In the first of two articles, Richard celebrates perhaps the sweetest investment of them all: The humdrum business that incubates a better one. Though my stock-in-trade is businesses reliably executing established and successful strategies, my biggest winners have often been businesses that pivoted. They incubated better businesses from within the business they already operated. In
The FTSE 100 was down -1.4% this week to 7,048. The Nasdaq and S&P500 also fell, but less than -1% each. The FTSE China 50 was up +1% last week, the Mumbai and Russian stock exchanges remain the best performing YTD, both up +25% since the start of the year. Oxford Nanopore, the maker of
Our funds specialist returns form a summer break with a new addition to the Prudent 15. It’s a lending fund that has built up a solid track record and offers cautious, income-oriented investors a solid 8% plus yield. My latest addition to the Prudent 15 is a slightly alternative income-oriented fund that has built up
Acquiring private companies that make precision instruments has propelled SDI shares to 12-bagger status over the last five years. Maynard Paton recaps the story and prospects of the ‘buy and build’ specialist. Everybody loves a share that keeps going up. SharePad lists 168 names that have delivered 15% or more annualised turns during the last
The FTSE 100 was up less than half a percent last week to 7,164, towards the top of the trading range that it has occupied since early May. The Nasdaq 100 was up +1.1% ahead of the S&P500 +0.6%. The China 50 was one of the best performing major indices up +2.8% to 18,291 as
Inspired by Maynard’s article on Hornby’s turnaround, Richard examines the history of Games Workshop to imagine what challenges lie ahead if Hornby is to emulate the success of this outwardly similar hobby business. The idea for this article came from Maynard’s article about Hornby. To my mind he convincingly described a turnaround that is already
The FTSE 100 was up half a percent last week to 7,124. The Nasdaq 100 had a better week +1.2% and the China 50 rebounded +4.5%, though that index is still down -14% in the last 3 months. The US 10-year bond yield finished last week at 1.35%, recovering from a low of 1.19% in
Breakouts are an excellent way to swing trade and profit from bull markets. I love breakouts because they’re a high probability pattern of continuation and also because it means that the price is rising. However, many people try strategies that that are inherently risky. Sadly, one private investor commented that they’d invested into a stock
Since the post-pandemic stock market boom, analysts and experts have warned us that the market was overvalued. Some have gone even further and submitted that we’re in a bubble that is set to burst. However, prices keep rising, suggesting many investors believe there is still value to be found. So which is it? Is the
Deep pockets, low pricing and fancy IT can’t always guarantee ‘disruptive’ success. Maynard Paton studies the mixed progress of estate-agent challenger Purplebricks Investors love disruptors. Find a pioneering upstart that is stealing market share from industry dinosaurs, and your portfolio may enjoy a huge stock-market winner. Amazon of course is the textbook example. But not
The FTSE 100 fell 2.5% last week and remains at the level it was in early May, at 7,048. The China 50 Index was down even more sharply 7.6% to 16,959. Alibaba fell 15% last week, and Tencent was also down 11%. The damage is being done by new data privacy laws that Beijing will
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