AIM-listed online ladies fashionwear purveyor Sosandar (SOS) served up a half-year (to September) trading update this morning. The highlights were appealing: revenues up 72% year-on-year and a profit before tax of £0.1 million made good reading. But as Tom Winnifrith oft opines, sales is vanity and profit is a matter of opinion: what really matters is cash.

I’ve been taking a look through the annual report from Wyld, AIM-listed Tern’s second largest investment, for calendar 2021. Needless to say, there was no announcement form Tern over this…..

A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece here about how the share price of Oilex (OEX) was being manipulated, with all sorts of claims being made from some people about being told information that wasn’t in the public domain.

Online fashion retailer Boohoo (BOO) has performed terribly for anyone who has been invested over the past year or so and has seen its share price drop by around 75% during that time.

Gold ended the week at $1808 – so still around the $1800 mark. It has been here for what seems to have been an eternity. Yet at the same time, whilst the yellow metal has held firm, gold stocks have been selling off and silver has slipped back to $22.50, having been as high as $24.50 only a couple of weeks ago.

Johnson Matthey (JMAT) has seen its share price take a bit of a hit in recent months and is now trading at a similar level to where it started the year, despite the world economy looking in better shape now than it did then.

Shares in AIM-listed jam-tomorrow investment company Tern plc (TERN) are still riding high at 10p. The spark for the latest rise was to do with principal investee Device Authority and the FIDO Alliance which involves no less than Intel. So Tern will make a fortune, right? Not so fast!

AIM-listed Haydale Graphene (HAYD) has offered up its interims to December 2020 today and whilst the company flags increased sales of functionalised inks graphene and points to falling admin costs and operating losses, these are on an adjusted basis. The unadjusted truth is that sales of £1.277 million were down from £1.347 million the previous year and the company lost £2 million in total comprehensive loss (although this is marked as being for the year – not that there was an cut’n’paste laziness!)

AIM-listed Block Energy (BLOE) seems to have made a pretty decent effort at addressing the problems I raised HERE. On Thursday, an RNS appeared which seems a pretty good overview of where things are and announced the departure from the board of NED and former technical director, Mr Roger McMechan…

When it comes to new technology that is yet to become common place, being amongst the first to get involved doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, especially for early investors in smaller companies.

Hello, Share Swampers. As the virus continues to dampen the city, the big question still remains. Should we be in cash or shares? Of course, the answer lies in between the two poles. You certainly need enough cash to carry you through this dodgy period, however long it might last. But if you follow the golden rule of always having at least 10% of your bag in cash this should not be a worry to most of us.

Covid-19 has had a big impact on many companies and quite a number of them now look priced to pretty much completely fail and go bust.

Most of the shares I cover here are from a longer term investment perspective, or ones which I think will go a lot lower and are best avoided.

Picking shares that are worth buying at the moment is a real minefield as the situation with Covid-19 is changing all the time. It would be very easy just to sit here and say ‘sell everything’ and you could probably stick a pin in a list of stocks at the moment to pick a sell recommendation, and the chances are that it would go down, at least in the near time!

One of the signs that all is not well at a plc is when directors pile in for share purchases of a poxy amount to try to show confidence. And that brings me to Future plc (FUTR) which has been on the receiving end of a duffing up by our own Tom Winnifrith and the Dark Destroyer Matt Earl at Shadowfall. Of course, as Tom Winnifrith points out, Future’s response would have made the US fraudster-turned-fraudbuster Sam Antar proud: the report and criticisms were totally ignored.

Future PLC (FUTR)  floated on AIM in June 1999, in the midst of the dotcom bubble. It listed at 385 pence per share, raising around £173 million, and valuing the company at £578 million. Within a year, its shares had risen by more than 100%. Within 2 years, its shares had fallen by almost 95% as its investments into new magazines and web sites failed to pay-off. While revenue jumped, it began to rack up losses.

AIM-listed online Women’s wear peddler Sosandar (SOS) delivered a Christmas trading update this morning. Bearing in mind that I was previously very bullish on the company, but lost faith as management strategy appeared to change with the wind, I was fascinated to see if I was still comfortable with having sold out, or had perhaps been too much of a pessimist.

Hello Share Trouncers. Housebuilders continue to stay high on my list. That’s despite government plans to end the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme by 2023. Persimmon (PSN) is worth your further consideration in my view, not least because of a prospective dividend yield of 10.3%...

The numbers from Morningstar this morning show that Neil Woodford lesser hound, the Income Focus fund (WIFF), was once again suffering significant redemptions yesterday. Surely the end beckons.

It is some three years since Evil Banksta covered AIM-listed AFC Energy (AFC) on this site with his piece In the long run, AFC Energy is a zero. The shares were then 14.5p. Last night they were 3.775p and now they are 3.39p. I guess we are 76.5% there, then! This morning we were told that the company was pleased to announce its results – but should it be?

AIM-listed Sosandar (SOS) has announced a full year trading update. On the surface, a rise in revenues to £4.4 million, up 228%, looks good but the statement is a bit vague and I fear that growth has slowed down somewhat, though it is still very impressive.

Indian fashion retailer Koovs (KOOV) has just released its interim results and they don’t look pretty, but to be fair to the company that was largely expected.

Sound energy (SOU) is a company that I’ve been negative on in the past, and justifiably so considering its recent fall from grace as one of the most popular shares amongst private investors.

During the last couple of years we have seen two retailers from the angling market float on the market, and their fortunes have taken very different directions.

I’m a big fan of Aston Martin cars and it is one of the most famous brands from the UK, but I can’t see myself rushing to buy shares when the IPO takes place in early October. More details on exactly how the floatation will be structured should become available when the car maker publishes a prospectus around September 20, but it is expected that it will be seeking a valuation of around £5 billion.

I came in for a fair bit of criticism when I covered Indian fashion retailer Koovs (KOOV) negatively and suggested it was a sell or avoid back at the start of July. Since then the share price has pretty much halved from the 20p level that it was trading at, so I feel that my criticism of the company was justified, and my view has been vindicated – hopefully some of you who have read my articles and were holding at the time also saved yourselves from seeing the value of your investment halve. A number of people have been asking me what my view is of the company now that the share price has dropped back to around 10.6p to buy, so I felt that it was time to take another look.

Some might see Foxtons Group (FOXT) as a good recovery play given how far the share price has fallen in recent times... but is it?...

Hello, Share Saddlers. I’m ashamed to admit that one of the main reasons I bought Whitbread (WTB) shares is that it came with a deal for two hotel nights at Premier Inns for the price of one. We are testing the waters on this one with a romantic weekend break later this month.

Indian online fashion retailer Koovs (KOOV) is a company that I have kept an eye on as some were tipping it to be the next Asos, but I have always been far more bearish on the chances of that actually happening!

The People’s Operator (TPOP) is one of a number of AIM companies where you have to wonder whether there is really any point in it continuing to stay in business, other than generating fees for its brokers.

The beverage/retail sector isn’t one which I normally watch that closely in general, but there is one small AIM listed outfit called Distil (DIS) shares in which I have been following for a while now.

Unfortunately a lot of early stage media and technology companies can look to have huge potential but then fail to really live up to expectations, and I think that has definitely been the case with Gfinity (GFIN).

Hobby products group, Hornby (HRN) has emphasised “turnaround plan on track and robust current trading” - and the shares have responded currently just over 7% higher to 33.5p. Is it recovery ahoy here?...

With the L1 funding package now fully drawn, AIM-listed CloudTag has now had an awfully large amount of money, yet we are still to see a product available for it to sell. But thumbing through the RNSs of the last few months shows an incredible cashburn. Where has it all gone?

Wow! I’d love to have been a fly on the wall over at Cairn Financial as the wording of last night’s no-one-is-watching-o’clock RNS from AIM-listed CloudTag (CTAG) was being, ahem, “discussed.” I wonder how long that lot took to put together….since last Friday? It was a real shocker.

Estate agents took a big hit last week when Chancellor Philip Hammond’s Autumn Statement revealed a surprise, in the form of a ban on letting fees.

It amazes me how some of these small AIM companies continue to operate for years even after they look dead and buried, and that certainly seems to be the case with PowerHouse Energy (PHE).

I wrote on Card Factory (CARD) in August with the shares then at around 300p – concluding I could understand the share price decline and to avoid. The following updates with the shares currently at 260p on the back of a third quarter trading update…

It has been announced that CFO of unique cash-burning machine (sorry, “unique… provider of enterprise-ready, non-stop software solutions that enable globally distributed organizations to meet today's data challenges of secure storage, scalability and continuous availability”) WANdisco plc (WAND), Paul Harrison, is to join JUST EAT plc with effect from 26th September. He is stated to be “looking forward to joining”. I bet…

Online fashion retailer Koovs PLC (KOOV) is one of those companies where the market valuation continues to baffle me, and I can’t see any reason currently why the share price should be anywhere near as high as it is.

Amino Technologies (AMO) has announced “a strong first half performance with record order intake and a very encouraging backlog to take into the second half of the year following sales growth in key regions”. Sounds interesting…

I noted before (HERE) that NED of AIM-listed China Nonferrous Gold (CNG), Mr Abuali Ismatov, had been dumping his shares in the company all year. The sales had seen a pause until mid-November but seems to have resumed in the wake of the announcement of the commissioning of company’s processing plant at its Pakrut gold project in Tajikistan. Total sales this year by Mr Ismatov by 20 Nov had amounted to around three quarters of a Bernie. But the sales have continued apace.

A month ago almost to the day (link here) I wrote on the luxury retailer Burberry (BRBY) that:

‘The direction of Burberry shares over the next six months does largely depend on how Chinese performance is perceived.  I think they surprise these low expectations and extrapolations…And this makes Burberry shares (still) a buy today’.

Today’s formal six month numbers to the end of September released today reiterate this view. 

Last week I had a deco at Next (NXT) shares, noting that the share price had weakened somewhat. The share price then was 6,905p and arguably the share looked as though it had found some linear trend support. But something stayed my hand. Was it the god of markets placing a forbidding index finger on my shoulder? More probably it was the rating the market had given the shares. On consensus estimates for the current year to January 2015 the share at 6,905p was on a prospective PER of nearly 17 times. Next is a remarkably successful company and deserves its premium but even so……? 

Hello Share Swingers: Generally speaking, I hold no truck with silly supermarket shares. Firstly, they are boring. They go up a bit, the come down and then regain their old value. But they never seem to get anywhere.