Richard is a highly-respected investment writer well-known for his Share Sleuth portfolio, a model portfolio he runs for the investment platform Interactive investor. Richard eats his own cooking – buying good businesses at reasonable prices and holding them for the long-term in his Self Invested Personal Pension.
I’m a long-time ShareScope and SharePad fan and my aim is to help you find better companies faster using the fantastic tools at your disposal. My focus is on finding businesses we can reasonably expect to prosper for many years. As well as analysing data, I work out the strategies companies are following and try to verify that they are working in the real world by quizzing executives, visiting companies, trying their products and observing how they operate.
I found James Latham a couple of months ago when I was trawling for cheap shares with strong balance sheets. The shares are still cheap, James Latham’s Price Earnings (PE) ratio is 13, and the balance sheet should remain strong… Centuries trading timber James Latham has a long and storied history. It manufactured plywood for
Listening to Porvair’s long-standing chief executive Ben Stocks talk about the challenges ahead, it is clear the company is bracing itself. Phrases like “preparing for the worst, hoping for the best”, and “the overall balance is negative”, come readily to him. This is a company I have long admired, but I have never had the
I discovered discoverIE using a simple and fruitful method of finding new investment ideas: a list of shares sorted in SharePad by previous annual report date. Having squinted for a few minutes at financial charts showing profitability, cashflow and debt (more on that later), I thought the company looked promising: Sorting a list in SharePad
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
Today I have added two more criteria to turn the list of cheap shares with strong balance sheets I made in my last article into a list of cheap profitable shares with strong balance sheets! The profitability criteria are free cash conversion and return on capital employed. This table shows the individual and aggregated rankings
A SharePad customer, Chris, reminded me of the power of ranking recently, when he emailed to say (among other things): “I find that I am playing with spreadsheets to get the data in place rather than actually making decisions. I guess sometimes too much data can be detrimental…” Decisions are hard, and messing around with
First, an admission. The software biz is a bit of a mystery to me. There’s a vast ecosystem of enterprise solutions, software that businesses increasingly need to operate, but how do those of us whose technical skills extend little further than Word and Excel decide whether these solutions and the companies that code them are
I have picked QinetiQ from my “Cash King” filter because it was one of the more reasonably priced companies that passed all the criteria. It’s debt-adjusted PE ratio is 14. QinetiQ makes Rattler, a supersonic target that simulates air-launched anti-radiation missiles. Source: QinetiQ annual report 2019 The company is a defence technology business, once part
While the stock market and the pandemic may have stabilised, I’m still thinking about financially strong firms. We never know when the next shock will happen, and a cash cushion gives us confidence a company will make it through when revenue melts away. I spent the last two articles experimenting with filters to find financially
The conclusion of my last article on finding companies with strong finances contained two caveats. Companies with seasonal cash flows can look like they have strong finances at the end of the financial year, when they report, but be weaker at other times during the financial year. Also, strong finances are not necessarily the result
Funny thing (peculiar, not ha! ha!). Search SharePad news for the phrase “strong balance sheet” and there are dozens of companies every day confirming their finances are strong as they reflect on the prospect of reduced, or in some cases, no revenue for a while. Search SharePad news for the phrase “weak balance sheet” though
How we measure return on capital depends on what we want to know: whether a company is good at making profit from its operations, or whether it is good at buying other businesses. As I write, the stockmarket is crashing. I have invested in strong businesses that should prosper through thick and thin, but that