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Carnival: Ready for recession

In practice:
Ripe for a lame pun and, perhaps, long-term investment
One of the laziest, most cringe-worthy indulgences a financial writer can lapse into is the lame pun about a company’s business.  This is why Gold funds glisten, and cruise lines, well, I’ll avoid the temptation…
Carnival (CCL), which calls itself “the world’s most profitable vacation company,” is [...]

Reintroducing a margin of safety into capitalism

No more flying by the seat of the pants
First, I’m sorry about the lack of posts this week. I’m working on bringing you the Thrifty 30 and the next few weeks might be a bit light too.
The concept of ‘Margin of safety’ is well known to value investors who try to pay less for companies [...]

Saving capitalism from the capitalists

In a section in the profile of Nouriel Roubini I mentioned in my last post, he acknowledges other ‘whistleblowers‘, people or institutions that warned of financial crisis early on. It contains only two:Raghuram G. Rajan, then chief economist of the International Monetary Fund:
“Raghu Rajan gave a very strong speech in 2005,” [Roubini] says, about excessive [...]

Economists who know what they’re talking about

Every month I write a column for Moneywise Magazine called Join The Dots.
 
I pick somebody newsworthy and explain what their words or actions tell us about markets.
 
Next month I’m going to choose an economist who knows what he’s talking about, probably Nouriel Roubini (See this profile in this month’s Finance & Development, an IMF magazine.).
 
He’s [...]

Innovation doesn’t inspire

Uncertainty abounds

After reading Alphaville’s alarmist appeal to readers to SELL: Insurers  because of now widely reported fears for their solvency, I tweeted :
Right, that’s it. As of now, I have a strict policy, not to invest in any entity that invests…
A little dramatic perhaps. I’ve avoided insurance companies and banks for nearly a decade, not [...]

Twitterrrr

Vaguely embarassing, I’ll skirt around the ‘twit’ jokes, but I’m on Twitter.
Here’s a sample of my, err… twits?

Software for value investors

This is a biased review. I love this software.
Let’s start this review at the beginning of my investing week, which, curiously, starts on Friday at about 5.30pm.
Sharescope
That’s when the day’s share prices are ready for download into Sharescope1, a program that helps with financial analysis, charting, and portfolio management. I probably use less than 1% [...]

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 [...]

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