"Seems to have met you measure Madam. I thought we might have...

"Seems to have met you measure Madam. I thought we might have got a little bit of interest from the market, but very subdued reaction thus far. To my untrained eyes the company seems to be in a great spot atm with the improving market conditions for all their revenue streams."

@sharkie,

I think some of the earlier concerns I had (see: https://hotcopper.com.au/posts/77589075/single) were manifest in this result, i.e.. from that post:

"There is a particular risk worth considering, which could impact the next one or two results, namely how much of the fees that are earned drop through to the bottom-line after bonus provisions have been made to keep the company's bankers and traders happy and motivated enough to keep rocking up for work.

Remember this is a "neck-up" business model; the only real assets are the key people and there is the never-ending chance of some of them getting into the lift on Friday evening and not coming back on Monday morning.

The FY2023 and FY2024 years were lean ones for stock trading volumes, IPOs, secondary market activity and corporate deal flow, which means that stockbrokers and investment bankers will not have enjoyed their usual bonus largesse for quite a while.

Knowing stockbrokers, investment bankers and corporate finance advisers like I do, there is therefore a non-trivial chance that EZL divisional managers will be arguing for a disproportionately large bonus pool to be set aside this year, as sort of "make-good" incentives, especially given the view that you don't want big fee earners to jump ship to competitors or start-ups when the cycle upturn has only just started.

So, to avoid being disappointed, I feel one should brace for an element of "Shareholders-Subsidising-Key Employees" in the upcoming result or two."

While Revenue was up 34%, Employee Expenses were also up sharply, by 27%. Clearly, the key fee earners in the business needed to be kept happy

The outworking of this is that, despite the recovery in business conditions, EZL is still under-earning to a significant degree:





So the wait for the real Operating Leverage continues. (As consolation, waiting time is not for nought...one gets paid a ~5% waiting dividend.)

.