Treating countries like companies
The hare and the tortoise again
With speculation that investors are lining up to stag Anthony Bolton’s China Special Situations trust at its imminent IPO as they did during the technology bubble a decade ago it’s worth looking at the story behind the excitement.
In the late 1990’s the notion that the Internet would change the world [...]
Put on your body Armour
Glass half full
You’d expect a company that designs and distributes audio visual equipment for homes and cars to be a casualty of a recession in which car manufacturers went bankrupt and house builders stopped building, but whether you classify Armour (AMR) as a casualty depends on how you look at the company.
Its share price [...]
How markets fail and myth of the rational market
Poking holes in free markets
The subject of last week’s blog, John Lanchester is one of many novelists, journalists and economists with books out on the financial crisis, blaming, in part, the madness of crowds of traders (and regulators), for rendering markets much less efficient than we thought.
Conventional financial models, they argue, rely on the pursuit [...]
Investing at the speed of light
Gooch & Housego almost got away.
I first looked at Gooch & Housego (GHH) last March, in the depths of the financial crisis. The shares looked cheap but the company, which makes components for industrial lasers, was in a crisis of its own. It had taken on dollar denominated debt to buy General Optics (now [...]
Will austerity make us happier?
Smiling all the way to the bank
Karl Rabeder is happy, he’s giving away his £3m fortune and plans to have nothing left. His conviction:
I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.
Is a growing meme, picked up by the novelist John Lanchester (and UK [...]
F_Score scores in the UK
You’re so beautiful.
One of the good things about being a blogger is that you can do a bit of research and publish it. It doesn’t have to be peer-reviewed, it needn’t be tested to the n’th degree, you can publish because it looks pretty, and it might just tell us something important.
This is a [...]
ATH looks good on the surface
A tale of two businesses
There are two sides to ATH Resources (ATH), the dirty business of open cast coal mining in Scotland, and the virtuous business of regenerating old deep mines.
Regeneration means washing contaminated spill tips, and landscaping the mines [See the corporate video]. Selling reclaimed coal offsets some of the costs, which [...]
Weekend wisdom
Things to read and watch
From this week I’m increasing the blog posting schedule to three posts, typically on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Friday’s blog, ‘Weekend wisdom’ will be a collection of notes on the best things I read, or watched, that week and takes the place of the links that used to appear at the [...]
Shareholders should pay as well as bankers
Like turkeys voting for a cut in the dividend
In a speech last month, Andrew Haldane, executive director of financial stability at the Bank of England warned it could take many years for the UK economy to recover from its debt hangover. During that period we’d experience low growth as all sectors of the economy, consumers, [...]
Titon: A breath of fresh air
‘aint no titan.
Like a detective might follow an unpromising lead just to rule it out, I started my investigation into Titon (TON) on Friday with low expectations. The uninspiring price chart is of little consequence, but what’s happened to profits over the last decade is.
Titon made a small loss in each of the [...]
