In part 1 of this series, I covered the ’spectrum’ of how to run an economy; from a full ’free market’ economy to a ’socialist’ utopian central planning model. When government spending gets to a high percentage of GDP (think 45-50% and above) there can be obvious benefits including a highly educated workforce, efficient healthcare, […]
If you’ve managed to move out from behind your sofa recently and take a peek at the news, you might have noticed an uptick in the number of central banks announcing ’interventions’ to support the UK economy. Further rounds of quantitative easing, rate cuts, loans and grants to small businesses, mortgage and bill ’holidays’ and
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently then you’ll be aware of the problems facing INTU; a giant retail landlord which is facing a catastrophic collapse in the face of declining revenues and a mountain of debt. As a landlord, INTU has been in the business of buying and developing giant shopping centres. These
There’s a regular topic of conversation in investing circles around managing a diversified portfolio and how many stocks an investor should own to be sufficiently ’diversified’. The general consensus seems to be that portfolio diversification runs on a spectrum of portfolios with 10 or less stocks being super concentrated ’high risk, high return’ and 40
A few years ago, I wrote a blog about the importance of developing your range of knowledge. Since then, my consumption of news and social media content has shot through the roof. Anyone who knows me well will know that my appetite for new, high-quality information is vast I can usually be found poring over
The last few weeks have been a great experiment to determine those that implement ’buy and hold’ as a strategy and those that have never actually had to do it during a market rout. Global indexes have collapsed on the coronavirus scare and panicky investors have been dumping shares left right and centre. For those
In part three of this series on when to sell, I’m going to explore more concepts that help me to decide when to liquidate a position. You can find parts one and two linked here. The grass is greener on the other side The first of these is undoubtedly when I identify a better opportunity
Half way through writing part one of this series, I realised that this is actually a much more complex issue than I can do justice to in a single article. As such, I’ve decided to split the topic into a series. In the first article, I covered my thoughts on selling; as a first rule,
If asked, I generally describe myself as a ‘buy and hold’ investor. The buying bit is mostly easy – I enjoy looking for good quality or undervalued assets and acquiring them. The ‘holding’ bit is where it all starts to get a bit tricky. I’m fairly averse to selling assets. The amount of work that
I was chatting to a reader about share prices and was asked whether I consider a falling share price to be a negative indicator. Surely, if the market is a combination of hundreds of individual investors expressing their opinions then a falling price indicates that more people have found a reason to sell than to
Reader question: Is a falling share price a negative indicator? Read More »
Last week, I wrote a post about portfolio management and signalled my intention to cover some of the elements in more detail in further posts. Since then, I’ve been thinking about the psychology of investing – I’ve written fairly extensively about the qualitative and quantitative analysis I do on companies, but relatively little about the
The key building blocks of my approach to portfolio management are to keep risks tightly managed and to develop an easy to follow method of identifying opportunities to buy and sell. I try to keep these goals at the forefront of my thinking to tilt the odds of making money in my favour. When I
The Bank of England is a comparatively modern institution when held against other national banks such as the Bank of Geneva (founded in 1345) or the Bank of Venice (founded in 1157). It was originally conceived by a merchant by the name of William Patterson in 1689 and was incorporated by William the 3rd in
Those of you that used to follow this blog will have noticed that I’ve been somewhat absent over the last few months. It will therefore come as little surprise to hear that I’ve been extraordinarily busy but happily have found some time to sit down and pen another article. When I started this blog in
Around a year ago, I wrote an article on General Electric, the American conglomerate that was once one of the world’s largest and most valuable companies. After slumping revenues and rocketing debts crippled both the company and its share price, the CEO was replaced and the company embarked on an ambitious turnaround plan to pay
