Diary: mfi, look, ardn, hvn

LOOK: Lookers - General Retailers - 54.1p/£208m

LOOK, the car retailers, has been getting a bit of interest from the value investing blogs. Valuhunteruk wrote about it yesterday, but I can't find offhand who else is interested in it. He cautioned about the lease situation, and I haven't factored that into my calcs. I calculate a ROC of 19.8% and a UEY of 19.4%, based on EBIT of 45m, TEV of 227.8m, EV of 232.4m (terms defined below). Pretty good - but remember my calcs are quick-and-dirty.


What the cat dragged in

Scanning down the list of heavy fallers on 03-Nov-2011, the following couple of companies caught my attention.

ARDN (Arden Partners) was down 17% on that day (ouch), but is interesting because it's now a net-net: market cap £8.9m against NCAV £11.5m. The Company's business consists of corporate finance, equity research, equity sales and market making activities. Arden Partners plc specializes in advising and provides corporate financing and corporate broking services medium and small sized companies across a range of industry sectors. The cause of the fall was a trading update: "the Company was meaningfully profitable after charging share based payments and restructuring costs although, it will be materially less than market guidance."

HVN (Harvey Nash Group) was down 11% on that day. No real news, except that it did speak out in an article in What Investment Trader: "The chief executive of Harvey Nash, the recruitment and outsourcing consultancy, has leapt to the defence of FTSE 100 directors as criticisms mount following a report that showed their earnings had increased 50 per cent in the last year." So there we go, apparently a 50% pay rise is quite reasonable. It caught my attention because it has an UEY = 17.0% (unleveraged earnings yield) and ROC = 57.5% (return on capital), which might be interesting to magic formula folk. I calculated EBIT = 7.3m, EV = 43m, TEV = 12.7m