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 employs some fuzzy logic to narrow the number of companies returned by his filter. A bit like we might do a set of press-ups every day, it is a routine to make him a stronger investor. While everybody is talking about the latest developments in artificial intelligence, getting computers to think more like humans,
The way companies account for share-based pay tends to erase the cost from profit and free cash flow, which is how we measure their performance. Richard factors share-based payback in and discovers it can make a difference to our perception of businesses, and their valuations. Every year I read Fundsmith’s annual letter to fund holders
The collapse of a handful of banks is provoking fears of contagion and a fair bit of trading. Though we think of traders and buy-and-hold investors as separate breeds, everybody trades. Discipline is as important for those of us who do it infrequently as those who do it daily. No doubt you have heard, people
Although Arm will list in the USA, there should be nothing to stop us buying shares in Britain’s top tech company after it floats. This idea leads Richard to a potentially rich seam of investments he has not previously explored: UK firms listed in the USA. Judging by the headlines, news that Arm is to
Richard looks at the good and the ugly in Hollywood Bowl’s alternative performance measures and concludes that the company has put a positive gloss on adjusted profit. In Getting to grips with Alternative Performance Measures (APMs), I explained that exceptional items are costs or gains that obscure the underlying performance of a business. This does
Companies publish alternative performance measures (APMs) that remove one-off costs and gains from profit to give us a better understanding of how they have performed. Like all financial statistics, though, APMs can be abused. Investors should always check how they are calculated. Since making profit is the reason for being in business, many Alternative Performance
Richard deploys ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program, to help him understand two software platforms we can invest in that incorporate artificial intelligence. His conclusion: this is not a dystopia, it is the start of a partnership. Unless you have been living under a rock, you have surely heard of ChatGPT. It is an artificial intelligence
Technically, Sharepad’s ROCE calculation is ROACE or Return on Average Capital Employed. It is a good refinement of perhaps the most revealing performance statistic for a business. Sometimes readers ask me why my figure for a certain financial statistic is different from SharePad’s, or the figure quoted by the company. Usually, it is because the
Richard calculates the annual performance of his portfolio going back 13 years. One good or bad year tells us nothing about the skill of an investor, he says. If you had a bad one, do not beat yourself up about it. Happy New Year! I am kicking this year off on a bum note, talking
Richard puts one last company through his process in 2022. It gives him a chance to reflect on how he has changed the way he uses SharePad this year. Towards the end of every year, I reflect on the year gone by, what has gone right and what has gone wrong, and how I can
Market researcher YouGov is known for its predictions, but it may not be the accuracy of those predictions as much as their speed, quantity, and low cost that distinguishes the business. We have surely all heard of market researcher YouGov. A day barely goes by without the media disseminating the results of its polling. If
Richard says finding a great business is only the first stage of finding a great investment. The second stage, establishing that what makes a company special is sustainable, is all about fairness. When buy and hold investors own a share of a business, we expect that share to grow in value as the business proves