Weekend Rebel Review 22nd Feb 2025

February blues! ANP, WYN, JET2, BOOM, CARD, OCI

This is just some thoughts, it isn't investment advice or incitement to buy in any way, just my views - please do your own thorough research. I’m not an analyst, I’m just a private investor looking after my own money. Nothing I do or say is meant as advice or should be taken as such. Here I publish my ideas and research that I have done and discuss the way I invest. Anything written here needs to be verified for its accuracy. Assume any stock I write about I likely own, so my views are biased. Inevitably I will get things wrong, everyone is responsible for their own decision making and what they buy and sell. Subscribing and reading this article means you accept the above and you take full responsibility for your own actions and decisions. Small Cap stocks can be illiquid and very hard to sell at times when demand is weak so caution is required.

Expect some spelling mistakes – I’m dyslexic and in a rush to get this out on a Friday so a bit of a task at times.

I’ve mentioned several times that I stick to sectors I understand and have suggested that it’s something you should think about if you are constantly picking up the odd thumping from disappointing news etc. It’s also worth looking back at the sectors where you have been hit. I have never had success in miners other than the big low in 2015/16 when there were bowls showing up everywhere off a big low. It’s worth looking back at the sectors where you have taken big hits and ask yourself are the odds in your favour in that sector. I know several guys that have had one real whopper gain in a sector, often by luck, but then they punt all sorts so stuff in the same sector and take a right hiding, just to try and find another whopper of a gain. Some people have to try to relive a lottery win, I guess that’s why a lot of multi-million pound lottery winners keep buying lottery tickets still – it’s the thrill of the win, not the money they want. The thrill of the win is a real adrenaline rush for many and I include myself in that, in fact at my age, and being a long in the tooth investor, it isn’t the money that gives me a thrill, its finding winners that others haven’t mostly found. That probably helps me stay pretty cool on big down days, knowing the next day cold be a big up day. If investors were to look back, they have likely given back everything they made from that one big win, looking for a second one in the same sector. If you researched a company really well, invested in it and made a lot of gains then yes, perhaps research more companies really well in the sector. But if you are one of these guys that does enough research just to feel you know the story and you got lucky in one case, I’d treat that as getting lucky and wouldn’t start throwing money at lots of others in the sector – it is too easy to want to relive the dream when it’s better to find better, safer dreams in other sectors. Understandability is very important to me. I’m never going to understand any business totally but I like a business where I can spend a few weeks or so to get a really good grasp of the business and it’s able to do that research without needing a masters degree in something to properly understand it, and understand the competition too. This is why retailers, builders, engineers, restaurants, pubs and bars etc, all rank high for me. I hold Avon Technologies – they use some very clever tech but basically it’s easy to understand because it’s just about making and selling helmets, gas masks and rebreathers. It’s easy to see who is buying the products and there’s lots of articles to read online. I can learn enough about the company and the products. The competition is pretty clear. Pharmas and miners and new tech like AI, all take a lot of understanding. At the moment every co is name-dropping AI to excite investors but AI has a wide range of capabilities, some things may be game changers, some may be pretty basic machine learning. Deep Seek proved that even the very best, biggest, highly rated AI related companies can get walloped if something or some company comes along with something far better and you likely have no way of knowing that particular rival had that product. That rarely happens in stuff like retail.

Basically, I think you can find plenty of stocks in plenty of sectors that you may have had success in a lot of times so why not think about focusing more, where you have frequently done well? Honing what you buy, where you buy and what to avoid really can help cut out those daft buys you make that often clip your gains through being invested where you are not well enough informed. You don’t have to invest everywhere or diversify so much as to increase your risk and your dilution. Buffet said ‘put all your eggs in one basket but watch the basket carefully’. I wouldn’t go that far but I get the sentiment and prefer to keep my holding numbers as near to 10 as I can. And try to focus on that 10. In reality I might get to 20 or a tad over but there will be 10 stocks that I know very well that will make up 70%+ of my portfolio.

Someone asked me last week, whether I regarded myself as an investor or a trader. I did say to them that you can be both, but basically investors and traders are the same, we are all investors or traders but just with different time scales. Some will buy and sell over the course of years, others will be over a timescale of days. I tend to think of myself as an investor that doesn’t mind taking advantage of short term momentum in a stock that may be rising on some form of excitement or short term momentum. Really I don’t much care about the label except for the fact that being called a trader usually has a derogatory slur to it, while being an investors seems to be more respectable. I don’t hear much of it these days having ditched ADVFN 10 years ago, the land of the spivs and trolls. At the end of the day, whether you are regarded as a trader or an investor, it’s about results and knowing what will make you money short term, and what’s best kept long term, and your performance and return. Trader or investor, whatever you fancy being called, I think you definitely make more money the more you buy and hold. I’m pretty sure if I bought my 10 best stocks today and was put in an induced coma for 10 years so I couldn’t touch them, I would do far better. Having the market right in front of your nose each day makes you do daft things at times. You never grow prize carrots if you pull them up each few weeks to see how they are doing. Sadly I often lack the discipline to hold on longer when I know I should. Passive investors who are not watching the screen all day long, likely don’t see other opportunities or get spooked by irrelevant news now and then, so to that extent, buy and forget has an advantage a lot of the time over active investing imo – ignorance can be bliss!

Markets

The market has been very quiet as it often is late February. March and April are the big months for results. I’ve been spending a bit more time looking at indexes while that is the case and this caught my eye this week – the FTSE Fledgling index:

The Fledgling Index is the underling to the Small Cap Index, fully listed stocks rather than Aim, the largest in the index has a market cap of £133m. Interestingly though, this index is very heavily weighted towards investment trusts and funds, in fact approx 70% are such companies. This index has made a stark move up of 5% in the last week or so – the biggest one week rally in a year. That screams to me to watch these sort of companies and as I mentioned last week I am long LIO, SMT and GROW.

After 2 good days, Monday and Tuesday that put me up 2%, I gave the lot back on Weds. Inflation came in at 3%, The market was looking for a reason to sell off on Weds, Ukraine, inflation meant a number of defence socks were back in favour so the punters were likely selling other stuff to raise funds to buy, or just bank a bit after a great 10 days. It amuses me how many punters want reassurance on any dip, it’s what shares do. Invariably, those dumping losers in the fall, put that cash to use in the stronger stocks as soon as the market starts to firm, just make sure you are in the stocks the punters want imo. You’d think these stocks that have great stories have suddenly seen everything change on one day’s profit taking. I added to a few stocks that I already hold rather than increase my number of holding bar one new buy. As far as charts go this week, Aim has ben the stand out

The Dow Transport looks to sill be in that up-trend, which is positive for Dow Theory followers:

Onto Stocks

Anpario. ANP is a UK-based manufacturer of natural sustainable feed additives for animal health, nutrition and biosecurity. Its feed addictive solutions include poultry, ruminant, swine, aqua and feed mill. Its product categories include health & performance, toxin management, feed quality, and hygiene & insect control.

This stock caught my eye a couple of months ago on the trading update which was rather good in my opinion.

Now forecast to do 24.6p eps and net cash of £10.5m after spending $6.3m on acquiring Bio-Vet, they will this year do record earnings and allowing for the acquisition, the net cash and earnings are higher than when they hit an all time high back in 2021:

The chart is curving up steeply but way off that 720p high. Better still, there are only 20.5m shares in circulation now compared to 2021 when they had 22m shares so PBT should convert to greater EPS

The CEO and the CFO hold 246k and 200k respectively.

Earnings forecasts have been rising steadily and Bio-Vet should add circa $550k or more PBT this year with lower shares in issue.

I suspect the earnings forecasts are conservative.

That curve up on the chart was just too for me to ignore ahead of the results in a months time, especially when earnings forecasts have doubled over the past year and earnings set to rise 50% over last year. 11p divi forecast for this year.

Do your research as ever, this isn’t a tip, I’m just commenting on what I have been up to. I bought my holding to be long into the results mid to late March.

Wynnstay, WYN – I seem to have gone animal feed crazy! 😊

WYN posted result two weeks ago and despite the fall in earnings to 23.8p from 36.2p the business looks cheap imo

Trading on a PE under 14 and £6m net cash, paying a 17.5p divi, the shares look cheap but there was more to the results.

The co recently got a new CEO, Alk Brand – who joined in October. He is Dutch and has extensive experience in this animal feed sector. His comments were eye-catching:

So there is a new 3 year plan and they are already confident of improvements. I like board changes and positive updates. There’s also a 5%+ divi @ 350p and a solid balance sheet. As the market sentiment improves, I think this will look more and more attractive to those that want to get back into the market with a safer stock and a great yield imo.

I have been buying while stock has been available but it can be tough to buy or sell many, 1000 is the mm size and over that you may struggle to trade at times.

Jet2 put out a trading update out on Wednesday which suggested earnings were inline, They did have a bit of a moan about costs though and said punters continue to book late. It wasn’t a surprise to me that punters book late, you can often get a better deal that way and a lot of people these days seem to feel like they are a bit teed off and think sod it, I’m ff on holiday. If you really leave it late and are happy to take what you can get you can be sure you are flying off while the weather is rubbish too, and there has been plenty of that.

Anyway, the market decided to sell off and several other co’s got dragged in in sentiment including IAG off 10p (3%) WIZZ was off 68p (4.2%) and OTB off 13.5p (5.4%) while Jet2 itself was of 168p (11%). Was that justified? It might be for airlines but OTB doesn’t have the costs the airlines have, they just sell the holidays. If airlines raise their prices so does OTB.

AudioBoom, BOOM was the first of my one-baggers in 2025 having risen 65% since the start of the year. The stock has had a small pull back, as it has done a couple of times this month in its charge north. Nothing goes up in a straight line, there’s always short periods of profit taking, as there was from £2 to £22 from Nov 20 over 14 months. Past charts are always worth referring back to imo.

I put a special Substack out purely on Audioboom one-bagging and my reasons for holding it last week, if you are new here and missed it it’s here:

https://cockneyrebel.substack.com/p/audioboom-boom

It’s always good to reassess on a one-bagging imo. I’ve not sold any, I have added in actually fact, higher than Thurs close but that is irrelevant, investors must do what they want to do, not what I do, and do your research to and know your own risk/reward and make your own decisions.

There will be pull backs in every stock on a steep rise where some take profits and some find buying opportunities, I’m cool with that. Some investors not used to having winners of late won’t be able to resist banking some, meanwhile I suspect buyers will snap up any dips at some point ahead of the next trading update mid April. That’s the way all rallies and winners get to much higher levels.

You have to remember that when there is big buying demand on volume, mm’s are often selling stock they don’t have. They make it up by buying shares on a mark down when the short term rally is over. This is how they balance their books, buying back shares cheaper than where they have recently been selling them to punters. You will often find rallies on 300% or more normal daily volume, then pull backs on far lower volume, that’s how mms work. A shortish period when the books are rebalanced and the cycle usually starts again.

If a bit of volatility bothers you then perhaps illiquid small caps are not the best place for you to be.

Chart since Jan 1^st:

And so that was a quieter week for the market as news goes, portfolio was all over the place tho. A couple of points of interest. I picked up Oakley Capital, OCI on Thursday and Friday as I’ve been watching the fall in spite of heavy director buying. Trading at near 30% below NAV, results in a month. Cardfactory, CARD had huge volume on Thurs and more higher than average volume on Friday – quite a rally on Thursday – there were a lot of very large trades. A fwd PE of 6 and a 6% yield here, results just 3 months away. 3.7p final divi and 5.64p forecast this year, over 16 months you get 11p divi roughly, assuming they don’t pay any special divi’s, which they have had a habit of doing when in profit. When they were making similar earnings in 2019 to what they are making now, they were paying special divis of 6p, prior to that they paid a regular 15p special nearly every year listed. Will make for punter interest as the results approach imo.

A week to go till we can kick Feb out of the door ad get some results rallies flying a bit.

Have a good weekend – I’ll keep the mankini in the wardrobe for another week 😊

Rebel

Twitter: @rebelHQ