When company directors go into the market with their cheque book buying lots of shares, it usually means one thing. The director thinks the market undervalues the company and that buying shares will send a signal to investors that the management at least thinks that the shares are a bargain.

Tony O'Reilly is one who has occasionally gone into the market buying Independent shares when they hit a low. Most other Independent directors, however, who dabble in Indo shares are more usually sellers - Gerry McGuinness being the most obvious example.

Now Joe Moran has given the market a signal that IWP - languishing at 170p from a 467p earlier this year - is worth supporting. Mr Moran has just spent over more than £2.1 million of his own money on 1.25 million IWP shares, taking his stake in the group to just over 4 per cent.

Last week, this column suggested that the selling of IWP has gone far enough and that the shares are worth a bet - if one is willing to take the long-term view. The expected fall in British consumer spending will undoubtedly impact on IWP, whose business is concentrated on discretionary spending products such as cosmetics.

But at the 170p at which Joe Moran bought his latest chunk of shares, IWP is trading on a historic p/e of under 7 and a forward p/e of less than 6.5. Those are the sort of ratings that one would normally associate with the market's living dead - and IWP is not yet in that club.

Air fresheners and cosmetics might be the sort of discretionary purchases affected when times are tough, but the unit cost of most of IWP's items is low. It's not as if the group manufactures CD players or videos - the sort of high-cost discretionary purchase that will most definitely be affected by an economic slowdown.