Judges Scientific has delivered mega-bagger returns for its very early shareholders. Maynard Paton studies the growth and success of the ‘buy and build’ operator. Today’s rough market for small-cap shares could be the exact time to hunt for your next great portfolio winner. Take Judges Scientific, the £540 million group of scientific instrument manufacturers, which […]
Shares in SDI have plummeted. Richard examines the price differential between the company, a manufacturer of scientific equipment, and Judges Scientific, a firm it is often compared to. In the last two weeks, my 5 strikes system* has only surfaced two new investment ideas: SDI and Goodwin. These businesses have good financial track records, but […]
Digging deep into stock market sensation Halma’s history, Richard gains clues about the kind of businesses long-term investors should think about owning in an economic blizzard. I have never owned shares in Halma, in fact, I have never considered owning them even though the business has performed extraordinarily well. Halma: Proof that roll-ups can grow […]
Richard takes a first look at Learning Technologies, a company aggressively buying businesses that make employee training and development content and software. Learning Technologies’ is a slightly bewildering agglomeration of businesses that helps organisations get the best out of employees. It creates training content for employers and makes software both for the creation of training […]
Shortly after Judges Scientific makes its biggest-ever acquisition, Richard sets out to discover whether the pasture is greener over at SDI, a smaller listed business that does much the same thing: buys and builds companies that make scientific instruments. If I were to use one measure to compare highly acquisitive businesses it would be Return […]
Richard takes a first look at protective packaging distributor Macfarlane, a company so boring even he could not bring himself to investigate it. The idea of investing in Macfarlane has been sitting with me for a while because an investor I follow has been banging its drum on Twitter. I have ignored him for all […]
Future PLC is one of the outstanding growth stories of the last five years, but it is also one that eluded Richard. He fesses up to the biases that blinded him to the opportunity, and discusses whether it is still one today… Today’s company, Future, is one I should have taken a look at a […]
Richard goes deep into Oxford Instruments’ annual reports and SharePad for answers to three questions to establish whether it is a good “pick and shovel play”. In my last article I explained how I used custom tables to find Oxford Instruments, a highly profitable business that seemed to have lost its way and then found […]
Bunzl, a company I investigated last year, is a classic roll up A distributor of everyday items consumed by businesses and organisations, it routinely acquires much smaller distributors, improves their efficiency and creates economies of scale. This reduces customer’s procurement costs, and improves the profitability of the mothership. To grow, the company has repeated this […]
This year has confirmed that most of the news is at best irrelevant to me as an investor. Worse, the news stressed me out. It regularly fed my mind with impossible problems to solve. Companies I admired closed down, temporarily I hoped. They raised money in emergency fund-raisings. They furloughed staff. So far, the determination […]
It would be convenient to report that I diligently pick every share I investigate from a Sharepad filter of exquisite construction, but it would be untrue. Sometimes I click around randomly until I find an interesting stock. I had heard Bunzl had had a “good pandemic”, and when I saw that its PE ratio and […]
If you’ve read my recent articles you will know I have been ranking shares using basic financial statistics. I found Bioventix by ranking five criteria. The objective was to find profitable companies mostly financed by equity rather than debt, with high quality assets and low valuations. The more profitable, the more conservatively financed, and the […]
In response to a reader’s suggestion, Richard investigates Alpha FX. It is exactly the kind of people-first business that could be building a long-term competitive advantage and consequently grow inexorably. As I was considering what to write about for my last article before the Christmas break, a present from a reader arrived in my inbox. […]
Richard uses a trick from Judges Scientific’s playbook to assess local hero Scientific Digital Imaging. Both companies acquire scientific instrument manufacturers using a “buy and build strategy”. Last month we worked out how to populate Google Maps with SharePad data to find local companies to invest in. Today, we will take the process a stage […]
There are two questions I ask of all companies I might invest in. Do the statistics indicate the business is highly profitable and, if they do, can I identify what makes it special? SharePad can answer the first question, and it can help with the second. Today I’m looking at Harvey Nash because it satisfies […]
