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.
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
Fundsmith Equity probably needs no introduction. Since its launch in November 2010 the fund has racked up class-leading annualised returns of more than 18%, compared to less than 12% for an index of global equities, by investing in high quality businesses at attractive valuations. You can, of course, make further comparisons, and explore the makeup
Richard investigates Dialight, a supplier of industrial LED lighting that flared up ten years ago briefly setting the stock market alight, and subsequently dimmed alarmingly. What are its prospects now it is taking back control of manufacturing? Ten years ago Dialight was a feted, fast growing business in a booming industry, LED lighting, but it
Richard investigates Vitec, which has reported some bad news in 2019. It could be an opportunity to buy shares in a high quality business at a low valuation. I don’t always follow up on reader suggestions, sometimes people recommend companies so repugnant it’s difficult to believe they have ever read a line of mine. But
The demise of Thomas Cook impacted the whole package tour industry including London listed Online Travel Agent, On The Beach. Whether you trust the accounting regulations or On The Beach’s adjustments makes a big difference to the company’s profitability in 2019. Richard unravels the exceptional items. It’s January, The BBC is screening Death in Paradise,
Richard enters 2020 with a cleaned-up SharePad setup primed to help him find companies developing competitive advantages. He expects it to make him a better long-term investor too. Happy New Year! As a full time writer/investor the festive season is the only set time in the year when I fully shut down. Like an ancient
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.
Business schools identify the sources of competitive advantage that tie customers to companies and what they produce. Fundamentally though, there is only one true competitive advantage: people. If I could recommend one book for long-term investors, it would be “Intelligent Fanatics Project” by Sean Iddings and Ian Cassell, which is subtitled “How great leaders build
Richard uses his “Skin in the game” table to find companies whose directors are major shareholders. The experiment starts off badly with Asset Co., but gets better. Frontier Development and Focusrite could be great owner-managed businesses. To recap: We can use SharePad to find companies that are run by managers who are themselves significant shareholders.