Most companies will answer questions from shareholders and potential shareholders. At Annual General Meetings shareholders have a right to ask questions and get answers. A large proportion of listed companies report full-year results in late winter and spring because their financial year-ends coincide with the end of the calendar year in December. As surely as

To get a grip on where a company is going you have to understand where it has come from. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean reading every annual report. Usually, it’s not enough to read the latest annual report. To understand a firm’s business model and strategy, how it makes money, how it plans to make more,

Investors pin their hopes on what could go right. The great product. The winning strategy. The growing market. The new technology. These may be good reasons to own a share, but only if you have also considered what could go wrong. In my last article I left you on a cliff-hanger. I described power adapter

While it’s comforting to know a business has enjoyed success, long-term investors must also form an opinion on its prospects if we’re to hold the shares through thick and thin. In How to read an annual report, I identified the sections of a typical annual report that explain how a company has made money, how

Rule number one in long-term investing is to understand how the businesses you expect to profit from will make money – otherwise, how can you be confident they will? Annual reports are the most complete source of public information on how businesses make money, and how they intend to make more money. Investors who read

In this article I’ve attempted to find Fundsmith-like companies using SharePad. The results are mixed but there’s a lot to be learned from the experiment. A letter from Terry If like me you hold units in Fundsmith, last month you will have received a letter from the fund’s celebrated manager Terry Smith. In publishing an

Maybe you already download tables of data from SharePad by clicking on the sharing button in SharePad’s blue Table view, but this data is dead. It doesn’t change in your spreadsheet if it changes in SharePad. Now there is a new option: Export “Live” Table. This allows you to incorporate data into spreadsheets that updates

If you take a look at Diploma through the lens of SharePad’s summary page (under the green ‘Financials’ tab), you will find it shares many qualities of a good business. It has raised the dividend every year since 1999, a significant period in the company’s history as we shall see. It has grown turnover, profit,

Happy New Year! I’ve started mine by tidying up my many desktops: my physical desk, my laptop’s desktop, and SharePad. I did so much experimenting with SharePad in 2017, I’ve overwhelmed the lists of settings. Settings are how we make SharePad our own. They are where we save list and chart configurations we use repeatedly,

By way of introducing two charts I’m routinely using to suss out how companies are financed – the twin pillars of debt and equity – I need to return briefly to my last article on hire firms. In the main, tool and plant hire firms serve the construction industry which is notable for its instability. If