Take a butcher's at this one.....

Crawshaw Group is an easy business to understand, it's a fresh meat and food-to-go retailer. This morning the Group released a positive trading statement saying,

"like-for-like sales have been particularly strong in the last quarter, with the growth being realised across the entire estate. This has been accompanied by a strengthening gross margin position"

and adding that they:-

"now expect the Company to exceed market expectations for the year ended 31 January 2016".

Good news indeed. An investment made since 2012 will have been handsomely rewarded.
Chartists and momentum traders will no doubt be attracted by the rising chart that appears to be reaching new highs today.

The company is currently valued at around £57m. The company made a operating profit of £1.1m last year and reported EPS came in at 1.3p putting the shares on a historic p/e ratio of 55. Looking at forecast figures for 2016 and 2017, brokers have predicted pre-tax losses but significantly improved revenues. The estimated dividend yield for 2016 and 2017 is just less than 1%. If I was interested in investing I would definitely conduct more research on those figures though.

Cash stands at a very healthy £9.1m, and tangible net assets at around £12.3m. The cash  generation was around £1.5m last year. The Group is debt free. In their last report they said,

"It is a very exciting time for the business and whilst short term profits will be held in check for a while as we add infrastructure costs ahead of the curve, we very much look forward to reporting on our progress as we build scale as quickly as practically possible."

and today's statement indicates that they are delivering on this.

Whilst Crawshaw is not a company I shall be investing in, they appear to be progressing nicely and it will be interesting to see if they can deliver substantial profits in the long term.

Not quite sure why Directors have been recent sellers of their shares without stating any specific reason though?

On the current fundamentals, the company does look expensive, but of course the jury remains out until they have built the significant scale that they refer to.

Something for bears and bulls I would suggest, but certainly the trading statement provides encouragement for the bulls and momentum, at least in the short term, remains in an upward trajectory.