Our share markets reminded participants the last few weeks that the steady, consistent gains of the last 12 months won’t necessarily always come that way. The Friday closing price of our benchmark dipped below the 30 June 2014 closing price for the first time in FY2015.

The primary reason I tend to almost never invest in mining businesses is the lack of pricing power they have for their commodity.

Our invitation to invest e-mail went out this week. Any readers who would like to receive the invitation should contact me by e-mail.

Our FY2014 performance letter mentioned that we had begun acquiring some stock of businesses listed on Australia’s second tier exchange the National Stock Exchange of Australia.

There are 278 managed funds listed on the CommSec website. Every so often, I look at the pool to see how EGP is performing against the alternative options into which our investors might deploy their investable funds.

Investors received their copies of our statutory and management accounts this week. Such accounts can demonstrate the trickiness of valuation for the inexperienced, for on a per-share earnings basis, FY14 was substantially behind FY13 for the fund. The difference was almost solely created by one holding which was subject to a takeover in FY13, causing a meaningful spike in realised gains that year. Fortunately, underlying asset values are very simple to understand.

Earnings season finally kicked off for EGP this week. Only 1 of the 21 holdings we are waiting on reported, 3 holdings report from a non-standard balance-date and wont report in August. Of the 20 still to report, 2 will report next week, 7 in the following week and the remaining 11 in the final week of August.

This post is a ‘Part 2’; last week’s post is assumed knowledge for this week’s readers. The two should be read as a ‘pigeon pair’.

The post will be about opportunity costs. Specifically, the opportunity cost of investing in Superannuation versus investment alternatives.

I was determined to write something with a bit more detail this week, given how sparse the updates have been of late.

I have been struggling a little the last few weeks for interesting insights to include as part of the weekly price update. Both the benchmark & EGP hit new highs this week, I guess that’s something…

Another brief post. We were fortunate to hit another all-time high this week (including dividends reinvested). The market gave back some of its gains from the previous week, but we still trail the benchmark slightly after the first two weeks of FY2015 – Tony Hansen 11/07/2014

The performance report for FY2014, which completed on Monday is now available (.pdf), and stored in perpetuity on the ‘Reporting’ tab.

Our share price is measured over the final five days of the financial year (as set out in the ‘Investment Principles’ document), to ensure any lumpiness in some of our less liquid holdings is smoothed out, preventing some of the ‘end of month’ manipulation some funds appear prone to.

We had a pretty strong rise in EGP’s share price this week. With 10 days until the end of financial 2014, we lead the market by 1.39% since January 1^st and our lead over the market has widened to an all-time high of 42.60% since inception.