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Whitbread AGM Report – More Fun Than Lloyds?

The Whitbread Annual General Meeting took place at Church House Conference Centre in Westminster on the 21st June. This was one of the few FTSE-100 AGMs I have attended where the Chairman seemed to pay good attention to the views of private shareholders rather than considering it a tedious 2 hours that had to be suffered. In addition shareholders (and I am a new one) could learn a great deal about the strategy of the company and its affairs from the meeting. ...

Cash or Shares. Which is Better?

An interesting article in Saturday's FTMoney (18/6/2016) by Paul Lewis suggested that you might be surprised to learn that if you had invested £10,000 in a cash account in 1998, you would have done better than investing in a FTSE-100 index tracker. It's surely odd for the Financial Times to persuade their own readers that cash is better than equities because a choice of cash might mean they no longer needed to read the FT - they could just use a ...

Where Bonds are Concerned, Trust No-One

The news that the holders of Lloyds bonds (ECNs) have lost their legal battle in the Supreme Court reinforces the message that when it comes to investing in bonds, you should trust nobody - not the issuer of the bonds, your friendly stockbrokers and wealth managers who advise you, or the FCA to protect your interests. The bondholders won their case initially in the lower courts, that Lloyds should not be able to force redemption of these bonds at par. But after ...

Berkeley Results, Pay, Brexit and AIM

We are now definitely in the usual summer doldrums in the market, compounded by the uncertainty over Brexit. It is obvious that private investors have been taking their money...

Final Call for London Seminar and Other ShareSoc Events

Company Seminar in London on the 22nd June Next Wednesday we have another of our seminars in the City of London at the offices of Finncap commencing at 4.30 pm. The companies presenting are: - Defenx (DFX) - Security software solutions which is certainly a hot area for investment at present. - AEW UK REIT (AEWU) - An interesting closed end commercial property fund. - Private & Commercial Finance (PCF) - consumer and business finance. Roger Lawson will also be talking about the ShareSoc campaign ...