Risk Archives - Capital Ledger

Judges Scientific: When Great Businesses Have Bad Years

For much of the past two decades, Judges Scientific (LSE:JDG) has been one of the UK’s outstanding compounders with a “buy and build” strategy: acquire high-quality scientific instrument businesses, give talented management teams the freedom to run them, allocate capital carefully, and allow time to compound the returns. The results have been fantastic. Revenue, earnings […]

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What a Design Win is Worth

Journal / By Henry Viola-Heir

“Not every order begins with a purchase. Some begin with a decision.” One phrase appears repeatedly throughout the engineering and technology sectors. “The company has secured several important design wins”. It sounds encouraging and markets often react positively. Management teams highlight the announcements, and investors often add another point to the investment case, but relatively

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UK Housebuilders: When Patience Becomes Inertia

Journal / By Henry Viola-Heir

There are moments in investing when the numbers aren’t the most difficult thing to interpret. We all have access to data, most of us can spot trends, and the market provides a constant barometer of our decision-making. Sometimes, though, the real challenge comes from our conviction softening, not because a single fact has changed, but

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ISA Season Investing: What Safety Really Means in a Falling Market

Essays / By Henry Viola-Heir

There are periods in markets when safety feels less like a portfolio strategy and more like a rumour. The start of 2026 feels like one of them. The difficulty isn’t simply that share prices are falling. Markets do that from time to time, and any investor with a little experience understands that drawdowns are part

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Volatility: A Portfolio Manager’s Playbook

Market Notes / By Henry Viola-Heir

It’s 8:30am. The index is down sharply, the headlines are unhelpful, and one of your biggest holdings is suddenly off 7% despite no obvious company news. Volatility has returned. This is the moment a lack of process can destroy you. Volatility compresses time and makes decisions that ought to be part of a long-term strategy

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Navigating Volatility: Lessons from the Classics

Market Notes / By Henry Viola-Heir

There is, among novice investors, a persistent tendency toward feverish impatience. When markets tremble, headlines blare, and portfolios lurch, the inexperienced are seized by a dangerous impulse: to act immediately, and often unwisely. Yet it is precisely in such moments that the wiser course is often one of stillness. When global markets collapse, even the

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How to Find Quality Companies During a Market Downturn

Essays / By Henry Viola-Heir

In times of market tumult, when the daily headlines scream fear and the broader public scurries for the exits, the seasoned investor remains calm. For those of us with a long-term horizon and a preference for businesses of enduring substance, such periods offer something truly rare: the opportunity to acquire quality at a discount. In

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Embracing Uncertainty: The Investor’s Path to Acceptance

Essays / By Henry Viola-Heir

The world of investing is, by its very nature, a realm of uncertainty. No matter how sophisticated our tools, how robust our strategies, or how informed our decisions, the future remains fundamentally unknowable. Yet, paradoxically, it is within this uncertainty that great opportunities lie. The art and science of investing hinge not on eliminating uncertainty

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An Investor’s Guide to the UK’s 2024 Budget

Market Notes / By Henry Viola-Heir

In the ever-evolving world of finance, it is the discerning investor who recognises that fiscal policy changes are not merely legislative adjustments but harbingers of new opportunities. The latest UK budget reforms, published last Wednesday by our first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer, offer much for the astute investor to consider. Initial reactions to

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Are you sufficiently diversified?

Essays / By Henry Viola-Heir

Most investors recognise that holding a diversified portfolio of high-quality assets is a key risk management technique. In today’s article, I want to explore the idea of portfolio diversification as a risk management technique in more detaill – in particular, looking at the pros and cons of diversified portfolio vs. a concentrated portfolio, and how

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Reader question: How to handle losing capital?

From the Record / By Henry Viola-Heir

A few weeks ago, I was speaking to a newer investor who had listened to an episode of the podcast and had heard me talking about being “down 40, 50, 60%” on an investment. As someone that hadn’t been investing long, this had concerned them, and they wrote in to ask if I could clarify

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Reader Question: Debt vs. Dividends

From the Record / By Henry Viola-Heir

Earlier this week, a reader contacted me on social media with a question about the repayment of debt compared to paying or maintaining a dividend. Although I initially answered privately, I wanted to take the opportunity to write a longer response which is better suited to an article. “Companies like Vodafone and Halfords which have

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The Chinese property market – is it Lehman Brothers part II?

Market Notes / By Henry Viola-Heir

In 2007, one of the world’s biggest investment banks, Lehman Brothers, collapsed into bankruptcy after suffering months of share price declines amid rumours of its subprime mortgage exposure. For those readers of a more tender age, the investment banking system had basically loaned funds to property investors that were fundamentally incapable of keeping up with

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Buying high and selling low

Essays / By Henry Viola-Heir

During the final week of September, I had two positions, Anglo Asian Mining and Digital 9 Infrastructure Trust drop by 20%+ in a single session. Both rebounded strongly the next day – the proverbial “dead cat bounce” but remain heavily underwater for recent investors. Despite this, I am still holding both companies and in this

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Being a patient investor in a persistent market downturn

Essays / By Henry Viola-Heir

Every investor knows the saying that investments can go down as well as up in value. Knowing and seeing this in action are two different things however, and my perception over the last 24 months has been of a huge number of investors disappearing from social media. After a decade of low interest rates and

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