Good morning! It looks like a fairly nasty open is in the offing, with the FTSE 100 futures indicating a 100 point drop to 6,252, on the back of some comments made by Ben Bernanke in the USA last night, about tapering QE later this year.

Silverdell (LON:SID) has issued a positive-sounding contracts win announcement. They go on to say that, "of the £12.1m of contract wins, at least £2m is scheduled to fall in the current financial year". All well and good, but in the context of £136m forecast turnover for this year (ending 30 Sep 2013) that's not material, so I suspect this announcement contains a strong element of getting some positive PR out there, to re-build investor confidence after the damage done by an ill-conceived Edison research note a little while ago.

 

 

I'm also intrigued by the announcement today from Helphire (LON:HHR) which states that the Court has approved their capital restructuring, designed to allow them to resume the payment of dividends. A special dividend of 0.165p per share has been declared, which is just under a 4.9% one-off yield.

They also include positive news on a further reduction in debtor days (which is the bane of companies in this sector, supplying car hire to insurers) to 127 days. It's not a company I've been following, but on a closer look Helphire has pulled off a remarkable resurgence. They have wiped out almost all of their debt, through the issue of new shares at 2.5p, and amazingly the Banks doing a debt for equity swap, and writing off almost all of the remaining debt. So it now looks financially strong, and is profitable again.

I suspect there could be good upside on the current share price, although I loathe this sector with a passion, having lost around £250k on Accident Exchange shares a few years ago. For that reason I won't be tempted back into this sector by anything, no matter how good it looks on paper. Although one has to admire the skill of management at Helphire having so comprehensively turned around an apparently doomed company. On that basis alone they are possibly worth backing.

Management have a target of £7.5m operating profit for year ending 30 Jun 2013, so at a market cap of £53m, with net…

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