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.
The world’s biggest bootmaker Dr Martens may be the strongest single brand company available to UK investors, but before he becomes invested for the second time in his life, there are a couple of objections Richard must overcome. Today, I am taking a first look at Dr. Martens, for three reasons: It has just published
Richard takes a first look at Learning Technologies, a company aggressively buying businesses that make employee training and development content and software. Learning Technologies’ is a slightly bewildering agglomeration of businesses that helps organisations get the best out of employees. It creates training content for employers and makes software both for the creation of training
Events at Luceco and Oxford Metrics may tell us more about the companies’ strategies, and whether they might make good long-term investments. Richard investigates. It is hard to believe Luceco’s share price is below the price it floated at in 2016, when turnover was 71% higher in the year to December 2021 than it was
Shortly after Judges Scientific makes its biggest-ever acquisition, Richard sets out to discover whether the pasture is greener over at SDI, a smaller listed business that does much the same thing: buys and builds companies that make scientific instruments. If I were to use one measure to compare highly acquisitive businesses it would be Return
Richard surveys the latest annual reports for promising long-term investments. Big Technologies, Digitalbox, Somero, and Xaar catch his eye, but only one of them holds his gaze. Still, a strike rate of one out of four is not bad. Almost every weekday I open a table of all the shares listed in London in SharePad
Richard re-examines one of his worst trades and considers whether changes at Portmeirion, the manufacturer of tableware and other home accessories, are enough to make him reconsider. Half a failed trade Portmeirion is one of the more severe of many blots on my trading history. I added Portmeirion to the model portfolio I run for
Prompted by the notion that executives sometimes vote with their feet, Richard takes a first look at Morgan Advanced Materials. It recently poached Victrex’s chief financial officer. A by-product of attending the Victrex Annual General Meeting earlier this year was the opportunity to ask its chief financial officer why he was leaving for the arguably
Richard finds answers to his questions about Luceco, a manufacturer of electrical products that power our homes. Knowledge, he finds, can be as powerful as electricity… This time last year one of my screens picked up Luceco, a company that makes electrical products like sockets. I wrote down my hopes and fears in SharePad and
Richard makes the case for investing in local firms, helped by analysts from The Yorkshire Fund. As usual, SharePad can help. I am starting this article with a shout-out to the analysts of the Yorkshire Fund. You probably have not heard of the Yorkshire Fund. We cannot invest in it. It is a mini financial
Richard takes a first look at protective packaging distributor Macfarlane, a company so boring even he could not bring himself to investigate it. The idea of investing in Macfarlane has been sitting with me for a while because an investor I follow has been banging its drum on Twitter. I have ignored him for all
Richard takes a first look at Garmin. The World’s Simplest Stockpicking Strategy told him to. I can tell you precisely the moment I first thought of buying shares in Garmin, because I tweeted about it. It was Sunday 30 January and I was sitting on the sofa, checking my watch to see what kind of
Future PLC is one of the outstanding growth stories of the last five years, but it is also one that eluded Richard. He fesses up to the biases that blinded him to the opportunity, and discusses whether it is still one today… Today’s company, Future, is one I should have taken a look at a