Developing a successful brand, or indeed a range of successful brands, is a key corporate goal for many businesses. Not only can a good quality brand deliver high margins and consistent cashflow, it can also help a company to create a valuable “economic moat”. This refers to the ability of a business to maintain a…
A few weeks ago on the Master Investor blog Nick Sudbury argued that investors, given the current environment of rising inflation, should be looking at ways to protect their wealth from currency debasement. One way of doing that is to invest in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, the increasingly popular Ethereum, or perhaps one of 900+…
Let’s look at three interesting small cap companies which have recently listed on the markets during these traditionally quiet summer months. 1) Angling Direct There aren’t many sports which offer the possibility of taking home dinner when you’ve finished playing. But angling, one of the most popular participation sports in the UK, is one of them. According…
Companies might make the decision to list their shares on a stock exchange for a number of reasons. Whether it be an exit opportunity for existing shareholders, to raise the profile of the business amongst its customers, or to set a value for the stock, there are many benefits of making the move from being…
Valuing shares is a tricky business. That’s why over the decades equity analysts have developed a range of different ways to estimate how much a company could be worth. Well established approaches such as discounted cash flow and earnings multiples have been popular for almost a century and remain commonly used methods for valuing businesses.…
Here’s an experiment for you to try. Ask 10 random people on the street if they’ve heard of ‘Global Switch’ (www.globalswitch.com) and you’ll likely be confronted with a vacant expression. You may well find a similar response if you mention ‘Anaplan’ (www.anaplan.com). Yet both are ‘unicorns’, an expression in the tech arena to describe a company…
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of investment strategies in existence which proclaim to be the best for maximising returns. From broad policies such as value or growth investing, to more quirky approaches such as astronomical cyclical analysis, investors are spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting a set of rules or procedures on…
As my colleague John Kingham recently wrote in the March edition of Master Investor Magazine, “high yield stocks do not always deliver the yield you were hoping for.” This refers to the dreaded “yield trap”, whereby companies which have seemingly large dividends relative to their share price then go on to disappoint investors by cutting…
According to finance theory there are three components to the total return which an investor can make from a share. Firstly, we have dividends. Often being the most modest source of equity returns, dividends can nevertheless be consistent and provide a useful source of income for investors. Those with shares in dividend paying FTSE 100…
As I discussed in last month’s edition of Master Investor Magazine, AIM shares had a good year in 2016, with the FTSE AIM All Share Index rising by an impressive 14.2%. However, investors who got involved in AIM’s new issues did even better – although the two sets of performance statistics aren’t comparable directly due…
