Member Info for Forensic505

The Chairman must be spitting feathers here. If memory serves he had loaded up big time in this.

Sorry but this is a pet annoyance for me. I do find it disingenuous (and rather fishy, if not insulting to our intelligence) when boards, like FRP's here, try to gloss over a simple and straightforward profits warning (albeit a mild one) rather than just stating the facts as they are.

That might help possibly help them hoodwink a few unsuspecting individuals in the sort term. But all too soon, the truth is plain to see.

Why do they even try ?

It just raises rather obvious questions about the basic integrity of the FRP board.

A personal vent, sorry. It just sticks in the throat somewhat...

I agree Youonly although now 17% down…

If this investigation has been running for 3 years and hasn’t been refuted by the company yet there is only one conclusion to draw in my book: get out while you can. DYOR.

100% agree with you Corryvreckan1.

Thank you.

Jee….

You value an AI puff piece over their own broker’s officially downgrading FRP profits….

That’s very brave of you. I wish you all the best of luck with that.

RNS today looks like a "mild" profit warning, in my vocabulary. They point to a number of corporate finance deals aborted/postponed after recent global (Trump) economic gyrations.

They therefore now need Administrations (their specialism in the insolvency world) to pick up to offset this. To date, Administrations (typically larger company insolvency process) have yet to fully come back to pre-covid levels, which is disappointing given the same (Trumpian) economic challenges. Insolvency, and particularly the high margin Administration work, is very competitive. They usually (or certainly they used to) publish their market share. It would be good to see a recent update of that because a number of the BIG FOUR accounting groups have spun off their insolvency divisions to Private Equity in recent years. So query whether those newly independent entities are biting into FRP's market share now ?

BEG and FRP are also worth some time looking into as, like MANO, they have a strong focus on insolvency.

BEG has fallen a lot recently. Dont know why. Might or might not be an investment opportunity. I watch them but I have never bought. FRP look a bit expensive for my taste. It is the very low MANO share price that makes MANO my clear choice.

My personal opinion. DYOR

The recent results were terrific and, in this economic environment (with Trump throwing tariff petrol on the recessionary fire) Manolete has its near perfect trading conditions. The legal claims this period will throw off will last for many years to come. Even today, elements of the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, are still being litigated in some parts of the world.

MANO is by far the number 1 in funded UK insolvency litigation. Not even the mighty and very smart Burford feature - they have a completely different business model. MANO market share is around 65% of the funded market. It also has a huge addressable market as the sector transitions from legal firms only being paid on success to them being paid on fixed (but certain) fees. That is the real prize and really low hanging fruit because the old model (Conditional Fee Arrangements) was so dumb.

Manolete is exceptionally efficient and well run. Almost every operational cost is fixed (or at worst, stepped) therefore almost every single £1 of gross profit falls straight to the bottom line profit.

That is complete rubbish Yuri.

Do not spread falsehoods.

Both in London and New York less than 3% of all claims end in a trial.

Don't trust the liars and the trolls. Hopefully one day they will find real purpose in the lives.

Looks like at least one material individual or institutional investor has had enough of this and is selling consistently hard.

Any announcements as they/it pass through the reportable ownership %s will be into watch.

DYOR

Link not working Halfpenny. Can you tell us how to find it on Google please? I’m keen to see it because your posts are usually very insightful. Thanks.

They are the same company.

The fact that they achieved £7.6m in 2020 tells you all you need to know about their prospects.

They achieved that £7.6m pre-Covid. During Covid their market was pretty much closed.

Now with much higher numbers of cases (though the avg revenue per case needs to keep improving) and a much bigger in-house legal team, I cannot see why today's £1.3m will not be tomorrow's £7.6m. They did it before. Now much bigger, why wouldnt they be able to achieve that and more again? Particularly fuelled by almost perfectly dour economic tailwinds coming from all directions.

This company IPO in 2018 at 175p. The company is now hugely bigger than it was in 2018.

Covid knocked it to the canvass but now…

The cash generation is now very strong, it beat Canaccord’s profit forecast by over 300%.

The last I saw Canaccord had this as a BUY with a target price of 166p.

In the light of the above, I suspect Canaccord might well want to revise its forecast and target price upwards.

You don’t invest in history, you invest in future prospects. Otherwise Google, Meta and Tesla would be penny stocks…

Mano has huge financial leverage (because its costs are largely fixed). So we will see more of what we have seen today: higher revenues and then gross profits falling straight to the bottom line company profit.

DYOR but also don’t listen to the sad old trolls…

Very decent market update today. Particularly the cash up over 40%!

They have clearly beaten the pants off the Canaccord forecasts.

Very nice 👌

Why down 7%? Was Capital Markets Day not good ? I'll watch recording later.

* I meant to write "....large single cases"

The increasingly poor run of costly last single case wipe outs, will (obviously) make the prospect of raising Funds 3, 4, 5 etc very difficult/impossible.

Unnerving.

I listened to their interim presentation a few days ago.

They were making a big plus out of their "AI Data" specialism in Commercial Arbitration cases.

But i think this is the area where most of the last 7 losses (many really very big) have occurred.

Their IRR has now plummeted to 36% (before they were saying they had the best in the sector worldwide, which I thought was BS in the first place). TBH I though the CFO sounded more credible (and balanced) than the CEO who was making those rather outlandish comments about AI and IRRs.

The trouble all seems to have started from when they moved to Fair Value accounting and the obvious trappings over overvaluing cases and then deploying only to be able to mark up new cases to cover up old mistakes.

Credibility starting to wane here somewhat.

I believe the reason for the weak FRP SP is because the huge rise in insolvencies is due to Liquidations. FRP's real specialist is Administrations (those are for larger companies). Admins are still at or below the pre-covid level whereas Liquidations are hugely higher. I think FRP recently stated that their Admin appointments were DOWN 49% from last year. That is their really core area. So that is (IMHO) the core problem here. DYOR as ever.

Oh dear. Another big Fair Value and Investment Cost write off.