Its shares are flat over the six months, despite the profits warning, and now is a good time to take the profits investors have enjoyed over recent years.Westbury is sticking by its ambitious target of boosting annual production to 7,000 homes by the end of the decade, but its disappointments this year - blamed on planning delays - have raised suspicions that it has made some poor purchases of land for development. It will increasingly have to rely on social housing projects to pump up the volume. European expansion adds a further positive narrative, but the 93 stores on the Continent are only marginally important to profit and it will be a while before the first two stores in Poland, opening in the next six months, will be contributing at all.The shares sit at the same level as in April, when we said avoid. On 7.5 times earnings, and with these earnings likely to decline, there is much better value elsewhere in the sector. Sell.Braemar staying afloat in choppy watersBraemar Seascope is a shipping broker, responsible for arranging cargo and container ships for customers who need to haul raw materials and manufactured goods around the world. On financial measures such as return on capital and margins, it performs poorly. It has reported a 26 per cent fall in interim profits at a time when rivals are hitting record numbers.
That remains our advice.Now is a good time to take profits in underperfoming WestburyWestbury is up there in contention for the title of worst quoted housebuilder. The 5 per cent-plus dividend yield on the shares should act as a brake on their decline, but dividend-growth expectations are already being scaled back.There is no sign that the company is under any financial strain, and it could even benefit if weaker rivals go to the wall during the downturn. With tax rises likely and receding hope of an interest rate cut to offset high fuel prices, it is impossible to be cheery about the retail sector for the time being.Lord Harris of Peckham - Carpetright's chairman, chief executive and 23 per cent shareholder - is sometimes cited as wanting to take the company private, although with little in the way of asset backing, this seems a marginal deal for private equity. Analysts reckoned the gross margin had slipped by a half a percentage point, and slashed profits forecasts for the financial year from about £60m to £55m. The unfortunate price-discount strategy has been in effect reversed, but what has hardly changed since we last looked at Carpetright in the spring is the outlook for consumer spending This is fragile.
The strategy failed to attract new buyers to the shops and simply meant that those who did buy got their carpets for less. So while yesterday's trading update showed sales falling at broadly the rate everyone had feared, Carpetright's margins were lower. Like-for-like sales (which exclude stores opened or closed in the past 12 months) were down 6.7 per cent across Carpetright's 417 outlets across the UK over the past 25 weeks. The group's shares trade at just seven times forecast earnings for next year.