Education

FCA launches campaign on investment scams

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have launched a campaign to warn people about investment scams. They get about 5,000 calls a year from investors about suspected scams and the average investor loses £20,000. The FCA have launched a new web site called Scansmart (see www.fca.org.uk/scamsmart ) which enables you to learn about the warning signs and even provides a menu on which you can check the investment you are considering. The FCA gives the key signs that the investment may be a ...

The dangers of share tips – Naibu (NBU) and Monitise (MONI)

Well respected stock picker Simon Thompson had to admit defeat with Naibu in the Investors Chronicle on Friday (19/9/2014). This Chinese maker of sportswear has, on an earnings basis, been ridiculously cheap for a long time, but some investors liked the high dividend yield. Simon picked the company for his share pick of 2014 in the Investors Chronicle - he tipped it at 58p in February with these words: "It's not often you have the chance to buy shares in a ...

Cyber threats and how to avoid them

The International Organisation of Securities Commissions (Iosco) has warned about the growing threats of cyber attacks to financial institutions. The Chairman, Greg Medcraft, has warned that there needs to be a much more concerted effort to tackle such threats. For example disruption of a stock exchange for any length of time could have serious consequences. Securities regulators who are members of Iosco are seeing increased attacks with more than half of securities exchanges being the subject of one or more. The closure ...

Internet for Investors Course

Do you make the most of the internet when investing? Are your investments based on the most intelligent research and can you easily monitor them using the internet? Even if you use the internet extensively already, you might be missing out on many useful information resources.Our new training course entitled "The Internet for Investors" aims to improve your skills in this area. It will cover:News and alerting services.SharesSoc’s own websites and member network.Fundamental data & portfolio analysis sites (four sites will ...

What happens to bond prices if interest rates rise, and the latest Co-Op news.

If interest rates rise, what will typically happen to bond prices? That was a question posed to 30,000 US adults according to a report in the FT today. I would hope readers of this blog know the answer because it is quite important now that QE might be tapering off and interest rates rising. Only 28% got the answer right, which is of course that bond prices will fall. People buy bonds in the belief that they are “safer” than equities. It ...

How to pick small cap stocks – just follow Harry Nimmo

Yesterday was the Annual General Meeting of Standard Life UK Smaller Companies Trust and those who like investing in small cap stocks would have found it useful to go along and learn from the master – fund manager Harry Nimmo. Gordon Humphries said that the company is basically “Harry’s 50 best ideas”, i.e. it’s a conviction portfolio but with no individual holdings allowed to go above 5%. It has a fairly low yield at 1.4% currently but that has grown at a ...