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High Pay Centre Launch Fat Cat Competition

Post Date: February 6, 2015

The High Pay Centre have launched a competition to emphasise the huge amounts now paid to the Chief Executives of large public companies. It's called the Fantasy Fatcat competition and you can enter it here: http://highpaycentre.org/fantasy-fatcat . All you need to do is predict which CEOs will have raked in the most money and which bank will have the biggest team of bankers sucking the most cash from the casino economy. You have £35 million to spend to pick 5 CEOs and ...

Beating the index – Fundsmith results and newsletter

Post Date: February 2, 2015

Terry Smith has recently issued his annual newsletter to investors in his Fundsmith Equity Fund. Those who invested primarily in UK focussed index trackers last year (FTSE-AllShare down 2.5%) will be possibly annoyed to discover that Mr Smith managed to achieve a total return of 23.3% last year. He had the advantage of being invested in global equities perhaps which generally did better than UK stocks, but he still managed to outperform his benchmark which is the MSCI World Index. How did ...

ScS Group listing – a pre-pack phoenix relists

Post Date: February 2, 2015

Upholstery and flooring retailer ScS Group Plc (SCS) joined the main market of the LSE on the 28th January. At the placing price of 175p the market cap was £70m. Now you may recall that this company used to be listed a few years ago, but went into administration in July 2008. It's useful to look back at what happened then and at some aspects of the current business in case you are considering an investment in the company. In 2008 the ...

HSS Hire and other IPOs

Post Date: January 27, 2015

I am sometimes accused by my wife and colleagues of being a "wet blanket". In other words immune to the excitement of new ventures or ideas. But when it comes to IPOs that's probably the right frame of mind to have. I shall proceed to throw some cold water over the IPO of HSS Hire which is listing in early February if all goes according to plan - the prospectus for which is now available. Academics Elroy Dimson and Paul Marsh have recently ...

Monitise crashes to earth

Post Date: January 23, 2015

Monitise made an announcement yesterday (22/1/2015) that prompted the share price to crash. It's 14p at the time of writing when it had been over 60p earlier in the year, and had been declining steadily over recent months. Questor in the Daily Telegraph said on the following morning that "A buyer may come out of the woodwork but we recommend taking what you can - Sell". One cannot be blunter than that. The company announcement indicated that revenue growth will be flat ...