Will small companies prove to be the easy target the market assumes? — Anti-fragility is a concept we have mentioned a few times in Friday Views. Coined by Nassim Taleb it describes a system (or business) that benefits from being put under extreme stress because it helps it get stronger in the long run. Unlike a Ming vase for instance, which would smash…

IWG has had an interesting few years; profit warning on pricing back in 2017, almost selling to private equity and then marketing itself…

Vestas is one of the market leaders (it has been no 1 for the last 4 years) in wind turbine manufacture and installation, commanding c20%…

How wrong analysts can be, and usually are, tends to be overlooked — Late last Friday evening ARK Invest published its latest Tesla model with the stupendous assumption that their new price target was $3000 for 2025, and even a bear case was $1500, double current share price levels. The modelling behind this, run on Monte Carlo simulations, has been torn apart on…

Is the sea ice thawing for UK equities? — Anyone currently watching the new TV series The Terror (via BBC iPlayer) will be reminded of a time when the UK, or rather the British Empire via the Royal Navy, was at its pomp, attempting to forge its way through the wastelands of artic Canada in an effort to discover…

The buy and hold mantra misses an important aspect of generating returns — I was listening to a podcast this week with Ian Cassel — a well known investor in micro caps and founder of MicroCapClub — in which he mentioned that Warren Buffett’s turnover was actually highest during periods in which he had his best performing years. …

Is using the last 5 years hindsight bias or justification for a superior strategy? — Away from the UK Budget or problems at Greensill a more pertinent debate has been raging about when you should sell a stock. Baillie Gifford published an opinion piece in the FT earlier this week about why it is usually a mistake for investors to take profits, this was quickly…

What do signs of inflation mean for the most expensive stocks? — Earlier this week I received two emails to my Gmail in quick succession. The first was from Sky telling me my subscription was going up by £5 per month (on a base price of £56) the second was from British Gas informing me that my electricity tariffs were changing, with…

How to get an edge on your Annual Report reading — Amongst the multitude of Warren Buffet quotes is one that fundamentalists love: “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” This sort of thought process is anathema to the world of big data and dopamine overloads. For many the whole…