Richard Beddard

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.

Garmin Ltd | Buy what excites you (NYSE : GRMN)

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

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Future PLC | One that got away (LSE : FUTR)

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

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Oxford Metrics | Profiting from the augmented age (LSE:OMG)

Oxford Metrics has an illustrious past, and judging by management’s targets it expects to augment it in future. Richard investigates the past, and ponders the future… I discovered Oxford Metrics while paging through SharePad’s list of the whole market (LSE shares, excluding Investment Trusts) skimming the summary pages of companies that had recently published annual

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Happy New Year

Richard slims down his flabby SharePad setup to start the year with a lean, clean investing machine. He sets out his goals for 2022 and says thank you to Phil Oakley, who hung up his boots in December. It is that time of year when many of us eat and drink too much and then

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Reading by the fire

Rediscovering the father of value investing | Benjamin Graham

Richard warms the cockles of his heart in front of a digital fire, while reading his favourite investment book… Christmas is approaching, and I must confess to a new and slightly eccentric guilty pleasure. In addition to mince pies and Irish Coffee, I have taken to working (from home of course) in front of an

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Bytes: Which is the best IT reseller?

Recent flotation Bytes Technology has joined bigger rivals Softcat and Computacenter on the stock market. Richard wants to know what it does differently. In my last article I introduced Marks Electrical, a company that had recently floated that might be an exception that proves the rule that Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) make terrible investments. The

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DFS plc | Will the investment last as long as the sofa?

Richard likes a business that is in control of its own destiny. He takes a look at DFS plc, the sofa seller that unexpectedly featured in his list of vertically integrated businesses. Of all the names that came up in my trawl for vertically integrated businesses, sofa seller DFS was perhaps the most surprising. To

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Winners in an uncertain world | Vertical integration

In the chaotic business conditions we are experiencing, self-reliance has been a source of competitive advantage. Since we do not ever know what the future will hold, Richard goes in search of companies that have an element of vertical integration. I hope it is not smugness, but I have felt a sense of satisfaction when

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How profitable is Genus PLC?

Animal breeder Genus Plc is at the forefront of animal genetics and highly valued by investors, yet standard measures of Return on Capital Employed (ROCE), a marker for quality, indicate only modest levels of profitability. Unusually (for me) I rediscovered Genus because of an idea, rather than as a result of trawling through shares in

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Four live pivots: Next, Goodwin, Bloomsbury Publishing and Victrex

Richard goes hunting in his own portfolio for companies incubating better businesses. They may be undervalued as a result. As promised, this week I am following up my last article on past pivots that worked with an article about live pivots that look like they are working. I used the word pivot to describe a

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Betting on change

In the first of two articles, Richard celebrates perhaps the sweetest investment of them all: The humdrum business that incubates a better one. Though my stock-in-trade is businesses reliably executing established and successful strategies, my biggest winners have often been businesses that pivoted. They incubated better businesses from within the business they already operated. In

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