01/08/2009
This week’s shares: Britvic, Brewin, Euromoney, Formation and Dewhurst

Pushbutton hero is pick of the bunch Piotroski taught me the importance of looking at annual reports when evaluating smaller, unfashionable companies. It’s easy to shuffle glibly through doorstoppers from FTSE companies, indeed if you committed yourself to reading them thoroughly you’d probably retire before you’d read enough to invest all your money. Happily, the size and [...]

   01/07/2009
Anthony Bolton calls the bottom

We’re OK, it’s just a normal bear market Notice how, in this article on identifying market bottoms, Anthony Bolton rigorously sticks to what he knows as opposed to what he doesn’t know. Second-guessing the economy is not for Britain’s most lauded fund manager. Instead, he’s thumbing the history and chart books: The first of the three factors [...]

   01/06/2009
Small companies going private

On not falling in love with powerful women I was dismayed by words attributed to Lorna Moran in the Financial Times yesterday. Not what she said, which was already apparent to many of the former shareholders in Northern Recruitment, the company she founded. Being reminded of events last month was enough to dismay me, and perhaps, [...]

   01/05/2009
Safety first investing

On failed resolutions, and safety-first investing I’m not keen on kamikaze New Year’s resolutions, where you solemnly give up chocolate, alcohol, or making a fool of yourself at karaoke, only to succumb a few days later and regret being so naïve as to believe that simply willing something would make it happen. Maybe if you’re in Apollo [...]

   12/22/2008
The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham

This is going to be a long review, but considering many of the words will be quotations from the mouth, or pen, of an icon, perhaps you’ll forgive me. The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham is a collection of articles and lectures written and given by Benjamin Graham, plus a few interviews with him. It gives insight into [...]

   12/17/2008
Aga’s blimmin’ pension fund

Despite its monumental cookers, I think the investment case for Aga (AGA) depends on something even more monumental, its defined benefit pension scheme. Last June Aga’s pension liability was £682m, and although the scheme was in surplus, which means actuaries reckon it has more than enough assets (shares, bonds and property) to pay the pensions of [...]

   12/11/2008
The great value divide

The market’s reasonably priced for a change, but should investors wait until it gets ludicrously cheap? Students of the market are tripping over themselves touting obscure measures of value, while erstwhile bears are suddenly bullish. That’s because after decades of excessive prices the market has fallen to something like fair value. Fair, that is, relative to the [...]

   12/10/2008
The cheapest six stocks in November

Here are the cheapest six stocks in November, as measured by Dr Keith Anderson’s Naked Price Earnings ratio: As I’ve described many times, this measure boosts the predictive power of the PE by accounting for a company’s long-term profit record, its size, and its business. In other words, companies with low PE ratios do slightly better than companies [...]

   11/12/2008
Are you a speculator who thinks he’s an investor?

Apologies for this chart, a sketch from my notebook, but I’ve never seen it drawn by anyone with the patience to use a ruler, so this will have to do*1. I imagine many of us thought we were investors in the bull market and, having, seen our profits evaporate, we’re now coming to terms with the [...]

   10/30/2008
Market is cheapest it’s been since the early 80’s

Something momentous, at least for me. As of Friday investors are valuing the UK stockmarket at half what they thought it was worth at the beginning of the year – when I started measuring the market’s long-term price earnings ratio. On the last day of 2007 it was worth 20 times the earnings of all listed [...]