3862 days ago
It is now a day less than a year until the 2015 UK Investor Show but following the smash success of the sell-out 2014 show, the UK's leading investor show is already able to announce the first 31 speakers who have agreed to appear in 2015! And there are 27 more names to reveal as the show moves up into superdrive
Our new speakers are Matt Lofgran of Nostra Terra and Matt Suttcliffe of Alaxander Mining and they join on stage Nigel Wray, Evil Knievil, myself (Tom Winnifrith), Clem Chambers, Vin Murria, Ben Edelman, Paul Scott, Lucian Miers, Steve Moore, Robert Sutherland Smith, Cathal Friel, Andrew Bell, Marcus Hanke, Amanda Van Dyke, Matt Earl, Thierry Laduguie and..
NEW For 2015: Charlotte Argyle, Ben Turney, Jason Drummond, Cassandra Harris and BrokerMan Daniel
Some failing shows manage only a handful of speakers but UK Investor Show delivers both changes each year AND the big names. Over the coming weeks we will announce more big name speakers as we plan an increased number of sessions as we take on more floor space. Brace yourself for a 50 speaker show!
And
3876 days ago
It is still just over a year until the 2015 UK Investor Show but following the smash success of the sell-out 2014 show, the UK's leading investor show is already able to announce the first 21 speakers who have agreed to appear in 2015!
They are: Nigel Wray, Evil Knievil, myself (Tom Winnifrith), Clem Chambers, Vin Murria, Ben Edelman, Paul Scott, Lucian Miers, Steve Moore, Robert Sutherland Smith, Cathal Friel, Andrew Bell, Marcus Hanke, Amanda Van Dyke, Matt Earl, Thierry Laduguie and..
NEW For 2015: Charlotte Argyle, Ben Turney, Jason Drummond, Dominic Picarda and BrokerMan Daniel
Some failing shows manage only a handful of speakers but UK Investor Show delivers both changes each year AND the big names. Over the coming weeks we will announce more big name speakers as we plan an increased number of sessions as we take on more floor space. Brace yourself for a 50 speaker show!
And there will also be 110 stands for PLCs to exhibit and present from. Already we are almost 20% booked out and we will start announcing those exhibiting very soon.
There are two classes of tickets:
A Golden Ticket guarantees you a front three row seat in any of the days 110 sessions plus a pass to the after show party with CEOs, speakers and journalists. It costs £60 (inc VAT)
An Investor class ticket gains access to any session at the show and costs £12 including VAT.
BUT you can buy either type of ticket with a 50% early bird discount if you book NOW. You can buy your early bird tickets HERE
3922 days ago
We are ringing the changes at The UK Investor Show on April 5 in Westminster. One big change is the introduction of the bloggers café – a special area where writers like Brokerman Dan, Doc Holiday, Malcolm Stacey, Malcolm Palle from Mining Maven, Robert Sutherland Smith, Steve Moore and myself will spend much of the day, blogging, tweeting and just chatting to anyone who wants a chat over a coffee. Hopefully my fave Tory blogger Charlotte Argylle will also join us at the cafe.
Of course we are not the main attraction but this is another reason for you to book a seat at the UK Investor Show this year -. Why book in to attend?
* A top location: the QE2 Centre in the heart of Westminster
* A cracking line-up of big name presenters. Nigel Wray, Mark Slater, Evil Knievil and I am back from 2013. But we are joined this year by 40 other speakers including Terry Smith, the tech queens Vin Murria and Cassandra Harris; Mining gurus Amanda van Dyke, Dominic Frisby and Matt Suttcliffe and blogger supremo Paul Scott and now the Blinkx Destroyer Ben Edelman.
*Real variety – main stage sessions on value investing, Bitcoins, mining investing, crowd-funding, tech investing, oil & gas, shareholder activism and much more
*Better and more exhibiting companies. Last year 50 companies attended the UK Investor Show. This year we already have 90 booked in and counting – the latest booking came just today: Tangent Communications (TNG) - a very profitable AIM listed media company. And most of these PLCs will also do a 20 minute presentation in smaller side room for those who really want to know more.
You can get full details of the speaker line up HERE
You can get full details of the main stage presentations HERE
You can get full details of the exhibiting companies HERE
Already well over half the seats for this event have been booked with 4% of the tickets going yesterday alone!
To book your ticket go HERE
I look forward to seeing you on April 5 in Westminster
Tom Winnifrith
4056 days ago
My old colleague and fellow t1ps emigre, Robert Sutherland Smith writes from the Hampstead Ponds...
The arrival of the autumn equinox probably went unnoticed by the majority of the fully clad population, enclosed as it is, in heated office home, car and train. But not amongst the minority of open water swimmers who are in true tactile touch with the outside world of the weather with myself at the Hampstead Ponds every morning.
4086 days ago
From our man on Hampstead Heath...Swimming in the now cooling waters of the pond - as summer recedes and energy bills rise - somehow prolongs those salad days of life; the water being as crisp as a lettuce and the swimmer growing as cool as a cucumber. These days when the wind scuds across the surface water, raising small droplets that splash over your head, are a particular pleasure to inland pond swimmers; it is like swimming at sea but without the salt.
Only a week or two ago in heat wave weather, the pond was more like the African Impop; now, it is a little closer to swimming in Dover Harbour Pond swimming, like markets, is often surprising in its sudden changes of mood - or is it my mood?
Dear old ‘Athenean’ George Osborne, Blighty’s Chancellor is probably - to steal the imagery of Andrew Neil - celebrating his ‘winning the economic argument’ down at Anabel’s. I am sure it was him I saw in a darkened corner? In any event,
4088 days ago
A year ago tomorrow t1ps.com, the website I set up in my bedroom published a defamatory and malicious piece about me in the name of Steve Moore, James Faulkner and Richard Gill. Our connection was utterly severed and I found myself working alone in the world running just this, my personal blog. Boy has the world changed.
As you may know Steve Moore was on holiday when that piece appeared and when he discovered what had gone out in his name and without his consent or knowledge, he resigned on principle. Then there were two of us. Soon after Darren Atwater took a pay cut, quit and moved to join us. Then Lucian Miers followed suit. Then Robert Sutherland Smith. Paul Nicholson, from the Isle of Man has hooked up with us since. And tomorrow, a year to a day since that infamous episode Malcolm Stacey – the founder of ShareCrazy.com joins our merry band with his debut piece on www.shareprophets.com
In the space of one year
4117 days ago
My old (158 at the last count) colleague from t1ps Robert Sutherland Smith is working out his last weeks at the place that should not be named. As of now he is full time back where he belongs with Steve and myself. As such he continues his monthly reflections from the ponds at Hampstead Heath. RSS has done a cracking piece on bonds and equity markets - why he is bullish - today on shareprophets (here) but for me writes:
It’s that ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ season of August in high summer at the pond. Blackberries (still an unripened green) are forming in the undergrowth of shrubs and bushes at the edge of the water, reminding us that nothing lasts for ever - particularly northern summers. Soon, there will be fireworks over Edinburgh Castle to mark the end of the Festival and massed bands and pipers will be marching to the old tunes - the ‘Black Bear’ and the barren Rocks of Aden, swaying - down the Royal Mile and into Autumn.
4117 days ago
While thousands ( sometimes tens of thousands ) of folks read my scribblings here and on shareprophets.com a far more select audience read what is on my premium site, the Nifty Fifty, which I produce with Steve Moore and Lucian Miers. My best ideas go there first. It is expensive but you pay for getting the best ideas first.
In our heyday at t1ps Steve Moore and I had a great track record. Over 11 years and c 240 tips our average gain was c 42.5%. Of course t1ps is now written by a couple of fellows who were still at primary school when the sire was launched. They claim the record of Steve, myself (and Robert Sutherland Smith) as their own in marketing material but it is OUR record. I can assure you that we never outsourced to primary schools.
Robert Sutherland Smith has been writing with me here and at www.shareprophets.com for a couple of months now and the news this week is that he will also be leaving t1ps for good at the end of September
4186 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at Shareprophets.com on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at SSE. RSS writes:
Events have fully justified my earlier bullish judgement elsewhere that SSE (SSE) shares were good value on a then estimated 6% prospective dividend yield. The share price rose with grace and charm to a recent May time peak of 1690p, from whence profit taking brought them down to a share price of 1627p last seen having done better that the FTSE 100 Index over six months in a bull market where risk stocks have been rising.
This ‘safe’ utility,
4186 days ago
It is always good to be firmly reunited with old friends. Robert Sutherland Smith and I started working together along time ago when he was only 148. I am pleased to say that he is, as of yesterday, devoting his freelance enterprises to www.shareprophets.com – thus the four key writers who made t1ps what it (once) was: myself, Steve Moore, Zak Mir and RSS are all reunited again over at www.shareprophets.com
RSS will continue to pen a monthly Pond Life column here but three times a week he will be analysing a FTSE 350 yield stock over on Shareprophets. Having started his City career in 1967 ( the year before I was born) RSS knows what he is talking about.
While some financial websites groups have recently admitted to sharply falling numbers I am delighted to say that after less than two months www.shareprophets.com already has 7,000 registered users who go there for free share data on all UK listed stocks as well as breaking news and cutting analysis from 20 writers with the men who made t1ps what it was at the heart of it.
If you have not registered you can do so for free at www.shareprophets.com
4187 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at Shareprophets.com on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at United Utlities. RSS writes:
My last look at United Utilities (UU.) on a site I have now abandoned to join the winning team here at Shareprophets with all my efforts, was just over two months ago, pointing out the attractions, adding them to my shares to buy tray and suggesting it was worth looking at. Since then, the share price seems to have risen by 17% as a reminder that the modern stock exchange, despite all the digital computer technology and highly rewarded analytical anorak power, is far from being a perfect market in the economic sense of the word. The price in late March was about 671p. It is now, last seen, 789p; an almost explosive share price rise.
4188 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at various places ( including Shareprophets.com naturally) on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Greggs. RSS writes:
There is something comforting about Greggs (GRG) the Newcastle based convenience food company; as reassuring as Geordies cheerfully tucking into sausage rolls, whilst sitting astride a cask of Newcastle Brown to the sound of a brass band playing “Pick ya feet up Geordie Hinnie” – and what is wrong with than man, do I hear you ask?
The sight of a Gregg’s shop on some British High Street somewhere across the land, is as reliable a token of our national identity as – at the other end of the economic and social scale – champagne and hats on Ladies Day at Ascot. And in my book a Gregg’s sausage roll and a cuppa wins my affections every time.
So it is sad to see that Gregg’s is having a torrid time on the stock exchange
4194 days ago
As I swim through the still bracing cool waters of the pond up at Hampstead Heath, a duck makes passage across my bows, or to be lucidly un-metaphorical, my nose! There is something comforting about ducks; reliable creatures bobbing along in an unreliable world, asking only the companionship of other ducks and some weed to eat.
In my mind I hum the tune of that old Roy Rogers (the elegantly attired, spotlessly laundered, white hated singing Hollywood cowboy of my childhood) song about his horse, the reliable and faithful “Trigger”, “… that four footed friend …he’ll never let you down …….etc” and add my own words: “That web footed friend, that web footed friend…….etc. It is a wonderful therapy doing something physical and boring enough to make your mind a vacuum into which such abominating thoughts pass through unbidden. Then, come thoughts of the market. As I make my turn by a weed covered buoy – I spot another approaching duck as my thoughts meander across the exceptional May market… Have we all been misguided?
For most of the month it has disobeyed the old market dictum about selling and going away until St. Leger’s Day. I wonder who St. Leger was and vow to look him up on Google!
4194 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at various places ( including Shareprophets.com naturally) on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at GlaxoSmithKline. RSS writes:
The latest information and news emerging from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is of encouragement to investors generally but to dividend investors most particularly. Although the company is one of the stock markets dividend yield staple, with a long established reputation for cash generation, a glance at the trends in its cash flow statements is a bit disconcerting. Whilst investment spending over the last three years has been rising (that includes capital expenditure) operating cash flow, the stuff that finances it (along with dividend payments to ordinary shareholders) has been declining; and significantly so, last year.
4194 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at various places ( including Shareprophets.com naturally) on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Standard Chartered. RSS writes:
Standard Chartered Bank’s (STAN) Q1 statement has brought the thing that markets most particularly dislike; the fog of uncertainty. And most particularly, the un-quantified (and thus unquantifiable) kind that the analytical mind must abhor. The Q1 statement informs us in the most general way without figures or percentages (the closest we get to arithmetic, are vague references to such thing as “low/high digit” changes etc) which mean as good as nothing to the numerate, calculating analyst and reporter. For someone like the reporter and commentator on the Financial Times trying to put objective copy together, it is about as insufferably and frustrating a thing as could be imagined.
It creates the impression that either the company did not know exactly what had gone on (the least likely explanation) or knew too well and did not wish to give it more precise substance? Whatever the reason, it left commentators without scope for analytical exploration and explanation?
4194 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at various places ( including Shareprophets.com naturally) on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at HSBC. RSS writes:
The two big relative attractions of HSBC (HSBA) as a bank are its recent historic steadfast holding to its culture and its subsequent capital strength. The culture enabled it to steer the ship without tax payer help through the storm of the banking crisis. It also persuaded the US Justice Department to keep a recent fine it imposed of $1.3 billion for money laundering, at the lower end of what was allowable, because it concluded HSBC management had the right attitude. No need, as at Barclays, for an internal moral rearmament campaign to return it to a more overtly ethical approach to business in the new post Bob Diamond world. At HSBC it seems to have survived like DNA in the corporate fibre.
4212 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at various places ( including Shareprophets.com naturally) on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at BAT Industries. RSS writes:
My last review of BAT Industries was a bullish one, having examined the management strategy of this large and important international business geared as it is, by common consent (entirely reasonably so) to a long term, irresistible decline demand for its products. I noted at the time that analysts estimated on a consensus view that sales revenue would grow by 20% over the two year 2013 and 2014 to an annual sales figure of £16.7 billion by the end of next year along with a 20% increase in earnings and dividends to 248p and 162p respectively estimated for the year to 31 December 2014.
4223 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at various places ( including Shareprophets.com naturally) on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 5th 2014. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at AstraZeneca. RSS writes:
With the first quarter’s results from Astra Zeneca (AZN) the curtain has gone up for the first act of what we all know will be a tough and difficult year; a stock market version of Gounod’s Faust but with a happier ending we trust. At least that is what the market expects to judge from the fact that the share price has risen some ten per cent from since the introduction and appointment of the new Chief Executive (whose name almost rhymes with Poirot) and his plan plus the fact the share price did not fall significantly on their publication - ending down 4.5p on the day to 3321p a share. His plan is to transform the company from its co-operative, external economy dividend favouring model, back to the drug discovery orthodoxy of more internally funded research and development; leaving the question hanging in the air about whether the company can increase internal R&D spending while at the same time maintain and increase dividends?
4225 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at various places ( including Shareprophets.com naturally) on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Barclays. RSS writes:
Two seasons have arrived simultaneously: Spring, and the reporting season for Banks. The bank’s first quarter figures have been delivered along with some cheerful late arrived sunshine. In the real world of long delayed warmth and sun, things suddenly seem wonderfully natural and uncomplicated to the average, well adjusted, individual feeding his mossy lawn. Daffodils are daffodils and cherry blossom is cherry blossom. “Oh to be in England…etc.”
For the investor in banks life is not so natural, beautiful or straight forward.
4225 days ago
At 8 degrees - the swimming temperature is chalked on a board each day – these intoxicating waters, sparkling and dancing in the early morning sun of an early May morning have the coolness and body of champagne; perhaps a Dom Perignon 55 in deference to Ian Fleming, who once lived nearby and who may have had a swim or two here in his days living on the edge of Hampstead Heath. All Etonians are taught to swim after all. The idea of 007 swimming in champagne seems perfectly normal. The water clinches you in a thrillingly cool embrace that would have pleased Her Majesty’s secret agent, as it does me. Did not 007 seduce some gorgeous foreign agent by a river whilst sipping the classic vintage? I trust the lady was stirred but not shaken.
Pond swimming prompts the imagination. I consider the policies of our Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne - wondering if he could in fact be a vampire
4247 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at BP although comic style makes me wonder what this child of the sixties has been smoking of late. RSS writes:
America, or at least its coastal region around the Gulf of Mexico – which was unfortunately flooded with crude oil from a BP platform a year or so ago – may be a land of dreams over the rainbow; but they are not necessarily pleasant dreams as BP – like Dorothy and her little do Toto from the “Wizard of Oz” which I watched with my grand-daughter over the weekend – are finding out. It is curious that the tin man in the film is made out of old oil drums and oil cans. But is BP “Dorothy” who eventually gets back to normality, or the “tin man” without a heart who does not?
4251 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at William Morrison, the supermarkets group. RSS writes:
I can remember when William Morrison (MRW) was once the most fashionable share in the food retailing sector. Not only fashionable, but exotic too; an emergent hitherto unknown northern kind of retailer, that was culturally different; more direct and tougher than softer southern food retailers like the then Tesco and Sainsbury. In stock market terms it was a bit like one of the heroes from one of those gritty fifties novels set in the north like ‘This Sporting Life’ and the ‘Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’. I seem to recall that Morrison’s brought the concept of ‘bogof’ to our shopping reality. William Morrison was at the no nonsense, cutting edge; retailing with a Yorkshire accent. It was highly rated as I recall, because it was a growth business as it pushed into the deep south of gentrified food and grocery demand.
But things have changed. Morrison is out of fashion in the food retailing sector now
4259 days ago
The thoughts of my old friend the one and only and truly great Robert Sutherland Smith…
I stand on the jetty gazing onto the cold grey waters of the ponds on Hampstead Heath, a stiff breeze blowing against, around and seemingly through me, directly from somewhere deep in the Russian Arctic region - surely more than a marketing exercise by Gaszprom in promotion of the gas they sell us for warmth, at economically indefensible prices? My darting, uncomforted gaze fails to be met by that of any bobbing coot or duck. They have wisely gone elsewhere; or simply not bothered to turn up.
The place is empty and silent. I stand there a swimming trunk clad standard bearer for the a dead nineteenth century English public school tradition of privation, physical self denial and cold showers - not that I attended any such establishment myself - knowing that the late Dr. Arnold of Rugby School, no doubt now sitting on the right hand of the Creator Himself, would be proud of me! Flashman, I conjecture, now reincarnated as a minister of the Crown, will probably be turning over in a warm bed somewhere, sleeping off too much champagne from the night before and in his case, no doubt, after a sound flogging by some dominatrix in a steel lined corset.
It is strange what thoughts visit your imagination, when swimming here? March they say, comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Not this March I venture! If it makes any concession at all, it will to be to go out as a polar bear. It is April that is described as the cruelest month. But (I hear Dr. Arnold sigh as I wilfully commit the impropriety of starting a written sentence with a co-ordinating conjunction) in 2013 AD April can scarcely prove crueller than this raw and bitter March.
As I prepare to push off for a rapid dash through fowl abandoned waters, I luridly think that this forlorn scene reminds me of the Chancellor’s March ‘Autumn’ budget. If he wishes to put himself in contention as the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer of the past century, he has made a powerful case for himself.
4261 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at AstraZeneca. RSS writes:
The new CEO of Astra Zeneca Pascal Soirot (which scans with Hercule Poirot very nicely) made his promised presentation on the strategy for returning the company to profits and earnings growth on Thursday 21 March. He appeared to do that with some degree of credibility because the share price was marked up the next day. I am also delighted to see that along with the presentation on how he plans to get profits growing he had a comment on dividends. Basically, the company says that ordinary dividends will not be an automatic function of an individual year’s earnings but rather will reflect expectations about growth. I think it is worth a direct quote
4262 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at United Utilities. RSS writes:
The water company United Utilities (UU.) whose equity has a £4.8 billion market capitalization has caught my attention for three reasons. First, at 709p, it has a useful historic dividend yield of 4.6%; second the share price has come close to its trend support line; third the company has just produced a well-received trading statement which put the shares better on the day.
4266 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Bae Systems. RSS writes:
4266 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Close Brothers. RSS writes:
As a result of a long and recent history and despite the fact that London is a uniquely large banking and financial services centre, the investor has not got many conventional banking equity investment targets at the moment. Fortunately, that does include two banks HSBC and Standard and Chartered Bank, which remained sufficiently true to their banking inheritances to come through the great banking collapse without government assistance to provide UK investors with a direct means of investing in the growing Asian Pacific economies.
4268 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Centrica. RSS writes:
4269 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at J Sainsbury. RSS writes:
In the chemical filing cabinet that serves that as my memory, I had evidently misfiled Sainsbury under the heading ‘no dividend interest’; presumably nudged by another memorized observation that Sainsbury has been handsomely outperforming William Morrison and Tesco – which I have also recently reviewed as a dividend paying candidate. The truth is of course that Sainsbury is notably well qualified to serve as an above average dividend yielder. So I have looked at the situation to see what Lord Sainsbury’s store has to offer by way of useful dividend income.
The Lord Sainsbury thing is a little joke of mine which I like to share with the bemused staff at my local Sainsbury when I send my personal regards through them to Lord Sainsbury.
4271 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Standard Life.
I willingly confess that I have generally found little difficulty in resisting past temptations to take a keen interest in Standard Life (SL.). Life assurance and annuities, the traditional focus of this two hundred year old company, are not the most exciting or fastest moving business activity in the world. That fact combined with the dry as dust name ‘Standard Life’ has invariably – by which I mean without variation – presented a cocktail of too dull a prospect to greet with of warm enthusiasm.
What life has ever been standard and who would wish it so? A name that is a negation of language and the constipation of linguistic imagination. But one which – putting the other case – fully conveys the attributes essential in a business concerned with the scientific measurement of and accounting for group human mortality in relation to the calculation of premiums and benefits for life assurance and pension annuities. Surely, was there not somebody on the occasion of its christening in some boardroom long ago, who felt an instinctive urge to giggle nervously and ask, “surely, we are not calling it Standard Life, are we? “
4273 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Aviva.
4274 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Admiral.
There is something of the Sound of Music about the Admiral Group (ADM) dividend yield; pleasing but too good to be true? A version of the world not as we realistically understand it! Earnings are to Admiral what heavy curtains were to the singing children’s governess; something she used to the most useful extent by turning curtain drapes into children’s clothes. In Admiral’s case they have turned all – or almost all – of its 2012 earnings into dividends; a policy wholly untypical of most publicly quoted companies. Both choices are idiosyncratic but also, infuriatingly, examples ‘out of the box’ practical utilitarian logic. Just as the chorus of nuns sing “How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down”, so investors might murmur, something similar about the dividend policy of the Admiral Group.
It is decidedly unusual for a company to distribute nearly all its earnings as dividends. Particularly so when its balance sheet reveals that 97% of the shareholder equity of £443 million is made up of retention’s
4275 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Legal & General.
The great issue surrounding insurance has been, as with the banks, one of capital adequacy: do they have enough capital to sustain and carry out their contractual obligations? That has been an overriding preoccupation for European insurance industry regulators. But regulation and the things that are regulated are as a moving feast or moving goal posts on unlevel playing fields. Most recently, the regulators have been worrying about those insurance companies that have been giving guarantees to customers. One recalls what that kind of thing did to an even once older insurance company, the late and august Equitable Life, which was ordered by the High Court to pay up on promises made contractually. It has been made known that a small number of insurers are under the regulatory eye in that respect.
And that has prompted a guessing game about which underwriters may be capitally challenged on that score, with dour implications for dividends for the most challenged. The recent cut in the Royal Sun dividend was both a surprise and a shock to the market. So viewing insurance as a game of musical chairs, the market has been watching to see which of them would be left without a chair.
4276 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Pearson.
Pearson’s (PSON) results for calendar 2012 have returned its accounting for the layman to an even greater inscrutability than that which it enjoyed years ago, when it was an extraordinary, almost eclectic collection of activities ranging from publishing to oil; a bit like going back from the renaissance to the dark ages. Investors cannot rely on the statutory accounts because they, in their matter of fact way, give a misleading impression of change. For illumination, the management provides adjusted and underlying figures to chart the changing dynamics of a changing business in a changing world. In that, we are entirely in their hands although they have to satisfy the sniffing, close probing finger jabbing attention of institutional analysts and fund managers.
4278 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at HSBC.
HSBC (HSBA) performed strongly throughout the great banking collapse of the first decade, of the twenty first century like a good deed in a naughty world by hanging on to much of its custom, practice and culture, when other banks were swapping their dull conservative garb for emperor’s new clothes. Chief amongst the traditions kept by HSBC was a miserly Scottish grip on capital. A lucky break for HSBC shareholders and a lucky break for UK tax payers. In the bankers’ gospel does it says: ‘blessed are they who employ sufficient capital for they shall inherit the earth’. And that is pretty much what we see in these results for the year to 31 December 2012.
4280 days ago
My previous article, RIP an old friend had at least one reader worrying about Robert Sutherland Smith given that he started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at BAT Industries. His introduction is a cracking one.
Belonging to a generation of children who smoked Turf cigarettes on London bombed sites to collect the cards of famous film stars and whose culturally formative involvement with cigarettes was through the allure of films like the Maltese Falcon I start this review to camera – as they say. I gazed at the results from the British American Tobacco Company for the year to 31 December 2012 and groaned. I flung my Humphrey Bogart fedora – slightly battered – onto the hook on the wall and stared again; sales revenue down 1.4%? I groaned again and took a Lucky Strike (brand sales up 11%) from the pack in the top pocket of my shirt and lit up. Below that top line sales figure, things had suddenly got a whole lot better; operating profit up 20%; net income up 24%. But were they legit? They were after all only the ‘statutory’ figures demanded by Federal busy bodies and others. As if by some kind of slow motion Hollywood magic, through a haze of imaginary Lucky Strike tobacco smoke, the truer adjusted figures emerged dream like – as they might in an old black and white movie.
4288 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Imperial Tobacco.
As an arithmetically and financially attractive income share, Imperial Toboacco (IMT) or “Imps” looks to be an outstanding buy at 2344p. Here is why. There are in fact two reasons – Imps is the object of two very distinct investing perspectives.
The most recent, is that of speculative interest on press stories about Imperial (as in old, a long vanished British Empire Singapore) Tobacco being acquired by a Japanese (as in the land of the rising sun) tobacco company. For that, investors want the lowest dividend yield to exit on. The second traditional investment interest in Imperial Tobacco has focused on its high dividend yield and its ability to grow dividends.
4289 days ago
My old ( very old) friend from t1ps.com Robert Sutherland Smith continues his monthly column dreamt up while taking an early morning swim on Hampstead Heath… Pond Life.
There is nothing better at about 7am on a raw February morning, when flurries of snow in the air are driven hither and thither by a hectoring easterly wind coming across the North Sea from somewhere south of the Ural Mountains, than to make your way to the ponds for a winter dip. Thankfully, it is not that cold this morning; only three degrees above freezing. Almost sub tropical compared with some days. You enter the enclosed compound to find that a few other sturdy fellows are already undressing; hanging their winter cloths on cold metal hooks. They stand there in the poor light of an early winter dawn, white as flour; more like spirits from another plane or dimension than living, breathing beings from north London before the working day.
What is this urge to plunge into forbidding steel grey waters on such a day – or indeed almost any day in an English winter?
4289 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Vodafone.
Vodafone (VOD) is at the cutting edge of the application of digital information technology which it supplies to a world of clamouring, fastidious consumer demand. The mobile phone is taking and increasing share of Internet communications business including data transmission, the latest commercial opportunity and phone company objective, from PC’s laptops and tablets. It is transformational; exciting stuff socially and economically.
By the logic of the scale of its worldwide operations it is a utility which has to compete not only on investment and innovation but also on price. Each year it needs to square the commercial circle of keeping a large number of people happy: its customers; regulators; governments and of course its investors. Doing all of those things simultaneously requires enterprising, athletic management. Vodafone shares have traveled in a short period of time, from being a highly rated company without much in the way of profits, to becoming a lowly rated share with a modest price to earnings ratio and a high historic (for the year to 31 March 2012) annual dividend yield of 5.9%; considerably higher than that currently offered by tobacco company equity – for many years the staple of high dividend payouts.
4293 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Bae Systems.
4294 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Drax.
So that old fashioned (in scale) and very British (Yorkshire) non global business of supplying the 7% of the UK’s electricity has, as part of the price of converting half its highly efficient coal fired electricity generation capacity, to the generation of electric power from biomass – mainly imported, fast growing replaceable timber – is off the stock market’s higher end dividend tariff. Before its results for last year to 31st December 2012, on a then share price of 609p, the published dividend yield for Drax (DRX) was 4.3%. That was then this is now.
4296 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at RBS ( or Royal Bank of Scotland as it was in my day).
The share price of RBS (RBS) has headed due south since my bearish comments on the company last month. Reviewing the share in terms of its future dividend paying capacity in the light of recent history, I observed that in the different world and circumstance of 2007 ( when bank capital adequacy was seemingly almost inconsequential and some banks were running on low or dubious capital or both ) RBS had distributed only 30% of its earnings as dividends. That implied on a totally theoretical, best expectation 30% dividend payout from 36p of earnings per share, a dividend of 11..9p; translating into by way of academic exercise, into an annual yield of a mere 3.3%.
4297 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at SSE ( or Scottish & Souther as it was in my day).
There are two things about energy supplier SSE Plc (it was until recently known as Scottish and Southern Electricity – which used to prompt thoughts of hairy highlanders incongruously tossing cables at a vicarage lawn tea party presided over by Miss Marples) which makes its shares a good dividend income play. But also, a share with some potential for long term capital appreciation relative to the FTSE 100 Index.
Firstly, SSE is explicitly committed to one over-riding objective investor objective which makes it noteworthy as an equity; that is, its proclaimed mission to increase its dividend payout by 2% more than the rate of inflation measured by the Retail Price Index. Chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin (mysteriously a Kelvin being a unit of temperature movement) has explicitly confirmed that goal.
4300 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Barclays.
The market response to the Barclay’s 2012 figures and accompanying strategic review out to 2015 was good enough to suggest that the Quakers had returned to run the fallen bank to restore those long lost standards of Quaker ethics, which had once prompted customers to beat a pathway to the bank’s door. No Quaker would have fiddled Libor. But in their absence (assuming that he is not in fact a Quaker) Barclay’s new Chief Executive, Antony Jenkins, was the next best thing.
He does a splendid job invoking a new moral high ground to which Barclay’s employees, drowning in ‘they don’t get it’ public opprobrium, may now swim. It was emphatic moral re-armament. The words ‘respect’, ‘integrity’, ‘service’ and ‘stewardship’ were picked up, recorded and reported by scribbling journalists. A job well done! But can words alone change the bank’s more recent culture of error when investment banking will continue to be such a big part of the bank’s business?
4303 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at BT.
4307 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at BP in light of its latest trading statement.
Writing here on January 6th I concluded that a charge of ‘gross negligence’ against BP in regard to the continuing judicial saga of the case against BP for its role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, was made less likely by a guilty plea to negligence from the sub-contractor oil well operator Trans Ocean. I added that, that such a helpful outcome might not represent the last word on BP’s outstanding liability; the ways of lawyers being wondrous. And so it has come to pass, something we learned more about as as part of a 2012 trading statement published on February 5th.
4308 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Aviva. I have never understood insurance stocks but, as I noted, RSS is a clever chap.
I saw that an analyst somewhere had suggested that Aviva (AV.) might wish to re-base its dividend payout – a polite way of suggesting a cut. The rationalist argument for such a development, if it were to occur, might include the obvious point that new chief executives coming to a corporate debacle to sort it out, often like to put all the bad news he ( or she) can find out for public consumption to distance themselves from history and provide the lowest start base possible for the rebuilding project. It only remains to add that Mark Wilson, after a long search, was appointed the new CEO of Aviva on the 21 November and took up his appointment on 1 January this year.
4310 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at AstraZeneca.
Whatever else, the annual results from that curiosity of the pharmaceutical sector, the Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca (AZN) tells us that the company’s management is thinking about dividend policy but presumably not telling us all they think. So here are my Hercule Poirot like surmises. Smoothing the waxed moustache, taking the cane from the umbrella stand and giving oneself an admiring glance in the art deco hall mirror, I mince forward, stimulating my little grey cells – such as they are – as I go.
4313 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at National Grid.
A couple of weeks ago I advocated a purchase of National Grid (NG.) shares for dividend yield. This week the company published its interim management statement for the period 1 October 2012 to 28 January 2013. It seems that my reading of the runes were pretty much correct. Regulatory management is shown to be going according to plan and shows no obvious signs of not moving into an expected new dance like embrace of mutual understanding and agreement between the regulator and company for the years following 2013.
4315 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Bae Systems.
In share price terms, BAE Systems (BA.) took off like a typhoon jet trainer from 250p in late 2011 to a recent peak of 350p. The share has thus produced £1 profit with its 40% capital gain for anyone who was brave enough to buy the shares at 250p. And it would have been a brave buy; a highly geared, pretty low margin defence contractor in times of government spending retrenchment in the UK and the US.
4318 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Standard Chartered.
What should one make of Standard Chartered Bank (STAN) at the current share price of 1665p? The price is 52% above this year’s low of 1092p (August 2012) and only 2 % below January’s peak of 1700p. Is it too late to buy? I think that despite the rise, arguably not.
4321 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at RBS
What does one make of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) at 362p? Banks as objects of everyday investor curiosity seem like sealed black boxes, wrapped in heavy oil cloth placed in a screwed down drum lying at the bottom of a deep ocean. Arguably, the buying of RBS shares this last year has been more a matter of flying by the seat of the pants (a great stock market tradition which some do well some of the time) than normal calculation. Trying to work out when the share price has reached a rationally understandable investment destination is difficult; more the stuff of momentum investment and chart reads.
4322 days ago
Christmas day at the Highgate Ponds – where allegedly lunatics and pike swim and crayfish behave like sharks – is the top of the yearly swimming market; overpopulated with unfamiliar crowds pulled in by the ‘greasepaint’ momentum of the occasion but woefully unfamiliar with the joys of swimming throughout the seasons.
In consequence, it is my habit along with the other waterfowl to duck out of the Christmas day plunge; going short of the mulled wine, the hoisting of the Union flag on the ruins of the old high diving board of the long vanished, once celebrated, Highgate Diving Club; the traditional bugle call across its steel grey water – and of course, the hyperventilating joy of Christmas Day hyper cold water as men in rubber swimming hats and snow white bodies, dive in to race across its bitterly chilling surface – to the distant cheers of a well wrapped, North London spectacle seeking onlookers. Even the ducks, coots and the grebes take off until this Christmas day festive peak is passed, and the place sinks quietly back into the consoling values of solitude and the wintery beauty of Boxing Day, when I returned.
4323 days ago
My old pal, from my 12 years at t1ps.com, Robert Sutherland Smith is a cheery old fellow (he is 157) with a dry sense of humour. A noted enthusiast for early morning swimming on Hampstead Heath I imagine that he has a few spare hours on his hands right now. Surely he cannot be swimming at present? We will all find out shortly as he starts his new monthly “Pond Life” column here on www.TomWinnifrith.com
So bored as he is he sent me a few of his thoughts on Greggs (LSE:GRG). We both like food and I am a major bear of this stock
4327 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years. at t1ps. He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. He is also going to do a monthly column for me on this blog on the subject that really interests him, life on Hampstead Heath. I am sure we all look forward to “Pond Life” – I wonder if he will be swimming this weekend? RSS today looks at Tesco. Neigh… Yes he does.
Tesco (TSCO) remains Britain’s favoured food retailer. But, at least in stockmarket terms, it has for some time been suffering the outrageous fortune epitomised by the Bard himself in his phrase about troubles when they come, coming not as single spies but in battalions. Just as we were adjusting ourselves to the company overcoming the problems of Christmas past (I refer to the trouncing they took at the hands of Sainsbury and Morrison’s in the trading period Christmas 2011) Tesco is hit by a horse burger scandal. I love the brutal market joke about what do you put on your Tesco burger? Answer; £5 each way!
Very clearly, given the importance attached to own brand retailing, the discovery that Tesco’s ‘everyday value’ beef burger was 29% horse and some pig – not Lord Emsworth’s ‘Empress’ I hope – is not without market significance
.
4330 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years. at t1ps. He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. He is also going to do a monthly column for me on this blog on the subject that really interests him, life on Hampstead Heath. I am sure we all look forward to “Pond Life.” RSS today looks at HSBC.
see reports that US Mega bank JP Morgan has this week been taken to task by regulators for its lax internal controls. For those of us who remember when banks used to be in institutions that lent money and were considered safe and dull this serves as yet another reminder that those banks with a real advantage in the new regulatory world are those with a culture for what used to be called ‘probity’; the principal stock in trade of London’s ‘joint stock’ clearing banks for much of the last century.Barclays, under its new management, in a neo-Darwinian instinct for adaptation to the new conditions
4331 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years. at t1ps. He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. He is also going to do a monthly column for me on this blog on the subject that really interests him, life on Hampstead Heath. I am sure we all look forward to “Pond Life.” RSS today looks at National Grid and starts, once again, with a touch of comedy. He is a funny chap RSS.
The observation about things being in the price is usually a prelude to the conclusion that a share price is well up with events; more than discounting prospects and one where a profit should be taken. On this occasion, in respect to that dullest of shares, the National Grid, (NG.) it means the opposite. Dull and boring, as my friend and former t1ps colleague Tom Winnifrith often says in relation to shares, is sexy. At my age I have long forgotten what he means by that but I think I get his general point and agree.
What is in the price of the shares of the great UK and US electricity transmission supply owner and operator, is a growth in dividends
4335 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years. at t1ps. He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. He is also going to do a monthly column for me on this blog on the subject that really interests him, life on Hampstead Heath. I am sure we all look forward to “Pond Life.” RSS today looks at GlaxoSmithKline and starts with a touch of comedy. He is a funny chap RSS.
Medical matters are on my mind as I have the Norovirus. But it takes more than that to stop me writing about companies but naturally my mind turns to drugs. Well I was a young man in the sixties – the 1960s not the 1860s before you ask. Talking of ancient history, the market long ago abandoned the assumption that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) would automatically build a pathway for shareholders to a starlight future of endless profits and earnings growth, by simply spending 15% of its sales revenue on R&D, and turning that into an approved blockbuster therapy every few years. In truth, costs rose and progress became more difficult – the return on R&D capital was not acceptable.
4341 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years. at t1ps He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celenrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. He is also going to do a monthly column for me on this blog on the subject that really interests him, life on Hampstead Heath. I am sure we all look forward to “Pond Life.” RSS kicks off with his take on Barclays Bank and those wicked banksters.
Because the yield is too low for a bank (in historic terms), Barclays Bank (BARC)shares are clearly viewed by the market as a ‘momentum’ stock; the elementary investment principle being, that because the shares are going up, buy some more? So good so far as it goes; but an increasingly insufficient justification as a share price rises, further discounting whatever it is the future holds. As the late, great lamented philosopher, Sam Goldwyn, taught us! ’Never make forecasts – particularly about the future!’ Had he had been alive to run the Federal Reserve Bank in the in the 1990s and not a picture studio, we might have avoided a lot of trouble.
The possibilities for banks and the banking model generally, have been given a boost with the latest results and share price performance of the Bank of America. Having been in a dreadful condition, BoA has just proved itself the best performing US bank in terms of an annual share price rise – up116% over one year
