Bernie Madoff, arch fraudster, has died in prison. He ran the largest ponzi scheme in history which defrauded investors of over $60 billion. His funds showed unbelievable good performance because he invented share trades to support his fund valuations. This attracted new investors whose cash he used to pay out departing investors and to support dividends. It is unbelievable that such outrageous frauds can still take place in the modern world despite all the onerous regulations.
I mentioned a recently listed company called Parsley Box (MEAL) in a prior blog post. I have now sampled their products – prepacked dinners and have come to the conclusion that I question whether this is likely to become a great company. The meals are rather bland and you can buy cheaper equivalents from supermarkets. They do have the advantage of a long shelf life and do not require refrigeration, but so do other products such as canned goods so I am not convinced there is a big market for them. The company is spending money on national TV advertising, on channels focused on the elderly like me. You can always generate sales if you spend enough on marketing, but that does not necessarily mean that you have a profitable business.
How actively should one trade? This is a matter of personal preference I have come to believe. Some people can hold stocks for ever in the belief that they will come good in the end whereas others panic at the first sign of trouble. It does of course depend to some extent on the type of stocks in which you invest. Dumping small cap stocks that are on wide spreads can be a very bad idea. The volatility of small cap stocks can bounce you out of a holding quite easily if you have a tight stop-loss.
But there was an amusing story in the latest edition of the Techinvest newsletter. To quote: “In that respect, we are often reminded of a well-publicised study by a large American brokerage a few years ago that aimed to identify which retail accounts generated the highest investment returns. Top of the list were: the accounts of customers who it turned out had been deceased for some time; next best was those accounts that customers had forgotten about and had not traded on for many years; the poorest of investment returns belonged to accounts that had clocked up the highest transaction costs through frequent stock rotation”. Techinvest runs a portfolio and certainly its returns have been very good over the years as they rarely sell stocks. They appear to just wait until some idiot comes along willing to pay a premium price for their holdings.
Personally I often hold stocks for years but I am also impatient when investments seem to be going wrong. I cannot sit there doing nothing. As a man of action, I pander to my impatience by selling a proportion of my holding but not all, i.e. I sell on the way down in stages. That cuts my possible losses. The only exception to this rule I make is if the news is catastrophic or I have lost all trust in the management when I dump the lot.
Babcock (BAB) is a good example of the danger of holding on regardless. It has looked fundamentally cheap for some time but the shares have actually lost 75% of their value in the last 5 years in a steady downward trend. There was more bad news on the 13th April. An announcement from the company said “The contract profitability and balance sheet review (“CPBS”) has identified impairments and charges totaling approximately £1.7 billion”. They now plan some disposals which they suggest may enable them to avoid an equity issue.
On a personal note, I had my second Covid-19 vaccination yesterday (the Pfizer version) so I am feeling slightly tired this morning, as I did after the first. The organisation was chaotic though this time. Originally planned to be done at Guys Hospital but then redirected to St. Thomas hospital and they lost my wife’s record altogether. My tiredness may partly relate to the miles I walked yesterday around and between hospitals. The person who administered the injection worked for British Airways as cabin staff. He was redeployed as there are few flights to service at present. He said a lot of people are extremely nervous about taking the vaccine. He had spent 45 minutes talking to one person before they eventually refused it.
Personally I have no qualms at all about any of the vaccines. They are much safer than the risk of catching the virus. But there are a lot of idiots in this world are there not! The latest bad news however is that the CEO of Pfizer has suggested that we may need a booster every 12 months in future. As I have been having annual flu vaccinations for 25 years that is of no great concern.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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