Tag: Investors Chronicle

A Bumper Edition of Investors Chronicle

Over the Christmas period we were treated to a bumper edition of the Investors’ Chronicle. And I have to say that this magazine has improved of late under the editorship of Rosie Carr. Whether she has a bigger budget or is just picking better writers I do not know but she certainly deserved the job after working for the magazine for many years.

I’ll pick out a couple of interesting articles from the latest edition:

“What does it cost to be an effective private investor” by Stephen Clapham. He comments that “private investors are, in my experience, not nearly willing enough to invest in tools and education to improve the performance of their portfolios”. I would agree with that. They tend to rely on broker/platform recommendations, newspaper articles, or tips from bulletin boards instead of doing their own research using the tools that are available.

Stephen mentions services such as SharePad, Stockopedia, VectorVest and Sentieo. I am not familiar with the last two but I use both SharePad/Sharescope and Stockopedia as they provide slightly different functionality. Plus I use spreadsheets to record all transactions and dividends and to monitor cash. This enables me to manage several different portfolios held with multiple platforms/brokers comprising 80 different stock holdings with some ease. I have been doing this since my portfolios were much smaller and less complex so I would recommend such an approach even to those who are starting to invest in equities.

As the article mentions, half the members of ShareSoc have a portfolio of over £1m and may be representative of private investors so they may be making profits of well over £50,000 per year from their investments, particularly of late. A few hundred pounds per year to help them manage their portfolios and do research should not be rejected if it helps them to improve their portfolio returns by just a fraction of one percent, which it should surely do.

Altogether the article is a good summary of what a private investor should be using in terms of services to help them.

The other interesting article is entitled “The Generation Game” by Philip Ryland. It highlights the declining performance of UK stock markets since the 2008-09 financial crisis. He shows graphically how the FTSE-100 has fallen way behind the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index. It makes for pretty depressing reading if you have been mainly investing in UK large cap stocks in the FTSE-100.

It reinforces the message that if you want a decent return from your equity investments you need to include overseas markets in your holdings and small and mid-cap companies in the UK. That is what has worked in the last few years and I expect it to continue to be the case.

Why? Because the growth is present in those companies while the FTSE-100 is dominated by dinosaurs with no growth. Technology stocks are where growth is now present when there are few in the FTSE-100. In fact the market cap of Apple now exceeds the whole of the FTSE-100.

The UK has become particularly unattractive for technology stock listings due to excessive regulation and over-arching corporate governance rules that divert management time. Meanwhile the UK economic environment still relies a great deal on cheap labour provided often by immigrants while our education system fails to encourage technical skills.

The Government has taken some steps to tackle these issues but not nearly enough while politicians have spent time on divisive arguments about how to deal with the Covid epidemic and about trivia such as Christmas parties and redecoration of the Prime Ministers apartment.

There are of course bright spots in this economic gloom and generalising about the state of the country is always going to lead to mistaken conclusions. We are probably no worse than most countries if you examine their politics and the UK economy does seem to be relatively healthy.

But the key message is that if you want to make real money investing in equities you need to be selective and not just follow the crowd, i.e. don’t just rely on index trackers.

Those are my thoughts for investment in the New Year.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )

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Good Articles in Investors’ Chronicle

There were several good articles in this week’s Investors’ Chronicle. I cover them briefly below.

The Editor, Rosie Carr, reported on feedback on readers’ views on taxation. Should the wealthy readers of the IC pay more was one question previously posed and the consensus answer seemed to be Yes. For pensioners it was suggested that they should pay National Insurance on their income and that there should be harmonisation of income and capital gains tax rates. It was also suggested that property taxes should be raised and Inheritance Tax raised.

I would support most of those suggestions but not the last. Inheritance Tax is typically a tax on created wealth which has already been taxed in one way or another. Double taxation on the same assets should be avoided in my view although perhaps some loopholes should be closed.

There was a good article by Chris Dillow on the problems created by the “decades-long attempts to cut inventories”. He points out that the adoption of “just-in-time” production methods had a positive impact as inventory is expensive. That is particularly so when debt is expensive and interest rates high. This of course is the result of MBAs like me being taught at business schools that cutting inventory was always a good thing. Now we find that the smallest hiccup in the supply chain such as transport delays proves to be very expensive.

There is a good analysis of the audit issues at Patisserie Valerie by Steve Clapham. He concludes that the sanctions imposed by the FRC “are woefully inadequate” which I also suggested in a previous blog post. I said Grant Thornton was “fined a trivial amount”.

The article does however suggest that there were some warning signs such as very high margins in comparison with other sector players, and high inventories in relation to the revenue. But there were reasonable explanations for the differences. One would have had to do a lot of research to figure out if there was really a problem or not. Clearly the auditors did not do that and most investors do not have the time nor resources to do such research. That’s why we rely on the audited accounts!

It is unfortunately the case that outright frauds can often be easily concealed but the audit in this case was clearly very defective and the published accounts of the company were grossly misleading.

But I do admit to failing to take my own prescription for avoiding problem companies – namely investing in a company with an Executive Chairman with too many jobs!

There is also a good article on “The flattery industry”, i.e. how management improve their reported profits by using “alternative” or “adjusted” measures. The FRC has published a report on this issue.

It is very clear that companies are addicted to alternative performance measures and that applies just as much to large companies as small ones. One company and its “adjustments” mentioned negatively in the article is GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). I sold a holding in GSK back in 2014 for that very reason – way too many adjustments in the accounts. The price of the shares then was about 1480p. It’s now 1407p. Clearly a good decision. Stockopedia currently says it qualifies for the Altman Z-Score Screen (Short Selling). Enough said I think.

But this is surely yet another example of where the FRC is falling down on its job. There should be regulation of what can be published as adjusted figures and there should be rules about how they are published. There should be consistency and not excessive emphasis on adjusted figures. At present we have a quagmire of data with no easy way to compare different companies.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )

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Stock Market Bottom and IC Share Tips?

This morning (6/4/2020) the stock market bounced upwards on faint indications that the virus epidemic might be slowing. Have we reached the bottom yet? I am not so sure. A lot of companies in the worst hit sectors are closed for business and running out of cash. They are likely to remain closed for a long and unpredictable time.

We have also not yet seen in financial results news the impact of the virus on the general economy, other than the sectors more specifically hit. But with so many people now out of work there will be a significant impact in due course on companies higher up the supply chain, i.e. the businesses that actually produce goods and distribute them.

I certainly won’t be buying many shares until a clear upward trend is apparent and where the financial results of a company are clearer.

There were a couple of companies which were tipped in this week’s Investors Chronicle as “BUYS” which are worth commenting upon. Diageo (DGE) the drinks company was one. I don’t currently hold it but did so until a few months back. The current share price is now significantly lower.

It’s interesting to look back at the forecast p/e and yield when I purchased an initial holding in November 2018. I always keep a sheet, printed out from Stockopedia, when I first take a stake so that I can look back at my good or bad decisions. The p/e was 22 and the dividend yield was 2.4%.  It’s now on a forecast p/e of 20 and a yield of 2.8%. It’s not really become much cheaper.

Analyst’s profit forecasts have come down but not by much. The company did give a Trading Update on the 26th February. It said this: “Public health measures across impacted countries in Asia Pacific, principally in China, have resulted in: restrictions on public gatherings, the postponement of events and the closure of many hospitality and retail outlets”. It hardly mentioned the impact on the rest of the world probably because on that date the epidemic was mainly concentrated in China.

We really do need more information on the sales status in Europe, the USA and South America to have any idea on the likely impact on profits for the current year. The Investors Chronicle gives positive comments about the company’s “brand power” and “global reach” but I will be restraining myself from jumping into another holding before the picture is a lot clearer. The same applies to many other companies.

Another share that IC tipped was Polar Capital Technology Trust (PCT) which I currently hold. The article included some interesting comments from fund manager Ben Rogoff. He said “We are focused on maintaining a portfolio of high-quality growth companies with secular tailwinds, and have a strong bias to those with clean balance sheets in areas we believe will be less impacted by an economic downturn and are likely to emerge stronger once this challenging period has passed. Companies with high levels of recurring revenue and strong balance sheets should be able to withstand a couple of very challenging quarters”.

He also said “We have rotated away from most cyclical areas, including travel, payments, small business and advertising, industrial/auto and associated robotics, and semiconductor stocks”.

These seem eminently sensible comments. The company’s share price has recovered from a dip in mid-March when both private investors and institutions were dumping stocks regardless and moving into cash. But after the share price bounce this morning, PCT shares appear to be at a premium to the Net Asset Value. In other words, it’s not cheap either. So another share not to rush into buying I suggest until it becomes clearer what the impact on the companies it holds in the portfolio will be. If there is a general economic recession in major countries there will be nowhere to hide.

DGE and PCT may both be quality operations but they are not great bargains I suggest at present. The only companies whose share prices have fallen a long way are those where their businesses are either closed or may be suffering in a big way. Until we have a clearer picture of the impact on the general economy, these are not ones to buy either I suggest.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

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