Onwards, little men!

My mum always used to refer to my Games Workshop tryranids as "little men".  My brother was into them too for a good while.  Very entertaining when I was little - a bit of a school subculture, often at the "unacceptable" end of the scale.

When I played them they were primarily based in the UK, with a couple of outposts in Florida and California if I remember properly.  But how times change - I have their website open in another window and the dropdown lists a bit more of a global footprint than before with 19 countries in total listed.  Now I am sure that there's probably no more than one outlet in Japan, but hey - it shows global intent.  Perhaps a bit worrying is that 14 of the countries listed are European, and we know that's all going t*ts in the next few months.  But, interestingly I am not that worried. 

Why, you ask?  Well I thought Games Workshop was horrendously overpriced when I was 14 and they've increased the prices significantly since then.  The target market age profile has got younger and younger since the early days of hardcore my-little-man-has-30-attributes-and-i-need-to-make-calculations-using-eight-of-them-to-fire-a-gun days - and as countries (and parents) become more affluent, every household has a potential Games Workshop salesman or woman in it.

So how does the stock look through my narrow lens?  It has lots of countries that it operates in, which is good, as i have already detailed.  Its is retail, which you'd have to be insane to get involved in (contrarian box anyone?), and it had dropped about 1.5% the month before I bought in.  That said, it is up 26% in the previous 12 months. Let's look why now.

The dividend yield is ridiculous - with good reason.  As I write it is at 11.82% because of a special present for investors from the company's board.  In the 12 months prior to buying in (on the 18 April 2012) there have been three dividends paid, totalling 67p per share.  The company is chucking off cash, and although the yield is not sustainable based on current cashflows the board has reason to believe it's acceptable to pay out.  And look here - they are pretty confident to chuck their own money at the stock.  No director has sold out of Games Workshop since September 2010, and since then there have been nine exercising of options or purchases of shares.  THF Kirby spent just shy of a million quid on shares in the company on the 22 March 2012.  Punchy.

Laura wasn't entirely convinced until I told her there is practically no competition on the high street anywhere in the world.  What will happen to them?  Probably get bought by someone like Mattel or some large toy conglomerate before I retire, but that i do not mind too much.

So where next?  Well, according to my Moneyweek magazine this week Aviva's net asset value (sum of all the assets - in their case primarily investments) is around 457p as of February 2012.  So according to Google Finance the FTSE all share is down about 1.43% since early February.  Assuming that the value of Aviva's investments has dropped twice as far they should be worth about 443.93p at the moment.  And where are they?  They were 316.70p on Friday 27 April - so they are trading at a discount of 28.7% to the net asset value.  Oriel Security reckons they should be doubling in price to 640p - unlikely if the market tanks - but Yahoo Finance shows strong analyst support for them.  Google Finance has a 8.21% yield.  All looking like it might be my next investment - but not for a few weeks.