Actually, that’s not how I really feel about Buffalo Wild Wings (NASDAQ: BWLD $24.51) at the moment, given it has just broken through all support and headed down into new-low territory, but it makes me think of the Troggs’ famous hit song.
BWLD, a theme road-house restaurant with an excellent growth rate (until the day I bought it) is certainly not in train-wreck territory by any stretch, unlike Select Comfort (NASDAQ: SCSS) that I talked about the other day, but “I wanna kno-ow for sure.” So I checked up on the financials again. ( It also is a perennial rave recommendation of the Motley Fool “Hidden Gems” newletter, although with the recent blow-ups of Select Comfort, InVentiv, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Flamel Technologies - I’m thinking TMF may want to re-brand as “Hidden Bombs”). I bought in at $29 a while back so I’m not looking like a genius at $24.50, but then I rode Merck from $42 to $26, and all the way back to $50 with some nice buys along the way near the lows. Goes with the territory with this evil little plan.
The company has no long-term debt and no intangibles – two things I dig on balance sheets. Only 10% of the stock price is represented by net cash (I get excited at 20%) – but that’s OK, most companies are nowhere near that. It’s PE is 21 and price to cash-flow 13 – both reasonable for a growth company. And it has positive free cash flow of about $7M. The only thing that stood out as odd was a sudden quarterly jump in payables. For the past three quarters they were bumping along at about $6M for both receivables and payables, and suddenly this past quarter the payables jumped to $13M. Either food costs have doubled, or they were behind in their protection money and had to make good. 
No real alarm bells here yet. It seems to be a quality, well-managed company that has managed to grow organically without using any debt, so that speaks to a good business model and good management. It’s a small cap at 18 million shares outstanding, so it’s not going to get a lot of play in a fearful market, but I don’t have any trouble with riding this one down for a while if I have to. Pretty soon I’m going to get a signal to buy more, and if that happens … I will.
All together now “Wild wing! ……… you make my heart sing … groovy … etc.”
Cheers,
Allocator
BTW(1) - BWLD was down 4% today and Select Comfort up 4% – the day after I sold it. That’s the kind of attitude you can expect from the market. :)
BTW(2) It’s a little-known fact that before the Troggs became a famous rock band, they were all chartered accountants, and this song originally started out as ”Mild Thing”.
