There’s a regular topic of conversation in investing circles around managing a diversified portfolio and how many stocks an investor should own to be sufficiently ’diversified’. The general consensus seems to be that portfolio diversification runs on a spectrum of portfolios with 10 or less stocks being super concentrated ’high risk, high return’ and 40 […]
A few years ago, I wrote a blog about the importance of developing your range of knowledge. Since then, my consumption of news and social media content has shot through the roof. Anyone who knows me well will know that my appetite for new, high-quality information is vast I can usually be found poring over
The last few weeks have been a great experiment to determine those that implement ’buy and hold’ as a strategy and those that have never actually had to do it during a market rout. Global indexes have collapsed on the coronavirus scare and panicky investors have been dumping shares left right and centre. For those
In part three of this series on when to sell, I’m going to explore more concepts that help me to decide when to liquidate a position. You can find parts one and two linked here. The grass is greener on the other side The first of these is undoubtedly when I identify a better opportunity
Half way through writing part one of this series, I realised that this is actually a much more complex issue than I can do justice to in a single article. As such, I’ve decided to split the topic into a series. In the first article, I covered my thoughts on selling; as a first rule,
If asked, I generally describe myself as a ‘buy and hold’ investor. The buying bit is mostly easy – I enjoy looking for good quality or undervalued assets and acquiring them. The ‘holding’ bit is where it all starts to get a bit tricky. I’m fairly averse to selling assets. The amount of work that
I was chatting to a reader about share prices and was asked whether I consider a falling share price to be a negative indicator. Surely, if the market is a combination of hundreds of individual investors expressing their opinions then a falling price indicates that more people have found a reason to sell than to
Reader question: Is a falling share price a negative indicator? Read More »
Last week, I wrote a post about portfolio management and signalled my intention to cover some of the elements in more detail in further posts. Since then, I’ve been thinking about the psychology of investing – I’ve written fairly extensively about the qualitative and quantitative analysis I do on companies, but relatively little about the
The key building blocks of my approach to portfolio management are to keep risks tightly managed and to develop an easy to follow method of identifying opportunities to buy and sell. I try to keep these goals at the forefront of my thinking to tilt the odds of making money in my favour. When I
The Bank of England is a comparatively modern institution when held against other national banks such as the Bank of Geneva (founded in 1345) or the Bank of Venice (founded in 1157). It was originally conceived by a merchant by the name of William Patterson in 1689 and was incorporated by William the 3rd in
Those of you that used to follow this blog will have noticed that I’ve been somewhat absent over the last few months. It will therefore come as little surprise to hear that I’ve been extraordinarily busy but happily have found some time to sit down and pen another article. When I started this blog in
Shares in Centrica have fallen nearly 20% after the company slashed its dividend and announced that their CEO, Iain Conn, is to step down from the role next year. The company has made a loss of nearly £500m in the last six months and has seen its shares decline an eye-watering 70% since Iain took
Surprise, surprise, Centrica has just fallen off another cliff… Read More »
Having written about my painful experience of investing with Carillion I have watched with interest as shares of Kier have followed a similar route. From a peak of over £24 in 2007, the shares collapsed to £6.50 during the financial crisis, never recovering their previous height and now having lost over 90% of their value
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this week, you’ll have read the extensive coverage of Neil Woodford’s decision to suspend trading in one of his funds. My understanding is that this makes it temporarily impossible for an investor to buy or sell units in the fund, or to transfer units they already own between
I recently read an article from a fellow blogger regarding their portfolio where they looked at their actual behaviour vs their published strategy. In a similar manner to myself, this investor believes in buying long-term value plays, buying for income and holding for the long term. I’ve followed their blog for several years and have
