I attended the Annual General Meeting of law firm Gordon Dadds Group (GOR) this morning. The company was tipped as a buy in Investors Chronicle on the 3rd August so I bought a few shares. It’s always good to go to the AGMs of new investments to get an impression of the management and ask a few questions. This is one of only three listed legal firms (the others being Gateley and Keystone which I do not hold).
This AGM was very unusual in that both on the “show of hands” vote and the proxy vote counts, there were no votes against at all, i.e. exactly zero on all resolutions. That is exceedingly unusual for a public company. As I said to the Chairman, he managed to achieve that by not having a share buy-back resolution on the agenda as I normally vote against such resolutions. Likewise no resolution to change to 14 days notice of general meetings. I congratulated him on that and a well run AGM where questions were taken first before the formal business.
There were about a dozen shareholders present, some of whom might have been staff. I questioned the increase in overheads in the last year – they are working to bring that down but it was increased as they “set up to expand” – and the high debtors. Although they bill work in progress monthly, it seems their corporate clients are slow payers. Another shareholder asked how work in progress was valued, and it’s at cost apparently. Otherwise I did not pick up any concerns although the legal market does seem fragmented and it is not clear to me how they are differentiated from others although they do have some specialisations. One might see it as a market ripe for consolidation with too many small firms and Gordon Dadds seem to have acquisition ambitions.
The company only listed on AIM a year ago so it’s early days as yet.
Interesting that the national media failed to pick up on the changes to the insolvency regime announced by the Government last Sunday. Perhaps not surprising on a Bank Holiday weekend although I covered it here: https://roliscon.blog/2018/08/26/insolvency-regime-changes-a-step-forward/
Perhaps private investors were not concerned because they think they can bail-out before such events unlike institutional shareholders who frequently have such large holdings that they can’t place them on the market at any price. But you cannot always do so. I have been caught twice in over twenty years of investing by unexpected administrations of retailing companies who often appear to have lots of revenues and positive cash flows. But a retail market turn-down can catch them unawares when they have high fixed costs (staff and property rentals). The result is often a cash flow problem when quarterly rent payments are due, or an unexpected tax bill appears, or suppliers’ insurers simply get nervous and withdraw cover.
A simple ratio to look at to pick up businesses at risk of insolvency is the Current Ratio which I like to see above 1.4. Remember business only go bust when they run out of cash. However, retailers often pay their suppliers after they have sold the goods to their customers so the Current Ratio is not a reliable measure for retailers. Likewise it tends to be unreliable when looking at software companies where they might have deferred support revenue in their current liabilities which should really be ignored as it will never be paid.
The Current Ratio is easy to calculate (it’s Current Assets divided by Current Liabilities). A better measure but a more complex one is the Altman Z-Score. This was very well covered in this week’s Investors Chronicle where it was argued that it was also a good measure of the overall performance of companies. It’s not foolproof in terms of predicting insolvency but it’s certainly a good warning indicator – the big problem is that accounting figures on which it is calculated are often out of date.
The Z-Score can be obtained from a number of sources as it’s a bit tedious to calculate it yourself – for example Stockopedia display it on their company reports.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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