Don't hold your breath for Richard Hooper and Tom Roche to take National Toll Roads public was the clear message coming from this week's NTR annual report, a report which showed that the company is still churning out huge amounts of free cash from the two Dublin toll bridges.

The problem for Messrs Hooper and Roche is finding decent projects to spend all that cash on, so it seems imperative that NTR is successful in winning one of the three PPP (public-private partnerships) road contracts which will bypass Limerick and Waterford and extend the M4 motorway from Kilcock to Kinnegad.

But even winning one of these will not necessarily mean NTR going public. Although institutional investors usually like an open, transparent market for their shares they seem happy to stay with the internal market in NTR shares - at least until there is a greater appetite for small and mid-cap stocks. NTR's recent €230 million (£181 million) value puts it firmly in that category.