07/20/2010
10 out of 10 for effort at Dixons

Back to basics #2 A shop assistant on the cover of DSG International’s annual report asks: Hello, what brings you to our store today? She might well ask, because I can’t remember the last time I went into a Currys or PC World and bought anything. Actually, I think I can. It was Microsoft Office 2003, [...]

   07/16/2010
Finding insecurity in BlueStar SecuTech

Rarer than the Chinese Crested Tern Such is my ignorance of banking in China, before writing this blog I had to check the yuan is the Chinese unit of account, like the pound is the UK’s, and renminbi is the currency, like sterling. So let’s talk yuan, and whether BlueStar SecuTech (BSST), a manufacturer of [...]

   07/12/2010
Buffett Beyond Value

Oracle or octopus? Unlike Snowball, the recent biography of Warren Buffett, the even more recent Buffett Beyond Value promises to help us understand and emulate the World’s greatest investor, rather than tell his life story. It does, to a degree. Author, Prem C Jain, a finance professor,  has studied 50 years of annual reports and earlier partnership [...]

   07/09/2010
Number one for value

Nice to see you… Having released Marks & Spencer back into the financial ocean, I’m hauling up schools of big fish in my thrifty nets. United Utilities, Dixons and HMV have yet to publish their annual reports but, even though I’m suspicious of retailers and have ruled-out HMV in the past, I’m interested in another, Home [...]

   07/07/2010
Crisis investing: oil edition

Crisis, what crisis? One of the prosaic, but educational features of the Barel Karsan blog, is chapter-by-chapter reviews of classic investment books. At the moment it’s reviewing David Dreman’s Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation. Dreman’s quantitative approach inspired a generation of stock screeners and, considering how towards the end of his life Benjamin Graham embraced [...]

   07/05/2010
Standing by Castings

A long and winding road Last October, I added Castings (CGS) to the Thrifty 30 portfolio when its market, iron castings and components for vehicles, had collapsed. Sales were down 15% and profitability (return on total assets) had fallen sharply. Casting’s manufacturing sites were operating at 50% of their capacity, it had laid off 350 employees, [...]

   06/25/2010
From action to analysis

Using your brain This blog follows three previous articles on beginning value investing advocating: 1. Understanding the basic premise of value investing, that sometimes share prices are lower (or higher) than a realistic evaluation of the business would determine. 2. Buying shares that, statistically speaking, look cheap (see parts two and three). Jumping straight from understanding (1) to action [...]

   06/25/2010
Patience may bring profit at printing.com

slowly, slowly So far, the Thrifty 30 portfolio’s investment in high street printing franchise, printing.com (PDC), hasn’t disappointed or delighted. Printing.com differs from other franchises like Kall-Kwik and Prontaprint because production is handled at a central hub in Manchester and most of its outlets are ‘bolt-ons’, run by independent printers that offer in-house printing too. It [...]

   06/23/2010
Almost perfect: Andrews Sykes and London Security

It’s all about trust I’ve been pursuing two companies on-and-off all week. Their businesses and financials fit the the Thrifty 30 template almost perfectly but I cannot add them to the portfolio. Andrews Sykes (ASY) rents out cooling, heating, and ventilation equipment in Northern Europe and the Middle East. It’s blog catalogues how it kept party [...]

   06/17/2010
Easy on the austerity George

Nightfall Tomorrow George Osborne unveils his emergency budget. Amid calls for him to cut, come what may, I’d like to put forward an alternative view. Isaac Asimov, a writer most famous for his science fiction, but who wrote about almost everything, a child prodigy who raced through the educational system devouring subjects like the cards in a [...]