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.
Richard takes a first look at Softcat, and he likes what he sees, even in comparison to rival Computacenter, another fine business. Both companies make good money distributing IT, but in Softcat he may have spotted a company with a growth culture. I wrote favourably about Computacenter in October, so I have two good reasons
Richard Beddard investigates DotDigital in SharePad. The data indicates it has been very prosperous since it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2011. A surge in investment suggests it intends to keep things that way. The starting point for many of the ideas I discover in SharePad is a basic four stage process that
To identify great businesses we must go beyond the numbers and understand what causes them. In this article I revisit 4Imprint, an investment I should have made in 2013, and a business probably still worthy of investment today. Back in May 2013 I wrote excitedly about a company selling promotional products to US companies. 4Imprint’s
Psst, company XYZ is going great guns, it’s shooting for the moon, get in before it is too late!!! In today’s article, Richard uses SharePad to evaluate Clipper Logistics, a tip he received anonymously on the Internet. Tips passed online are sometimes little more than ramps, invitations to boost the tipster’s wealth by buying shares
Stroll into a WH Smith and you might wonder why a shop that sells Sellotape, colouring books and slime (really!) exists today, but the company thrives. Smith’s creeping reinvention is an example to investors seeking to profit from businesses people casually write off because they see no future in them. Perhaps Computacenter is another. The
New issues have a reputation for delivering poor investment returns. In this article we filter SharePad for companies that may be more seasoned than they look. In my last article, I filtered SharePad for the firms that had been listed longest on the London Stock Exchange. Statistically speaking, the longer an investment has been listed
Exciting news: Aston Martin is readying itself to float on the stock market. Investors should think twice though, before buying the shares. Typically, it is the most seasoned firms that make the best investments. This is how you can find them. The Aston Martin story has many of the hallmarks of a big flotation. The
To demonstrate how to filter in SharePad, we’ll build a base filter that filters out the shares we are least likely to be interested in. Our criteria will be personal, but the filtering technique can be applied to almost any investment style. Establishing your sweet spot To exclude shares we don’t want, we must decide
This is the second article in the series “From ideas to investments” in which I look at the process of finding and evaluating investment ideas. Fishing for stocks using filtering, or stock screening, is a quick way to create a shortlist of shares that are likely to perform well – but only if we buy
Today’s article is the first in a new series called ‘From ideas to investments’ which takes an in-depth look at how to generate investment ideas from fundamental data and develop those ideas into profitable investments. We’ll be looking at the benefits and pitfalls of stock screening and subsequent steps in developing a unique style incorporating
Financial statistics from SharePad and non-financial data from the company itself all indicate Motorpoint is no ordinary car dealer. If you’ve bought a vehicle from the company, or read its annual reports, you’ll probably know why. My article on Electrocomponents showed how I find most of my investing ideas with the simplest of SharePad filters,
IG Design, formerly International Greetings, is one of my biggest investment mistakes—even though I made a few quid on it. Since I sold my shares in International Greetings—as it was called then—in April 2014, the company’s share price has risen from 71p to nearly £5.00. Clearly I misjudged the prospects of the business and that