It’s not often we see a share five-bagging in 12 months, but then UK Oil & Gas Investments (LSE: UKOG) isn’t your average share. It’s a tiny oil explorer with a market cap of only £41m, whose shares were priced at just a little over 0.5p a year ago.
Then in April 2015 an exciting upgrade to oil estimates at the Horse Hill-1 well in the Weald Basin, in which the company owns a stake of a little over 20%, helped send the shares spiking upwards. The price has been erratic since, but recent updates on 17 February and 1 March on flow tests from the well have given the shares an extra boost to today’s 2.5p.
So can the UK Oil & Gas share price keep on climbing in the year ahead and beyond? Well, we still don’t know what sustainable long-term oil flows might be like at the so-called Gatwick Gusher, or how much of the estimated 9.2bn barrels is likely to be commercially viable, or where the cash for the long-term development of the field is going to come from… but if you’re brave enough, I wish you well.
Glad rags
The fashion business is surely one of the riskiest, as a look at the extremely erratic share price of Supergroup (LSE: SGP) over the past few years will attest. Despite a couple of attempts, the shares haven’t regained their peak of February 2011, and at 1,323p they currently stand almost 25% down from then.
But over the past 12 months we’ve seen a 41% rise — and the past three years of earnings growth coupled with three more years of growth forecasts could even see the shares marked down to a P/E in line with the FTSE 100 average. The current year, to April 2016, is expected to show a 16% rise in EPS, and the pundits have further growth in the teens marked in for 2017 and 2018 too — and we should be seeing a start to dividends too.
There’s a clear buy consensus out there, but fashion is too fickle a business for me to get into.
The best comparison site?
Moneysupermarket.com (LSE: MONY) shares are up 27% in the past 12 months, to 339p, and up a whopping 268% in five years. Years of strongly-rising earnings lie behind the success story, with today’s results for the year ended December 2015 showing a further 18% rise in adjusted EPS leading to a 14% hike in the annual dividend — the 9.15p payment yielding a middling 2.7%, but rising.
The firm has apparently been trading solidly in the two months since year-end, but earnings growth is forecast to slow a little to around 8% per year for the next two years, putting the shares on P/E multiples that look a bit high to me at around 20 and above.
Moneysupermarket’s share price growth in recent years has been very impressive, but I can’t see it continuing at the same pace — I expect to see it slow down over the next few years.
