magazine archive
magazine archive
Feature
How to adjust price-to-earnings ratios for debt and cash
Thursday 26 Apr 2018Experienced investors should be familiar with the price-to-earnings (PE) ratio. For the less experienced, it is the most popular way of valuing companies and their share prices, certainly among retail investors. Even fund managers, equity analysts and other investment professionals commonly use it...
How the SOX index can help investors work out whether stock markets are going to rock or roll
Thursday 19 Apr 2018A slide in the share prices of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google’s parent Alphabet, the so-called FAANGs, and Tesla is grabbing all of the headlines. Whether this is down to a collection of company specific reasons – such as questions over Facebook’s involvement in the Cambridge Analytica...
What does less than a year until Brexit mean for the FTSE 100?
Thursday 12 Apr 2018Investors reared on the quiet calm and steady gains of equity markets over the past few years were given a reminder of that old adage ‘investments can go down as well as up’ as stock markets globally took a turn for the worse over the first quarter of 2018. Bottom of the class was the FTSE 100,...
Are directors’ interests really aligned with shareholders?
Thursday 12 Apr 2018The failure of drinks distributor Conviviality ( CVR:AIM ) has highlighted a growing problem with UK smaller companies, namely the misalignment of interests between shareholders and executive management. I am shocked how large institutional investors are prepared to throw vast sums at small...
First quarter update on our 2018 share portfolio
Thursday 05 Apr 2018Our top picks for 2018 are lagging the broader market at the end of the first quarter. Our portfolio of 10 stocks has an average loss of 8.4% versus a 6% decline from the FTSE All-Share. While this is a disappointing start, our selections were designed to be held for at least a year, so we remain...
Four lessons to draw from 18¼ years of precisely zero from UK stocks
Thursday 05 Apr 2018A potential takeover bid for a fourth FTSE 100 stock this year is helping the index to try to cling on to the 7,000 mark, as Takeda’s plan to consider an offer for drug manufacturer Shire ( SHP ) adds to the offers for GKN ( GKN ) , Smurfit Kappa ( SKG ) and Sky ( SKY ) . But that 7,000 mark is...
What is a C share?
Thursday 29 Mar 2018Conversion shares or C shares are issued by investment trusts to raise money and allow investors to subscribe for new shares without negatively affecting existing shareholders. It will take time for the manager of a trust to deploy fresh capital and during that period, the cash element would likely...
How to test the foundations of the property sector
Thursday 29 Mar 2018He is unlikely to have appreciated it, or cared, at the time, but Mark Twain’s advice to ‘Buy land, they aren’t making it any more’ has long since formed the basis of the investment case for UK commercial property, either via quoted stocks or dedicated funds. Whether property is right for an...
How to use moving averages to pin down the FTSE 100
Thursday 22 Mar 2018In capital, local currency terms the UK is the worst performing country among the 23 nations classified by the MSCI as ‘developed’ markets year-to-date. Investors will have their own views as to why this might be. Domestic political uncertainty, global geopolitical concerns, more hawkish central...
Will the market sell-off prompt investors to look at value investing again?
Thursday 08 Mar 2018Does the end of momentum in the UK stock market since February’s sell-off suggest investors may become less willing to pay high ratings for growth and instead look more closely at value plays? It’s an interesting thought and one that’s likely to become a key talking point among the investment...