Earlier this year I was speaking to a friend about investing and felt like I was standing in front of a metaphorical firehose of investing noise. “Henry, have you read about Bitcoin? I made 30% last year on it!” “I made a bet on a gold miner, they have access to three mines but the […]
This blog is probably a surprise to any readers who read my site regularly as I haven’t made a post in over six months and have been fairly absent from Twitter. Where to begin? Well, I should start with the exciting news; I got married! Not only did I get married in October but my
So, a little later than I expected, I’m pleased to publish the next article in my series about Investment Idea Generation. In the first article in this series, I wrote about the topic of selecting investment goals, different types of assets and asset classes, and the different investment vehicles available to investors looking for alternatives
In my last article, I indicated that I wanted to cover investment idea generation for an investment portfolio in more detail. The very first stage of building a portfolio of investments, far before investment idea generation, is to define your investment goals. For the purposes of this exercise, let us define our goal as income
Listening to the latest Twin Pete’s Investing podcast (which can be found here or here for those heathens that aren’t already dedicated followers), I was particularly interested by a segment where they discussed transparency of investors presenting ‘research’ on social media. The reason I was so interested was because of my own management of this
The Narrative Fallacy is the idea that humans are predisposed towards believing a good story over understanding the facts of a situation. We are often drawn towards less desirable investments simply because they have a good story and then use the story to convince ourselves of the merits of the company in which we are
The last few weeks have reinforced the importance of portfolio managers and private investors having a solid process to protect capital and prevent themselves from opening position which are, frankly, only ever going to lose them money. For those of you that haven’t seen the headlines, a number of tiny US companies such as Bed,
In 2008-09 we had a financial crisis; a credit crisis that required immense levels of government intervention in global financial markets. In the case of the UK, this included hundreds of billions of pounds in quantitative easing and an effective elimination of positive interest rates. Several UK banks required direct injections of capital and one
Sovereign Debt Crisis: The economic consequences of COVID-19 Read More »
Last year, I wrote an article which introduced some of the ways in which investors misjudge risk management. I always meant to cover the topic in more detail but for one reason or another never got around to it. In today’s article, I want to take a more comprehensive look at investment portfolio risk management.
Long-time readers of this site will remember my failed investment in Carillion – a leading international construction businesses that collapsed under the weight of its debts and ended up in bankruptcy back in 2018. At the time, I largely penned up the collapse of Carillion to poor management and a weak balance sheet but recent
A few weeks ago, I spoke to a fellow investor about a new company I added to my portfolio which they had already held for a few years with little joy. The share price is down fairly heavily over the last two years from a high of a little over £6 in 2018 to a
I was speaking to a fellow investor over the Christmas break about how they had positioned their portfolio for 2021 and the challenges in finding growth in the UK stock market. In today’s article, I’m going to recap on some of our conversation points about the challenges facing the Financial Time Stock Exchange indices (FTSE
Where will UK stock market growth come from in 2021? Read More »
Most investors will be aware of the 60/40 model for cautious investors seeking growth in the markets whilst avoiding the turbulence of a pure equity portfolio. In this model, the portfolio is comprised of 60% equities and 40% bonds. Historically, bonds have much lower volatility than equities, causing the overall value of the portfolio to
Well. What a year. 2020 is going to be long remembered by many investors (myself included) for being their first ‘real’ bear market. According to my trading journal, my worst official month for the year was March, when I was down over 18% in a month and looking at a total decline of over 23%.
When undertaking a recent review of my portfolio I was struck by the great number of logical contradictions in investing. I’ll be publishing this review in the next few weeks but the process of writing it made me consider all the various hurdles and challenges that investors face. For example; Patience is a great trait
