.

Anthony127

I bought J D Wetherspoon (LON:JDW) about a year ago thinking that it could return to its pre Covid value of £16.

I notice that there have been some pub disposals recently but these do not seem to have impacted revenues or eps and I understand that the majority are due to duplication with other JDW pubs being too close to each other.

What is noticeable to me is the increase in share count over the last 5 years or so, perhaps due to the employee share scheme, now that it has been implemented I'm assuming and hoping that the share count will stabilise and help eps.

I do think that JDW is benefitting from the many closures of British pubs that are going on and that JDW will emerge as survivors having beaten the competition. Also far too many pubs these days cant be bothered to open until noon whereas Wetherspoons are open from early in the morning.

I particularly like the fact that JDW shares its economies with its customers by lowering its prices where it can which I think shows some integrity, at this juncture I regard JDW as a value turnaround. I await Friday's results with interest.

PeteB

This will be a really useful screen. Any chance that it could be available at the portfolio level, so you can see in one place whether any of your portfolio holdings are reporting, please?

ShoeShineBoy

5th Oct

Hi Megan,

like others below, thanks for continuing to write this column, I always enjoy reading it. Tesco (LON:TSCO) was big buy for me back in 2021 when interest rates were rock bottom and I was looking for better yields on my spare cash. What I didn't expect was to make a decent sized capital gain!

Mgt made good decisions during covid (repaid the furlough cash and used the UK train network instead of haulage drivers to reduce transportation costs), have moved the business away from banking, started a large scale share buyback and continued to generate lots of free cashflow.

I like the business and especially the fact I can go to one of the stores in West London to see 'front of shop' for myself.

ROCE and margin percentages are on the low side but better than I thought before I was a holder.

This week's numbers were good and several follow-up articles were helpful in terms of highlighting the differences between Tesco (LON:TSCO) and J Sainsbury (LON:SBRY) ie: 7% of J Sainsbury (LON:SBRY) sales come from non-food and so analysts think the business is more susceptible to a potential downturn if the average UK consumer decides to spend less.

https://tinyurl.com/yxywu5s2

My problem now is a nice one: do I continue to hold Tesco (LON:TSCO) as one of my top 6 or 7 holdings or take the profit ? The yield is not what it used to be but then again if the BoE speed up interest rate cuts, Tesco (LON:TSCO) will compare favourably again to cash.

SSB

John LA

8th Oct

Hi thank you for a really informative post, do you plan to make this a regular post.? It's really useful to know the upcoming announcements

Megan Boxall

Hi John,

I'm glad you find it useful. Yes we are planning on making this a weekly content feature and we've decided that it is probably most useful published on a Friday - hopefully some useful weekend reading for investors to prepare for the week ahead.

It's still quite quiet in the UK, but results and trading statements will start picking up towards the end of October. And it's Q3 results season in the US so there should be some interesting news flow coming from across the pond.

Interesting on the comparison of Tesco and Sainsbury - even just from a consumer perspective I would say that Tesco feels like it's in a better position to weather any downturn in consumer spending. It seems like the clubcard and discounting is really working.

On the subject of what to do with your holding now, we have actually got a webinar coming up next week on stock selling discipline, rules and good practice. You can sign up here: https://www.stockopedia.com/ac...

The Week Ahead: 30 September

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Megan Boxall

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