Small caps all over the place
Article Date: Mar 23 2000For once, it's almost impossible to generalise about what's happening among smallcaps. Terms like 'bull market' or 'bear market' are meaningless when stocks in the same sub-sector are putting in such divergent performance. Peter Shearlock reports
Among the dot.com stocks, there have been some signs of recovery after the previous week's shakeout - and the US high-tech market Nasdaq has started to provide some support again. But the underlying tone is poor, and I suspect that the game is up for many of the incubator/investment funds: why pay a massive premium to asset value when valuing the underlying investments is getting to be such a dodgy business?
Some of the moves among past recommendations this week have been breathtaking. On the plus side, just witness what has been happening to On-Line after its flotation of subsidiary ADVFN. On-Line shares (which I recommended in the Growth Company Investor Weekly Digest in September last year at 144.5p) have been bouncing back and forth between £10 and £12.50 as ADVFN, which has a clever financial analysis tool to support financial websites, came to the market in a placing at 10p a time and jumped to 59p. On-Line responded to some mistaken comment in the national press to point out that its remaining 76 per cent stake in ADVFN was worth over £100 milllion - or about £21 per On-Line share.
ActivCard, by contrast, must have been giving investors heart attacks. The Easdaq-listed company (recommended in the Digest at $24.90 in December) finally made its move onto the Nasdaq market - courtesy of a placing at $76.50 by J P Morgan, the investment bank. That should have been the prompt for a further run-up in the price. But Morgan appears to have chosen a stock symbol on Nasdaq that matched that of a now defunct stock - whose hapless shareholders promptly started entering sell orders. That confusion, plus some well-organised bear raiding in the wake of the high-tech shakeout, brought ActivCard's quote back to $36 before it recovered to $50. I suspect it is a buy again at these levels: its market capitalisation is not much over £1 billion and it now has £200 million or so in cash.
In last week's Digest, my main pick was measurement and control systems maker Roxspur, then 36.5p and now 39.5p.
Roxspur has been a dog of a stock over the last couple of years but a couple of weeks back the management announced they were looking at launching a management buy-out. That is not likely to be for any less than the current £20 million market capitalisation, even though the last set of figures showed earnings down a third in a tough market.
But more intriguing is what happens to the share quote. There is mounting speculation that it will be kept and the company turned into a shell vehicle. That could put several million pounds on the all-in value of the company. One for fun money punters.
Another interesting tiddler is Disperse Technologies, which came to the Ofex market a fortnight back at 44p and has since more than doubled. The shares have come up from 100.5p to 117.5p since my recommendaion in the Digest last week, but the shares are still a strong buy.
Disperse is working on four different technologies for simplifying and improving the manufacturing of creams and lotions - for the food, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and household goods industries. It already has a licence agreement with Estee Lauder and a development agreement with Reckitt Benckiser.
The board is stuffed with chemists and engineers, there are high-quality consultants and the market capitalisation is still only £20 million. Exciting.
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