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 […]
Terry Smith is arguably the most successful British fund manager of the last ten years. Although the current bear market may well have more twists and turns to come, so far his straightforward philosophy (buy good companies, don’t overpay, do nothing) is proving that it works in tough times, as well as the good ones. […]
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 […]
PZ Cussons is in many respects a mini-Unilever. It owns and manages a range of brands that incorporate personal care, home care, food, and beauty products. Weighing in with a market cap of only £1.5 billion, it is no more than a fly in the ointment for Unilever, but what it lacks in scale it can make […]
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 […]
These super investors tend to be a cold-blooded lot, but there is one company that does seem to get their pulses racing: Valeant Pharmaceuticals. I have to be honest, I had not even heard of this company until very recently but it seems to have become a gorilla overnight and so I thought I would […]
Everybody knows that the market has done well since the shenanigans of 2008, but the stock market is not itself a business–it simply aggregates the valuations of many different businesses. These businesses fire and splutter at different times, just as they drift in and out of fashion on one whim or another. So, although many companies may be fully […]
I have just finished reading a well-written biography of Jesse Livermore (‘Boy Plunger: The Man Who Sold America Short in 1929’ by Tom Rubython) and am now more comfortable than ever in my avoidance of anything even remotely related to speculation. I am not sure I can think of any other case where a man with so […]
It was all going nicely this year until those pesky Greeks came along with their anti-austerity ideas and their democratic rights etc… Just kidding, the markets were long overdue a correction and it seems that is what we have. Whether it develops into more than that is anybody’s guess. In the meantime the broader market correction caused a […]
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 […]