Professor Glen Arnold

Piotroski factors provide some insight into the likelihood of financial distress by examining trends in key accounting metrics over two years.  If all nine point in a positive direction then a very low level of distress is indicated. Any score under five out of nine should make us wary. I’ll use the latest annual report to 31st May […]

Analysing the different business operations of Haynes (LSE:HYNS) is not made easy because the company avoids separating revenue and profit between the books and professional sales in the UK and Europe. However, by piecing together information from elsewhere we can deduce that the sales of paper books/manuals and online manuals in the UK is in […]

We can use the cyclically adjusted price earning ratio, CAPE, to give some perspective on the current share price expressed as a multiple of a company’s proven earnings over what might be regarded as an economic cycle.  It is usually measured using ten years of earnings, which is thought to be a long enough period […]

On Thursday I attended the AGM of Haynes (LSE:HYNS) in Sparkford, Somerset – a long trek from Leicestershire! I’d spent the previous three days reading about the company and had more or less concluded that it was no longer a share for my Modified price earnings ratio portfolio because earnings in recent years had been […]

SpaceandPeople (LSE:SAL) joined the AIM market in December 2004.  It sold 600,000 shares at 50p each (MCap of £5.7m).   These shares rose to £2.20 in 2008, then fell to around the issue price 2009-2012, rising to £1.52 in 2014.  Now they trade at 19p – 22p. This volatility reflects intermittent optimism about the potential of […]

With owner earnings we are trying to obtain the earnings that, in future, would be left for shareholders after the managers’ use of cash generated to pay for items of expenditure to maintain the strength of the economic franchise (e.g. additional capital items, additional working capital, marketing spend, R&D and staff training) and to maintain […]

I’ll use Piotroski’s nine factors aimed at a detecting a trend in financial distress risk to initiate a discussion of SpaceandPeople’s vulnerability to running into serious problems. After all, this share has fallen 86% in four years, which might indicate that Mr Market thinks it is likely to go bust. Below there is an analysis […]

Today I’ll examine if Spaceandpeople (LSE:SAL) achieves high returns on tangible assets on a consistent basis. This will be followed by rough estimates of value informed by the return on net tangible assets data. Two complications arise immediately in the analysis: Prettifying of the reported profits The directors have got used to not writing off […]

This SpaceandPeople (LSE:SAL) newsletter will examine whether there are good reasons to expect that the company can keep paying out an annual dividend of £293,000 (1.5p per share, or a dividend yield of 7.1%), and even raise it, given the quality of its business operations. I’ll start with the basic data on income and cash […]

SpaceandPeople (LSE:SAL) shares have fallen 86% in four and a half years to 21p (MCap £4.6m).  During that time there was only one year (2016) when losses were made.  Even with that loss of 3.12p the average EPS over eight years was 4.34p. Note in the calculations below I have completely ignored the directors preferred […]