Buy and hold, hopefully forever…
Shortly after the AstraZeneca board’s indecently hasty rejection of Pfizer’s (a.k.a. the praying mantis) “final” bid a few months ago, I said on Twitter that it would be nice to see some of them put their money where their cigars were. Granted, I was mildly piqued by the speed with which the Pfizer bid was […]
Another negative month (-1.53%) for the portfolio in July and the boring Sell in May and go away theorists are beginning to pop up with their trusty charts and musty data sheets. A lot of companies reported results in July, before their grand fromages depart for the Mediterranean. Of these, the most healthy for my […]
Huddled over their steaming bowls of thin gruel counting out their gold coins, it is very easy to criticise misers. By practising something mildly virtuous–thrift–to excess, they appear to miss the point of the money, which is that it is a tool to be used for something, not a dead asset to be senselessly accumulated for its […]
While tobacco may not be a pleasant business to be in, not many people would dispute how lucrative it has been. Lorillard shareholders, in particular, will probably have been breaking out the bubbly recently as they digested the details of their company’s $27.4 billion acquisition by Reynolds American. However, I can’t help wondering how Lorillard’s former owners–the hotels to insurance conglomerate Loews–will be […]
The Little Book That Beats The Market, by Joel Greenblatt, is an interesting book but it is indeed little, to the extent that it can be read in one or two sittings. Greenblatt says that his aim is to teach his children (spin-offs) how to make money for themselves. To do this, he advocates a form of system investing […]
Market Neutral funds are one of the more seductive sounding products offered by the Asset Management sector; who would not be tempted by this? The investment objective is to achieve a positive return over a 12 month period in all market conditions. The thought of smooth, steady progress while markets zig zag around hysterically suffering periods […]
As Sylvester Stallone knows, if you find something that works then keep doing it. In the case of his Rocky franchise, this meant that every plot went as follows: 1. Throwing down of gauntlet by unpleasant rival 2. Token picking-up of gauntlet by sluggish Rocky 3. Motivating incident 4. Turbo-charged training session 5. Victory. In […]
I didn’t even know that this was a ratio, until I read about it over the weekend, but it makes sense and looks useful, and so I am immediately promoting it to key ratio status. If you are wondering what the justification for the Mickey Mouse picture is, well, it is more to do with the magic than […]
Fundsmith, the fund manager run by Terry Smith, has launched a new investment trust conveniently named (for cheap punsters) Fundsmith Emerging Equities Trust (FEET). Hope springs eternal in the fund management industry and, despite the lack of any emerging markets track record, the trust is currently selling at a premium of 8%. Until this point Fundsmith has […]
All good runs must come to an end and mine did in June with a negative return for the portfolio of -1.23% . I read somewhere yesterday that the FTSE is up about 45 points for the year and so it seems nothing much is happening anywhere else either. In the meantime, I suppose, the […]