Buy and hold, hopefully forever…
(Photo by A Syed from FreeImages) Maybe I am getting a bit long in the tooth, but it does seem as if everything is getting faster these days. Between February 19 and March 23 the S&P 500 fell a shocking 34%. In fact, from the February 19 peak, the Wall Street benchmark took only 16 […]
In a bear market, perspective is key. With that in mind, I have always found Bob Farrell’s 10 Market Rules to Remember (by way of David Rosenberg) very useful: Markets tend to return to the mean over time Excesses in one direction lead to an opposite excess in the other There are no new eras […]
A few months ago I posted about BACIT (Battle Against Cancer Investment Trust) and suggested that I was considering buying shares in it. Well I did buy those shares and so was pleased when they recently announced that a dividend equivalent to 2.10p would be paid on 19 August. Unfortunately, I was not so pleased […]
It is a well known truism that there isn’t ever really anything entirely new in finance and what Greece is going through this week has been endured many times before. Knowing that isn’t going to make it any easier for the people who will pay with their jobs and pensions for their leaders’ antics (mind you, somebody must have […]
A small article in this Sunday Times’ Money section summed up a lot of what I think is wrong with the asset management industry. Having begun by stating that “it is early days yet for an investment trust marketed on the basis that it should be bought only on a 10-year view”, the column goes on immediately […]
There is not much in the City that does not involve generous remuneration for all involved, but the Battle Against Cancer Investment Trust (BACIT) is one rare example. This is a fund of funds that, rather than collecting different types and layers of fees for its managers, waives one layer of fees completely and donates the other to the Institute […]
It is a long weekend here in London but the weather–as usual–is refusing to make any concessions to barbecue cooks or day trippers. Chilly conditions and gusty winds do however make ideal conditions for reading from the comfort of one’s armchair and so that is largely what I have been doing. Safes (and Howard Ruff) Merryn Someset Webb’s column […]
I have just read William N. Thorndike’s brilliant The Outsiders, which identifies the traits and techniques of the CEOs that ran (or run) some of the best-managed companies of the last fifty years. A few of these names I had heard of (Buffett, John Malone, and Katharine Graham), and some I hadn’t (Bill Anders, Bill Stiritz, […]
Shares in Alliance Trust, we are told, are the sort of thing that gets passed down from generation to generation; much like a Patek Philippe or the Grandparents’ silver teaspoon collection. Another thing that gets passed down is complaints about the trust’s performance and the ensuing promises of better to come. So, what has been the problem this […]
The Voya Corporate Leaders Trust Fund was founded on one simple piece of logic – companies that prospered in the Great Depression could prosper in all economic and market conditions. The Trust’s founders therefore picked 30 of the strongest American corporations of that fairly grim time (1935) and bought them in equal amounts for their fund. The rule […]