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Company Results – Alliance Trust, LSE and Whitbread

This morning Alliance Trust announced their results for the year ending December 2015. This company has been the subject of a campaign by ShareSoc (see https://www.sharesoc.org/alliance.html ) and Elliott Advisors were also aggressive in demanding changes before Alliance's last Annual General Meeting but then committed to a truce for one year. Subsequently the Chairman Karin Forseke and Chief Executive Katherine Garrett-Cox have departed and the board has otherwise been restructured. This followed some years of underperformance which resulted in a wide ...

Fundsmith Annual Meeting – Another Good Performance

Last night was the latest annual meeting for investors in the Fundsmith Equity Fund. It was another good performance by Terry Smith on the night, and of course a good performance by the Fund itself was reported. It achieved a return of 15.7% last year (year ending December 2015) which was way ahead of any global fund index you care to choose. A lot of stock picking investors did well last year, but how many also have achieved 4.7% in the ...

London Stock Exchange – Deutsche Börse Merger, and Brexit

More details were announced this morning of the proposed merger between the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Deutsche Börse. Is this really a "merger of equals", as it is being promoted, because such things are very rare in practice? Deutsche Börse has a larger market capitalisation and their shareholders will end up with 54.4% of the combined group. We now learn the group will be domiciled in London but will have headquarters in both London and Frankfurt with listings on both the ...

Earthport Hit By Apparent Fraud

I covered the position of Earthport (EPO) in the last ShareSoc Informer Newsletter in an article under the headline "Can these real dogs recover?". The article covered several companies where profits had been negligible over the years resulting in investors becoming disillusioned but there were some signs of improvement. I said in concluding about Earthport (Monitise and Tungsten were the other companies) that "it's fair to say that investors are losing confidence in Mr Uberoi (CEO) and are concerned about the ...

The Non-Financial Reporting Directive

While the debate over the EU and its bureaucracy is so topical, it's worth taking a look at the latest public consultation on an EU Directive that needs to be implemented into UK law. This goes under the snappy title of "The Non-Financial Reporting Directive". It's primarily about how companies report information to their investors and to the wider public on their strategy and operations - typically in their Annual Reports at present. There is already a requirement in UK company law to ...