Back to basics with Ben Graham
Bargains galore!
Just a quick one today to point you to an article I wrote for the New Year’s edition of Money Observer, Back to basics (here it is, with tables, in PDF form: Page 1, page 2, page 3), an article about Benjamin Graham.
Graham’s approach to investing; to build in a margin of safety by [...]
This week’s shares: Holidaybreak, Numis and Dawson
The good, the bad, and the ugly
The flow of new annual reports for cheap companies with good profit records all but dried up this week. The nation’s board directors obviously had better things to do over Christmas. Nevertheless, the three companies that did produce reports also produced plenty to talk about.
Holidaybreak (HBR)
I’m predisposed to like [...]
Dewhurst: not perfect, but…
Dewhurst pushes most of the right buttons
Before I talk about this week’s shares tomorrow, I promised more on Dewhurst (DWHT), last week’s pick of the week.
There’s a funny story in a novel I’ve just read, ‘The Marriage Bureau for Rich People’*1. Irshad, the number one valve salesman in Southern India, complains that none of the [...]
Million Dollar Traders
I’d rather be an Apprentice
Did you see Million Dollar Traders? It’s the BBC’s share trading version of The Apprentice, which started last night on BBC 2 at 9.00pm, and continues for another two shows. It’s also on the rather brilliant iPlayer for the next twenty days.
Hedge fund manager Lex van Dam funds eight novices, including [...]
Who reads this blog?
Our audience is global, and that’s not all
On the premise that, if you’re interested in what you read here, you might be interested in what fellow readers are writing, here’s a rundown of the bloggers who’ve commented on my blogs.
I haven’t edited this list as I would neither insult a reader by not [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
