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
A few months ago I wrote an article about the declining standards of debt in issue and how I believe this is going to impact an awful lot of investors that stick with the received wisdom of ‘bonds are safe, equities are risky’. I was therefore interested to read that 2019 is shaping up to
I forget where I first heard the quote, but several years ago, I was watching a video with Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet where one of them said something to the effect that “Diversification is for people that don’t know what they’re doing”. It was a typically astute observation from the duo, and it made
Your portfolio is about preserving capital in the short-term and achieving capital appreciation in the long-term. In addition to this, you might seek to produce some level of income but these goals can often feel complicated and obscure to achieve. So how do I go about it? When pursuing these goals, I find looking at
One of the first companies I bought shares in bought was Centrica. If you’ve ever paid for gas in your home then you’ve probably heard of them. A huge, FTSE250 company with decades of trading history and operating in what is usually considered the ‘defensive’ market of utilities. When I bought the shares, I loved
Earlier this week I was alerted to a story about everyone’s favourite electric car company Tesla and their ‘interesting’ approach to the on-going financial black hole that represents their balance sheet. Despite declared a loss every quarter since they were founded in 2008 (yes, that’s right, ten years ago), this is a stock that has
The house of cards that is the Tesla balance sheet Read More »
I was watching a video of the 1996 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting where a member of the audience asked Warren Buffet where Berkshire kept their cash. If you watch the clip you might get some amusement from Warren casually stating “we have a billion and something in treasuries, and a little something extra in commercial
The appetite for extremely risky assets has grown and grown since the financial crisis of 2008. More debt and margin. It seems like noone is thinking about risk – just reward. Every since the first debt was issued, there have been individual and institutions that we all know shouldn’t be lent money under any circumstances.
Corporate bonds, or financial obligations owed by companies, have been increasingly year on year for a long time now. A few months ago, a fellow investor pointed out to me the growing issue not just of net bond values in issue, but the grade of those bonds. How are bonds graded? Bonds – both corporate
