The best stocks to buy since 1993
Our latest issue will be released in 11 days, don't miss out!
Showing 11-20 of 48 results
I met with Vin Murria, one of the shrewder dealmakers on the London software scene, again this month. She is an old friend to SCSW. The last time I met her was probably 10 years ago when she was still running her previous company, Advanced Computer Software (then in her late forties), with the remit of building a business in primary care - softw... ...
Completing the trio of publishers to update the market this month (see Bloomsbury and Wilmington), Future’s AGM was told performance has been broadly on track this year, with an improvement in growth being seen since the end of Q4. Within the mix, price comparison site GoCompare and B2B has been faring very well, whist digital ads / e-com affili... ...
SCSW’s traditional New Year ritual is the NAPS mini-portfolio each January. Derived from a French card game named Napoleon, shortened to “Nap,” it refers to the best hand one can have and for us, it is an exercise of providing a select-once-and-leave-for-a-year portfolio. In 2023, I am not sure how satisfying it was that despite witnessing a do... ...
For a business that had a tidal wave of free cash generation of £253m, of which £96m went towards debt reduction (to leave net debt at £327m or 1.25x), a further £47m on acquisitions and £13m on buybacks, any normal market conditions would have seen the shares surge. Instead we had a wild gyration in November, with the shares ranging from £5.50-... ...
Signs are mounting that a long, dull period is over for former glamour stock Future. Between 2017-2021, Future caught the imagination spectacularly. The price went from 352p when I first wrote on them in December ‘17 to a post TMT bubble high of £39 by August 21, a gain of over 1000%, raising the price-earnings ratio to more than 50 as investors... ...
The slow steady decline in newspaper and newsstand magazine sales has persuaded many investors that this is a sector to be avoided. But some “dead tree” publishers, often with the help of fresh management, are coping well with the structural decline in print and creating strong platforms for future growth. You only need to look at the transforma... ...
Future is another advertising share that has been buffeted having fallen 50% in the year to date despite not putting a foot wrong. This month it acquired WhoWhatWear, a digital-only women’s lifestyle publisher based in the US. It has 12m online users and also a strong social media presence, with 10m social followers and makes Future the sixth-la... ...
Another SCSW share to squeeze out yet another upgrade is Future with operating profit to be at the top end of market expectations (which had been in a range of £183.5m to £193.6m). The company is pointing to “continued momentum in digital advertising with sustained yield growth more than offsetting the impact of strong comparat... ...
Future has acquired Dennis from Exponent Private Equity for £300m. Dennis is a consumer subscription business, which strengthenes its presence in Wealth in particular and also enhances Future’s US presence, given 56% of the revenues being acquired are in the US.In 2020, Dennis had sales of £104.8m (12% growth year-on-year) and EBITDA of £20m, ma... ...
The shares soared after Future’s blow out H1, which said Q3 has started ahead of management expectations. Full year results are now expected to be “materially ahead of market expectations.” Both big acquisitions, TI Media and GoCo, executed well. TI Media is ahead of target while GoCo, which was in for six weeks, is now expecte... ...