For a tiny company which only uplisted to NASDAQ recently, Research Solutions $RSSS is very expensive but it may be worth it.
It's an information company - they sell access to scientific papers and want to become "the Bloomberg of Science"
I'll only mention a couple of the main moving parts and recent developments here and the valuation is up to you, it'll be multiples of current ARR however you slice it.
Two sections to this business: transactions and platforms - platforms is where the money is made.
A corporate or academic customer signs up to the platform (platforms) and though it can order scientific literature (transactions) and get it within an hour. The platform allows access and advanced manipulation of the literature. Note in red, the Q3 jump in deployments
The company last Q just signed a deal with Springer Nature, this move alone adds 1/3rd of all worldwide journal published scientific literature that already available on the platform and may explain the jump in deployments as well as the tone on the call afterwards.
In green above I highlight the gross margins and looking further down the table, its easy enough to see the operating leverage that the growth in platform deployments will bring.
Purple highlights show the magnitude of expensed development and EBITDA.
Why now? I've been watching $RSSS for a long time and whilst the price just doesn't crack, it has dipped somewhat. Q3 could have been the prelude to a Springer-driven step change in already strong growth and into profitability; this may well never look "cheap" or even reasonable.
10K is only 65 pages long, original table in first tweet available here on the company's website and is updated each quarter
$RADA makes small tactical military radars. The recent sell off hasn't made it cheap but it has begun to bring it closer to GARP territory
It's a rare pure-play on a theme that's perhaps not yet widely appreciated and is hard to access directly but you can see it in the numbers
Here's where it trades on a forward sales multiple against some of the big diversified defence majors - has lost much of the premium and now sits a little off the top end. Brits bottom of the pile.
Same group of majors but here on forward EBITDA multiples and towards the bottom end excluding the UK companies.
Naive view but I think Hunting #HTG may be on its way back to Covid lows because it's orphaned on the wrong market and there's an information disconnect - if so, my guess is that it's pretty oversold here.
The company isn't a pure play but it's good enough to say it's very shale exposed, towards the completion side vs the drilling side of things.
Three year chart to around May 2021: HTG in green vs several US oil services ETFs - as you can see, they trade in lockstep.
Same chart but on a 2021 YTD basis and it starts diverging somewhere around mid summer.
IG Design #IGR was a ten bagger in the 5 years leading up to Covid. An update a fortnight ago dropped the shares by half and erased all the gains in the most recent five years. Knife catching and broken growth this soon is almost always a mistake but IG may be an exception here.
My basic premise with it is that the accounts are a complicated nightmare (CTRL+f for "adjust" is 232 hits in the last FY report) but most immediately, that this is right now a gross margin story - I think there are grounds to at least consider whether IG can be given a pass here
Unfortunately, it does mean walking through it so grab a.. (just no) so anyway, here's the rough idea: Pre-covid in white, M&A growth darling, 20% gross margins. Forget the op margin for now - I'm stripping out the adjustments that made adjusted whatever go up and to the right
Saw a one-line tweet the other day mentioning McColls #MCLS as one of 2 highest conviction names.
I think I see why: there's a metamorphosis happening underneath and reasonable path to PE and FCF multiples between 2-3 plus a growth narrative, all under that lovely grim exterior
Story is that they're shrinking. 1500+ stores 2 years back, to 1050 by the end of FY21
Also changing: culling small newsagent shops to focus towards larger, more profitable grocery-heavy stores. So far, so worthy - but the real interest is the transformation into Morrisons Daily
Company raised recently to accelerate a programme converting 350 stores into these Mini Morrisons. They're at 56 today, will be 350 by end FY22
Cost is £90K per shop, what they call "cash payback" is 2-3 years and so far they're providing pretty immediate LFL sales growth of 25%
What does Sneller see to get such sudden FOMO for the old zombie that is Iofina #IOF? If you recall the name, it should produce revulsion but a few things have changed and there's a chance it may be about to make some money.
IOF produces Iodine in the US via O&G brine. Iodine is a beneficiary of industrial recovery generally and covid specifically - the largest use is used as x-ray contrast which may benefit demand from catch up on delayed hospital treatment.
And because it's 2021, inevitably:
Production is trapped on the wrong side of the Pacific: the two major production centres are Japan and Chile - so you have the obvious logistics issues for both and potentially politics for the latter.
I think it's worth revisiting Aquis #AQX here in light of a couple of data points that have since come out.
There are three main parts to the co: a stock exchange (AQSE); a tech licencing biz and their multilateral trading facility (AQXE) - it's this last one I want to look at.
First is the RNS from earlier this month announcing their MTF (investopedia.com/terms/m/multil…) had achieved 6.2% market share. Across the €53.6B traded on AQXE in July, this came out to €1.7B a day.
Those 6.2% and €1.7B are quite significant numbers and I'll come back to them later
In the period since the beginning of 2018 market share has risen from 1.72% to that 6.2% above. Here's how that value traded looks.