I have been harping for a couple of months now that I don’t think the economic situation in the U.S. is nearly as bad as it is consistently being portrayed. To this end, I found this article very interesting in the way it articulates a number of positive factors in the American story that are […]
Stocks moved sharply upward this week, fellow owners and regular followers will have noticed our portfolio is generally much less volatile than the broader market. When the market declines sharply, we rarely decline as fast, unfortunately, when the market rises sharply, we usually fail to keep up as we have this week. The Europeans seem […]
I mentioned in my post a fortnight ago that US housing starts were expected to continue their strong upward trajectory, well they were reported through the week here: “Privately-owned housing starts in September were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 658 000. This is 15.0 percent (±13 7%) above the revised August estimate of […]
A short update this week as I’m travelling, don’t worry, nowhere luxurious, I’m in Cooma as I write. Because I haven’t the time to write anything interesting myself, I will refer you to someone else’s work, which in any case is a thousand times more insightful than my weekly observations. I refer to this article, […]
The market staged a big turnaround this week; unfortunately our holdings didn’t keep pace. I guess the question is – can the gains be sustained. It is hard to tell, but to my way of thinking, positive economic news is starting to out-weigh negative economic news. I always focus on US news, because like it […]
I write this blog mid-week before it is to be posted (i.e. prices used were sourced Wednesday – don’t scream if they’ve changed, they change all the time!), after looking back through my posts last week to find the post I referred to in last weeks blog, I found my proposal in Update No. 6. […]
We start this week with a quote from the greatest literary work of the 20th century: The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his […]
I’ll be relatively brief this week; for there are a great many valuations I need to focus my efforts on at this time of year. Wednesday evening (14th), the time the first draft of this post being written, the S&PASX200 TR index (our benchmark) is down 15.3% since our April 1stinception, our fund at this […]
The Fund NTA dipped a bit this week (more than the market) as our largest holding which is the subject of a corporate action declined in price, as the bidder games the target. If the takeover falls over at current prices, I truly believe it will serve our fund-holders better, though it may hurt short-term […]
There was a flood of profit announcements this week, I will briefly focus on 4 that are members of the EGP20 and discuss one that is not. The funds holdings did not quite keep pace with the markets bold upward move this week, but we still have half of our holdings yet to announce and […]
The global share-markets seemed to settle somewhat this week until Friday, when I had cause to think of famous bush poet John O’Brien’s words in his Australian classic – Said Hanrahan. "We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan, "Before the year is out”. As long as the market is ‘rooned’ by October, I’ll be […]
Well, what a fascinating week that was, for those who were watching the market from day to day, you would have noticed some highly unusual behaviour. The market moved from substantial losses to gains in a single day and vice-versa, depending on a variety of factors. Interestingly, the Australian market was one of the strongest […]
Some investors in shares at the moment could be forgiven for feeling like Rodney Dangerfield when he said “My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying”. If your horizon is a couple of years out or more, I really believe you need not panic. In fact for holders […]
A question without notice to readers: Without researching, which sectors of the market do you think have been the best and worst performers this year? To help those less familiar, the main sectors are these: Energy, Materials, Industrials, Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, Health Care, Financials, Information Technology, Telecommunications Services, Utilities and Real Estate Investment Trusts. […]