2010: An Investing Odyssey
A long, wandering and eventful journey.
There’s not much point in rehashing 2009. If you hibernated through it you missed a good whipsawing by the stock market and your investments are probably doing much better than they were at the beginning of the year. If you panicked at the beginning of the year and sold [...]
State of the Market
Neither hot nor cold.
[This is a transcript of a podcast originally recorded in October. If you prefer to listen to it, it’s here Today the FTSE All-Share is slightly higher, but not enough to change the analysis.]
So, the FTSE All Share is up 850 points from 1,800 to 2,650 in round numbers since its [...]
Being Warren Buffett
There’s only one WB
[This is a transcript of a podcast originally recorded in October. If you prefer to listen to it, it’s here :-)]
On Tuesday night, my son Danny and I watched Evan Davis interview Warren Buffett.
I suspect many of you have seen the programme, ‘The World’s Greatest Money Maker’, too. It’s been one of [...]
Even if gold could be worth $6,300 I’m not buying
Gold, it’s glittering
Everybody’s talking about gold. The financial Internet is yellowing by the day as pumped-up hedge fund managers, bloggers and analysts dream up reasons to buy gold bars, gold coins, gold ETFs, gold mining shares and, most probably, the gold fillings from dead people’s mouths.
Through a canny little site called bit.ly I can [...]
Classic value shares return 76%
27 shares trounce the index.
A year ago yesterday I included a list of classic value shares in an article, Back to Basics (see: pages 1,2 and 3 - all pdf) for the January 2009 edition of Money Observer magazine. This weekend I drafted an update, maybe they’ll call it Back to Basics 2. It will [...]
Value Investing: Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investment
Read this book!
If you knew nothing about the stockmarket but happened upon Value Investing the old-fashioned way in a shop, you’d probably return it to the shelf sharpish. Certainly after reading a little of the preface.
James Montier’s on a crusade against the financial orthodoxy: Efficient Markets, Modern Portfolio Theory, the Capital Asset Pricing Model [...]
Blame it on Bachelier
A random walk into recession
You’ve got to watch these two interviews with Benoit Mandelbrot:
part 1
part 2
Mandelbrot saw the financial crisis of 2007 coming, He couldn’t have told you exactly when or how it would happen. His achievement was simply in recognising that big, and sometimes destructive events do happen in financial markets.
Maybe [...]
Reward, without the risk
In theory:
The holy grail
Contrary to conventional notions of risk and reward, buying shares in safe companies really does improve returns. That’s the message from a research note published last year by Morgan Stanley.
It published an alluring chart, which depicts what goes on over a stockmarket cycle (click on it for a larger version):
The story [...]
Step forward… The real Thrifty 30
In practice:
I name this portfolio…
Regular readers will be familiar with my Thrifty 30 portfolios. They are portfolios of thirty shares in financially strong companies at cheap prices. I first tried it on this blog, then I had a go for Money Observer [pdf]. Up to now, though, I have not maintained a Thrifty 30 portfolio. [...]
Minsky, mortgages and you
In practice:
Minksy’s protracted moment
If you follow this blog, you’ll recognise these names: Jeremy Grantham, Nouriel Roubini, Robert Shiller, and James Montier. I’ve quoted them many times, and they anticipated the financial crisis.
They have something else in common, they’re all followers of economist Hyman Minsky. Grantham describes himself as a Minsky maven. Roubini feared we were [...]
