magazine archive
magazine archive
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Dividend growth: 50 years and counting
Thursday 10 Nov 2016The squeeze on income-yielding assets has made the hunt difficult for income investors. Interest received on savings accounts is close to zero, translating into a negative real return when accounting for inflation. Bonds – a traditional asset class for income – also yield poorly. For example,...
Decoding broker research
Thursday 03 Nov 2016Equity analysts are employed by investment banks and stockbrokers to research companies and provide investment ideas to their clients. Their work is not always freely available to the public but snippets do regularly appear in the financial press. These can provide an insight into the market’s...
Mighty Amazon washes away competition
Thursday 27 Oct 2016Jeff Bezos’ ambitions are seemingly limitless. The billionaire founder of Amazon’s (AMZN:NDQ) Blue Origin business is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for commercial satellite launches and human space transportation services. On terra firma, the tech titan’s tentacles reach out towards ever more...
Have we hit ‘peak’ everything?
Thursday 27 Oct 2016I n the 1980s I remember writing an economics homework essay about how the world was going to run out of oil by the year 2000 — Marion King Hubbert’s original ‘peak oil’ thesis. Well, predictions are tricky, especially about the future. However, the peak, and indeed trough, thesis seems...
Wrong weather and other excuses for poor trading
Thursday 20 Oct 2016C ompanies on the stock market have more excuses as to why trading has been poor than even the sneakiest student trying to dodge their homework. Just as the nation loves to talk about sun and rain; quoted companies love to blame the weather for their tills not ringing. Some firms will be telling...
The scramble For dividends in Asia is just getting started
Thursday 13 Oct 2016I n the West the grasp for yield has become a protracted theme for investors. Income hungry, they have been forced to search in non-traditional income-yielding asset classes as bond yields continue their fall amid the flow of central bank money from across the globe. The UK government now rewards...
How to use the CAPE ratio
Thursday 06 Oct 2016N obel Prize winning economist Robert Shiller reckons the best way of assessing value in forward looking markets is to look to the past. In 1988 he popularised the cyclically-adjusted price to earnings (CAPE) ratio, also known as the Shiller PE, to help investors decide if a stock, sector or market...