The Complete Turtle Trader
I’m going to start this review of The Complete Turtle Trader with a little mystery. Why does Bill Miller endorse the book on the jacket cover?
Bill Miller runs the legendary Legg Mason Value Trust. He describes himself as a long-term contrarian investor, which is about as far away as you can get from Turtle Trading. [...]
Finance books to mend your soul
Sometimes I find it helpful to take a step back from the day-to-day work of evaluating companies and markets and think about what I’m looking for and why. Regular readers know I find the reports of James Montier*1 at Societe Generale and his book Behavioural Investing (review) particularly useful.
Last week he sent around brief reviews [...]
A company and a book to cheer you up
If you thought my last post on Dairy Crest was a reluctant vote of confidence, you’re right.
Posting links to news stories like the ones in the right sidebar of this blog it’s hard not to let gloom seep into my stockpicking brain. Sadly hysteria is an occupational hazard, which explains why journalists don’t make good [...]
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 [...]
Supply and demand 60 years on…
Ultimately supply and demand moves share prices, and it’s always been that way.
This is true of private equity buyouts now. It’s one of the factors driving the market upwards:
…a positive reinvestment effect occurs when companies are taken over for cash or near cash and the proceeds are reinvested. This affect may apply to the market [...]
DNA of a superinvestor
Occasionally a cult forms around an investor. In the case of Mohnish Pabrai, it’s a sub-cult of the mother of all investment cults.
Whilst searching Amazon for classic value investing texts, Eddie Bravo of Vale tudo investing blog, discovered that two ‘must-read’ books, both out of print, were selling for considerable sums. Seth Klarman’s ‘Margin of [...]
Experts with the ‘X’ factor
Most, but not all, pundits are wrong, most of the time. Here’s how to spot the experts who’ve got talent…
Robin Soole, a reader of this blog, is unimpressed by financial journalism. In the following quote he added his own merciless annotations to a reply from an editor advising a reader after one of his magazine’s [...]
Cockroaches and trolls
Graeme at MoneyTerms is adding more encyclopaedic definitions to his site. I suggested a few, others are topical, which makes MoneyTerms an ally in interpreting the financial pages. So, if you want to know why cov-lite financing used by private equity firms is causing concern in the City, or discover the seedy world of the [...]
Economist joins the free Internet
The Economist has joined the free Internet. It’s front page is now a big ad., but it’s a small price to pay
The sixty year bull market
Here it is. As promised. The latest update of the most beautiful chart in my burgeoning chart library, provided courtesy of Scottish Widows (UK Financial History 1945-2006).
It shows the value of £100 indexed from 1945.
Invested in equities with dividends reinvested it would have been worth £125,243 by 2006.
Investing in equities without reinvesting dividends would have [...]
