Tonight I’m all alone with my first assignment results in seventeen years. 1993 was the last time I handed in an assignment, so I was feeling a tad rusty while preparing this assignment. I think I nailed it and deserve a good grade. What’s more important is that I know I’ve learnt a lot from the subject and the assignment was fantastic for drumming the key ideas home.

I’d like to say sorry to RSS readers. I’m not sure why the graphics don’t display properly in Google Reader. Well actually I’m pretty sure it’s because of the stylesheet I use for graphic handling, I’m just not sure how to easily change the code to ensure images displays properly in readers. Too much nerd?

Sean pointed out that WOW.AX had dropped below $27 late last week. I agree with him that $25+change would be an attractive price for this high ROE company. I’ve spent more time looking at Woolies and Coles since last commenting on them and pondering why they have not emulated the likes of Tesco. As it turns out my question should have been why isn’t Tesco trying to emulate Woolies and Coles. 23% of every retail dollar spent in Australia ends up in their pockets. In groceries they pocket 70%.

ELD.AX continues to build a base and as I’ve pointed out before may be of interest to value investors at these prices. Here’s my write up on Elders from February. My conclusion was “Elders forecast a turnaround in EBIT for 2010 from $17M to $84M. Debt has been reduced via the institutional and shareholder placement and asset sales. Gearing is now low. The dividend has been suspended until 2012. A new management team is in place with a lot to do to reverse the previous team’s diworsification of Elders. It’s still to early to predict the success of any turnaround; however, the risk of total failure now appears low. Unfortunately the potential rewards don’t appear to be great either.”

Here’s Elders latest presentation, April 21st to UBS Small Caps Conference.

Back to the start. I always associate the word tonight with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

Disclosure: No position in WOW or ELD at time of writing.

Related posts:

1. Falling Knife: ELDERS LIMITED (ELD)
2. Elders Limited hitting multi-decade lows