Almost Family (AFAM) is another reader nomination in the "good charts" category - the volatility has been enormous - trading from mid $30s to low $50s in the past few weeks. Website here.

Almost Family, Inc. and its subsidiaries provide home health care services in Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, the United States. It operates in two segments, Visiting Nurse (VN) and Personal Care (PC).

The VN segment provides a range of Medicare-certified home health nursing services to patients in need of recuperative care, typically following a period of hospitalization or care in another type of inpatient facility.

The PC segment provides services in patients' homes on an as-needed, hourly, or live-in basis. These services include personal care, medication management, meal preparation, caregiver respite, and homemaking. It offers these services to patients, who are admitted to skilled nursing facilities for long term custodial care.

As of December 31, 2007, Almost Family operated 33 Medicare-certified home health agencies with 51 locations and 22 personal care locations.

I am actually familiar with this niche since I've been in and out of the stock of Amedisys (AMED) - a quite similar company - in the past. But I wanted to see how earnings went yesterday and they look quite promising. It appears, due to it's smaller size, Almost Family has the ability to grow faster and usually with higher growth rates comes higher multiples. This is yet another $400M type of company with a very low number of shares outstanding (8.1M) and float (7.0M) While that always poses risks if a larger institution wants to get out, it also means earnings PER share can fly upward if a company is on a growth trajectory. Which AFAM is.

• Almost Family reported third quarter 2008 net service revenues of $58.7 million, an 84% increase from $32 million in the third quarter of 2007. Net revenues in the Visiting Nurse segment for the third quarter of 2008 were $48.6 million, a 113% increase from $22.9 million in the third quarter of 2007. The total revenue growth of $25.7 million came from a 44% organic growth rate plus $15.7 million from acquired operations. The Patient Care acquisition completed on August 1st was in the quarter for 2 months and contributed about $7.6 million in revenue.