Hexed: Contrary to expectation on the part of the market, Mr Rollen of Hexagon AB was yesterday evening publicly found not guilty. The effect was an inevitable 5% rise in Hexagon AB’s share price this morning. However, this still leaves Hexagon AB a clear short above 400 Euros. The balance sheet is appalling and the…
A modern economy can only function efficiently if its infrastructure is up to the task. Essential assets like good quality roads, bridges, railways and hospitals play a vital role in all of our everyday lives, but these facilities are expensive to construct and maintain and command premium prices. Historically most of the critical infrastructure in…
From 1st January all investment trusts have had to publish a Key Information Document (KID) before their shares can be made available to retail investors. This sort of standardised information can be useful, but unfortunately some of the prescribed content can be highly misleading. One of the most surprising aspects of the new KID is…
I heard on the wireless that Mifid II contains 1.7 million paragraphs spread over 7,000 pages. HMRC has always proceeded on the basis that ignorance of the law is no excuse when in fact it is quite impossible for one man to know the law. Mifid II seems to be getting in on this act.…
Kenya is once again politically stable and is fast becoming the most mature emerging market in Africa. Jambo!* When you go through customs control on entering Kenya you are supposed to surrender all your plastic bags. Last year, plastic bags were banned in Kenya outright. This impressed me for two reasons. Firstly, it shows Kenya’s…
The defence sector has experienced a challenging period since the financial crisis. Cutbacks to military spending have become the norm across the developed world, as governments have sought to reduce budget deficits in an era of austerity. This has caused sales and profit growth to be lacking for many companies in the industry. However, the…
The novice investor or trader often obsesses about where to get into a trade or investment and may spend much time trying to refine this process. Indeed there is a whole industry around the perfect entry signal; buy now or miss out on massive gains, XYZ share cannot go any lower… Of course, we all…
Miton Global Opportunities (LON:MIGO) is a highly unusual fund that aims to profit from pricing inefficiencies by buying investment trusts that are trading on wide discounts where there is a clear catalyst for them to narrow. It had a fantastic 2017 by investing in four of the ten best performing trusts in the market and…
The chairman drew me into increasing my gold long position just before the weekend. I couldn’t follow it over the weekend since, curiously, there is no price feed from the Far East. Goodness only knows why. There must be hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Chinese – to name just two lots – who would…
There are times when certain decisions have an unusual impact on subsequent events. We reach, in other words, a ‘fork in the road’, and the choices taken – or not taken – have an incalculable impact on the future. The weekend of 13/14 September 2008 represented precisely one of those forks in the road. At…
