Ann: Chairman and CEO Address to Shareholders 2016-SFH.AX, page-24

There's something to be said about paying up for quality, within reason of course.

You've hit the nail right on the head there.

Problem is, more than at any time I can recall for decades, any business that is remotely of quality has been so aggressively bid up in over the past 12 - 18 months, that there is nothing on that end of the spectrum that I can find worth buying with any great conviction.

Which is what has forced me to trawl through the market's detritus to see if I can find any discarded items of questionable quality that might be valued at cents in the dollar.

But this invariably involves a lot of frog-kissing, with very few princes emerging.

Getting back to SFH, after a bit of kissing of this particular frog, I am still unsure if it is a prince or not. For I have no idea what the upcoming few financial results might throw out.

Put another way, I would not be surprised if the company reported a sensationally favourable turnaround in fortunes; nor would I be surprised if the upcoming results were disastrous.

While a part of me says that more of the latter scenario - as opposed to the former one - is factored into the share price, it is still very difficult to invest on such potentially binary outcomes.