Phil has over 25 years experience of investing. He started out as an investment analyst for asset managers and City stockbrokers before becoming a writer. He has worked for MoneyWeek and Investors’ Chronicle and was the CFA UK Financial Journalist of the year in 2020. He worked for ShareScope between 2014 and 2018 and helped to develop many of the investment tools in SharePad. He has written a number of educational investment articles for ShareScope and is also the author of the book How to Pick Quality Shares.
I am passionate about investor education and try and make what might seem complicated subjects easier to understand. Investing is not just about picking winners but also avoiding losers and learning from your mistakes. My aim is to make investing as simple as possible by focusing on what matters and avoiding what doesn’t.
Phil takes a look at some of the issues investors should consider when owning a share that has performed very well. He does this by taking a look at Rolls-Royce shares. It’s always nice to own a share that performs very well. However, there will come a time when investors will ask themselves whether they
Companies have three main choices when it comes to financing their business. They can use money from shareholders or equity, use the profits and free cash flows produced by the business, or they can borrow money from lenders. Debt on its own is not a bad thing. If a company takes the money it has
Phil uses SharePad to shed some light on the very popular Fundsmith Equity fund. Fundsmith has great long-term performance but recent performance is more modest. Fundsmith is one of the most popular managed funds out there and gets plenty of column inches due to its high-profile manager Terry Smith. Since starting out at the back
Phil puts the embattled Reckitt Benckiser under the SharePad spotlight. Last Friday saw a sharp fall in the share price of Reckitt Benckiser – one of the world’s leading household and consumer goods companies. A judge in the US awarded damages of $60m after ruling that Reckitt’s infant formula products may have contributed to the
Phil shows how he uses SharePad to research companies and shares. I have been using SharePad since it was launched in 2015 and helped to develop many of the features that are in it today. It remains a great resource for private investors and I find it invaluable when researching investments for my own portfolio
Phil looks at the issues with one of the most important ratios in investing and argues the case for a cleaner and more realistic alternative. Return on investment or return on capital employed (ROCE) as it is commonly referred to is seen as one of the best measures of a company’s financial performance. It is
Phil takes a look at a strategy of identifying unloved shares as a way of generating market beating returns. In my last couple of articles, I’ve discussed some of the issues that investors face when looking at good companies. One of the biggest difficulties faced is that the shares of such companies can be highly
In my previous article, I discussed the reasons for investing in good companies and how you can search for them in SharePad. We saw that investing in good companies can generate stellar returns for investors over time but being able to buy the shares of them at a reasonable price is often difficult. It is
Investing in good companies is one way to grow the value of your portfolio. In this article, Phil takes you through his method of searching for outstanding British companies using SharePad. When I first started out in the investing world more than a quarter of a century ago, value investing was still very much in
Buying a share in a company in the hope that it might get taken over is a risky thing to do. There’s no guarantee that a buyer will ever emerge and you could end up losing money waiting for one to turn up. Phil takes a look at some prominent takeovers of 2023 and asks
There’s no harm in using fund managers as a source for investment ideas but blindly copying them without doing your own research can be a costly mistake. Phil looks at the recent purchase of Rightmove shares by two well-known professional investors to see if private investors should consider buying in as well. Why copying others
Profit warnings are part and parcel of the experience of owning shares. They are not pleasant but they often contain valuable lessons which can benefit investors in the future. Sometimes they can just reflect a temporary blip. But they can also be a reason to question the sustainability of a company’s strategy and business model.