How cheap are world stock markets? Five key tests May 30, 2017 | City Talk Valuation is key to making investment decisions. Invest when markets are expensive and future returns are likely to be poor over the medium to long term. Buy when markets are cheap and the odds are stacked much more in your favour. But a word of warning – valuations are useless at predicting stock market behaviour [...]
Can this chart really show what will happen next to the stock market? May 26, 2017 | City Talk Société Générale’s Albert Edwards, a market commentator that we on The Value Perspective blog respect very much, recently wrote his weekly strategy note on the dangers of stifling dissent and the comfortable ‘groupthink’ that can come about as a result. On the first page was the following graph and – in a show of dissent [...]
Sell in May: does the oldest stock market superstition apply to the FTSE 100? May 23, 2017 | City Talk “Sell in May and go away,” so the old stock market adage goes. The theory is that you should sell in summer months because they are usually the worst performing. So investors should sell in May and hold cash until early September – until the St Leger horse race. But data analysed by Schroders offers [...]
Top 20 most consistently performing investment companies over the last decade revealed May 22, 2017 The world's 20 most consistently performing investment companies over the past decade have been revealed, in a new study by the Association of Investment Companies (AIC). A quarter of the top 20 are in the global sector, with the Lindsell Train Investment Trust taking pole position and F&C Global Smaller Companies pulling in second. Despite [...]
Life expectancy remains as uncertain as any other part of our future May 22, 2017 Life expectancies are constantly being revised upwards as extrapolation take the most recent data into account. Kevin Murphy, author on The Value Perspective blog, highlights how dangerous making predictions from such a short amount of data can be. Along with taxes, death is famously supposed to be one of life’s two certainties – and yet [...]
Which UK stock market sectors have performed best over two decades? May 19, 2017 | City Talk When the stock market rises and falls the sectors within it can move very differently, especially in the short-term. Perhaps the best example was the dotcom boom and bust, when technology shares soared in 1999 and then spectacularly crashed in the three years that followed. A balanced and carefully managed portfolio can ease the impact [...]
The calmest markets in 20 years – and why that should make you nervous May 18, 2017 | City Talk There are very few times in history where markets have been more calm. Andrew Williams, author on The Value Perspective blog, highlights why this should leave investors deeply concerned. It may have become a cliché to describe the world as an uncertain place – especially over the last year or so – but clichés are [...]
The unusual case of the cheaply valued share buyback May 15, 2017 | City Talk In theory, companies should only buy back their own shares when they're cheap, but this rarely happens. Andrew Lyddon, author on The Value Perspective blog, highlights a case where it has. The share buyback can be a beautiful thing – at least in theory. The idea is that a company buys back some of its [...]
A political checklist for stock market investors May 12, 2017 | City Talk Brexit, Trump and European elections all had the potential to cause chaos in the stockmarket. Yet investors have remained calm. What next? How markets have responded to elections When global equities fell 7% in the days following the UK’s European Union (EU) referendum, it appeared that the tone for markets may have been set for [...]
This is the ‘inconvenient truth’ about investing May 11, 2017 | City Talk No matter how much some investors might wish it was not so, the biggest driver of whether or not you make money as an investor is the price you pay for an asset, says value blogger Andrew Evans. On The Value Perspective blog, we appreciate not everyone shares our conviction that the biggest driver of [...]