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Authoritative Independent Monthly Share Selections Using Technical & Fundamental Analysis

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Auto Trader

August 2017

Investing in shares may lose you all or some of your money. Past performance is no indication of future performance. Some of the shares recommended here may be small company shares, which can be relatively illiquid and hard to trade and this makes such shares more risky than other investments.

  • Epic Code:
  • AUTO
  • Price:
  • 370p
Since peaking at 450p last October, the shares have been hidebound in a tight range. However, the company has made great strides with final results showing revenues, pretax profit and eps marching ahead by 9%, 23% and 22% respectively to £311m, £193m and 15.6p. Top line growth on a largely fixed cost base lifted operating margins a full 6% to 67% while strong cash generation reduced net debt by almost £38m to £355m (even after £129m spent on share buy-backs) which lowered  net debt / EBITDA from 2.2x to 1.6x. The dividend jumped from 1.6p to 5.2p. All superlative.Regular readers will recall Auto Trader is the UK’s largest digital market-place to buy and sell cars and has three divisions. Tra ...

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With small companies there is an above average degree of risk compared to buying blue chips. Please be aware that we have not assessed the suitability of any of these investments for you. The newsletter simply states a personal view and diarises the editor’s investment decisions. Please speak to your stockbroker or other qualified individual to ascertain whether any of these companies mentioned would form useful additions to your own portfolios. Past performance is no indication of future success.

All material on this website is protected by copyright. You may use Information retrieved from the www.scsw.co.uk website for your own personal non-commercial use which means that you may not sell or copy this information to any third party without prior written consent. ISSN 1358-183X