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A bank holiday in the life of an investor

Six years after moving into our home, and six years after we started replacing the carpets with wooden flooring, I tackled the last remaining bastion of carpet yesterday - my daughter’s bedroom. But just to prove that this investor never completely downs tools, it was One up on Wall Street I was reading in my [...]

Formative experiences of baby investors

I’m re-reading Peter Lynch’s ‘One up on Wall Street‘. For me, it’s like a conversation with an old friend. I don’t usually re-read books but I’ve read this one many times. It seems like there’s an observation on every page I can relate my own investing experience to.
On page 50 he talks about his first [...]

Are rights issues good for investor returns?

Joe Everitt of ODL Securities doesn’t think banks have bottomed:
Historically banks have always been seen as an income portion of a portfolio… They’re Steady Eddie companies. Unfortunately the landscape we’re in now, with banks being so highly leveraged, it’s very difficult to see the value argument. If you take a look at Bradford & Bingley. [...]

George Soros on the credit crunch

George Soros says the acute phase of the credit crunch is over, but we have yet to feel the effects. Yesterday on the Today Programme [BBC audio]
You’ve had a period of credit expansion and a belief you can leave markets to their own devices, what I call market fundamentalism, and because markets do go to [...]

Johnson Service: A template for meltdown

I’m scripting Johnson Service (JSG) for iBall. If you read last week’s post (The six cheapest stocks in May), you’ll know why I think it’s interesting. Major director buys might signal a turning point for the odd agglomeration of dry cleaning, clothing rental and facilities management companies.
One way to detect a pattern, is to list [...]

isg spotted

Look very carefully on the fence - an isg hoarding. Interior Service (ISG) is in my list of high yielders.

Taken last week on Middlesex St., near Liverpool St. Station, London.

Bubble 2008 found

Does the black line look familiar? It should do. It’s the unmistakable pattern of a bubble. Lots of them, actually. To plot the black line James Montier*1 amalgamated previous bubbles - from the South Sea Bubble to the tech. bubble.

Then he superimposed a red line showing recent price action in emerging markets, and surprise! It [...]

Darwen reaching for critical mass

Investors in suspended Darwen are waiting to hear about the company’s reverse takeover of Optare, and what it means for the rapidly developing bus company. This is what chief executive Andrew Brian told me yesterday.
Just to recap. Darwen only floated on the Alternative Investment Market last February, and already it’s suspended while it hashes out [...]

Looking beyond banks for income

Bank yields look generous but might prove ephemeral. So what else is out there?
Readers are giving me a pasting for a blog I wrote saying banks aren’t cheap enough. And sure enough, if you look at them in terms of their dividends, instead of their earnings, some of the banks look very cheap.
At 11.9%, Bradford [...]

An open love letter to Ken Fisher

Astute readers of this blog may have noticed I don’t talk about Ken Fisher’s views as much as I did in the early days. There’s a very good reason for that. For over a year now he’s been writing for us on the Interactive Investor mothership so you have plenty of opportunity to read them. [...]

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