Bruce Packard

Financial Analyst, former management consultant, equity research analyst Bruce Packard started his career at Credit Suisse followed by various banks and stockbroking firms before quitting The City to work in financial PR, Litigation finance and finally financial education. In 2008 he predicted the nationalisation of the UK banking industry.

I’m a self-invested, low frequency, buy and hold investor focused on quality. As well as writing for ShareScope I like to capture my financial analysis and non-conformist thoughts on my own blog brucepackard.comI also used to own a craft beer bar in Berlin and for fun play beach volleyball (unlikely to turn professional though). 

Charts

Weekly Commentary 12/04/21: Equity. James Equity.

We are most of the way through result season for companies with December year ends. Bruce discusses how companies with patchy track records can border on evasive in their RNS disclosure, without quite crossing the line to unacceptable. Often the share price reactions suggests that investors aren’t fooled though.

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Weekly Commentary 22/03/21: Ports and platforms

Bruce compares a couple of Direct Carrier Billing (DCB), mobile payment platforms: Boku v Bango. He wonders if platform economics has become too popular, with the benefits well recognised but not downside. Also Ocean Wilsons, the Brazilian (Salvador, Bahia) port business.

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Chart showing company investment

Weekly Commentary 08/03/21: Baillie Gifford vs Albert Bridge

With Scottish Mortgage Inv Trust down 9% last week, Bruce looks at the debate between Lawrence “usually a mistake to sell” Burns of Baillie Gifford and Andrew “take profits” Dickson of Albert Bridge Capital. Companies covered Renishaw, Solid State, K3 Capital and Franchise Brands.

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Weekly Commentary 01/03/21: What has been will be again

Nasdaq sold off last week, down 7% since the middle of February, though still up since the start of the year. Tesla fell to $680, versus a peak of $896 earlier in February. US 10y yields hit 1.49% last week up over 50bp in the last month Financial bubbles don’t pop because speculators suddenly start

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Weekly Commentary: 22/02/21 – All Aboard for Mu Mu Land

At midnight, on 1st January this year, the K.L.F. released their back catalogue of music (hits such as 3AM Eternal, Justified and Ancient, Last Train to Trancentral) on Spotify and uploaded their old videos to YouTube. This was their first activity as a band since 1992, when they announced they were leaving the music industry

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Weekly Commentary: 15/02/21 – Getting high on junk bonds

Last week Bloomberg reported that junk bond yields in the US fell below 4% the lowest level ever recorded and down from 11.5% peak yield in March last year. This is the opposite direction to the yield on the “risk free rate” of US 10y bond (hitting 1.18% last week) which has been steadily rising

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Weekly Commentary: 08/02/21 – The signs are here

Moonpig IPO’ed last week at 350p, valuing the company at £1.2bn, and the shares rose +24% to 430p the following day. Meanwhile the FT reported that Elon Musk is expecting SpaceX to be valued at $60bn in a funding round later this month. Virgin Galactic is up +163% in the last 3 months. Valuations are

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Weekly Commentary: 01/02/21 – Bored Markets Hypothesis

Some of the speculative exuberance has spilled over the punch bowl at the cryptocurrency party into a number of glass half empty equities. GameStonk, err I mean GameStop, rose from below $20 a share earlier this month to over $500 per share, as retail traders from the Reddit thread “Wall Street Bets” piled in to

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Weekly Commentary: 25/01/21 – Expectation v surprise

I was initially unimpressed by the UK’s mass vaccination rollout. However it is important to keep updating your beliefs when data is better than you had been expecting and not miss the inflection point. From below 150K per week in December, we now have almost 5m vaccinated. My mistake was to extrapolate in a linear

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