Thanks Klogg, appreciate the detailed response - very valuable...

Thanks Klogg, appreciate the detailed response - very valuable insight.

Maybe i should've mentioned this before (and this may be obvious anyway), but i'm asking these questions not as a critic of FSA, but because i am actually interested in the business and am actually trying to talk myself out of buying it - which is something i do with most stocks i want to buy. If management hit their 5-year, 10% p.a. growth plans this stock is, frankly, dirt cheap - anyone can simply plug that sort of growth into a 4-line spreadsheet and derive that the implied 5-year return is north of 15% p.a. with no P/E multiple re-rate, but i'd assume that any business delivering 5 years of 10% p.a. EPS growth will garner a higher multiple than the current ~12-13x FSA gets, so that's a 5-year high teens (maybe even a low twenties) p.a. return from a business with a highly aligned and conservative management team. Big tick.

I am trying to form my own view as to how achievable that long-term outlook provided by management is, and your feedback is very helpful. Where i am currently could basically be described thus:

1) I'm satisfied that the operating environment for FSA will provide the company sufficient opportunity to hit that 10% p.a. earnings growth. I am convinced the personal debt agreement market will continue to grow solidly, and i personally think it could grow quicker than others due to my belief that a broad macro downturn is more likely than most think.

2) I'm still doing a little work on the competitive dynamics of the industry, trying to figure out whether FSA holds its ~40% market share going forward. There's some excellent discussion on this thread regarding how FSA's employees are easily trained and obtained, how there's low capital requirements etc., and the first thing that pops into my head is: "low barriers to entry". This is the focus of my inquiry. I fully acknowledge that, at a >5% div yield and ~12-13x P/E, maybe one just has to accept that the stock is cheap enough, and the business sufficiently well-managed by an aligned and motivated management team, to compensate for what seems to me to be a relatively low barriers to entry type business.