Ok Polar Capital are sitting on something like £30m in cash... but the market cap sits at £42m.
For a company expected to make a profit of £5.55m for FY08-09, that looks pretty crazy. Assets under Management are dropping, but as of 30th September they still had $2.87bn, a drop of only 8.7% or so for the last 6 months - which in this market is actually pretty good going... they had net subscriptions of $342m from ongoing businesses (highly impressive), a 10% loss on funds under management, but about 280m outflow from the Japan fund - investors have fled that one and it looks like it will close.
On the other hand, performance relatively vs. the industry has been ok... so Polar isn't going away.
The market seems to be suggesting that Polar's Asset management division isn't worth much... but for turnover of over $30m and profits of $5.55m, I think they've got it wrong.
EPS are going to come in at about 5p... which puts the stock on a p/e of 11X but once you strip out the cash, the p/e is less than 2 times...
I've put some into my fund, which I'm embarrassed to say had a bad start due to overenthusiasm. I'm going for value now as I try to redeem myself.
