Creightons plc is a company that develops, manufactures, and markets toiletry products. It appears to have been listed since 1999 but the first RNS on Investegate is “Final Results” – which suggests more RNS announcements are missing.
You may have seen some of their brands in the high street – management said at Mello they have an excellent relationship with Home Bargains. They expect the business to keep going from strength to strength (but of course all management teams would say that) and that a key factor of that will be the growth of the online business. With revenue growth of 6% I don’t feel very impressed, though gross margin improved to 42% from 38.3%. This shows bargaining power with suppliers and also the strength of the brand.
The chairman reports that “e-commerce doubled in the period, albeit from a low base”. Unfortunately, we left to guess that base as it is not broken down to be displayed in Note 7 which covers revenue on the income statement in the recent interim financial report.
Background
Here is the chart:
We can see that from the brief period of exuberance, the stock price has done very little until around the end of 2012, where volume appears to started to trickle in.
I can credit £Creightons for teaching me early on that finding stocks that go up a lot is not impossible. This stock was one of my first share buys, alongside Ab Dynamics (LON:ABDP), and I owned Creightons from 6p. I sold it around 12p thinking I was clever, as I had just made 100% of my money, wondering what I should buy next. It was only after I read Peter Lynch’s books where he claims “sometimes the best stock to buy is one you already own”, when I realised he was right!
I have bought and sold Creightons many a time since then, as I’ve also realised that if I allow my bias of not wanting to buy shares higher than the price I sold at then I would barely be able to buy any shares! Very often stocks do go higher but as a trader this is something we need to get used to – we are sacrificing long term moves for short term gain. If you want…
