Evil Knievil: Keep your trousers on

Well, keeping one’s trousers on is generally good advice unless one is suitably requested to take them down. And I always wear pyjama bottoms round the flat since that cuts out the mystery of keeping one’s creases under control. (It was my late father’s colleague, an English don at University College, who pointed out to me that all that matters in this life is writing thank you letters, well shone shoes and, you guessed it, well-pressed trousers. I think he added that resolute swearing helped as well.)

Certainly not consciously, I have been wearing N Brown (LON:BWNG) pyjamas as offered by Jacamo for some years now. This has been advertised by, inter alia, Freddie Flintoff. He is a big guy.

As it happens, when this Covid-19 business broke out. BWNG applied for and got a large loan. And most reasonable people would hold back from investing in trouble.

But BWNG is capitalised at 41p at c. £115m as against nav of c. £150m net of intangibles in the last accounts. It is too early to get emotional but this could be a real steal since I am told that c. 24% of the turnover (c. £500m) is marketing expense and that this has been largely cut out. Whereas 90% of the business is online. Presumably it is surviving very nicely thank you.

I grant you that there is now a lot of debt. But BWNG can live with that.

I bought 100,000 at 41p since my friend at Schroders said I jolly well ought to.

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Whilst on the dog to Schroders my friend also said I should buy Xaar (LON:XAR), now 75p. I suspect he could also be terrifically right here as well.

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Finally, as a matter of transparency, I concede that I am being murdered by Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA). But I am not closing.