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50 Years at Berkshire Hathaway – Warren Buffett’s Annual Report

Warren Buffett is widely viewed as the most successful investor in modern times, primarily because of his consistent record in outperforming market indices. His Berkshire Hathaway investment vehicle is the largest conglomerate in the world as he holds not just stakes in publicly quoted companies but a wide range of wholly owned operating companies. He has recently published the latest edition of his annual letter to investors and as usual there are some pithy comments in there from which everyone can ...

Olympus – A $1.7 Billion Dollar Fraud

One of the best television programmes on business matters was surely the recently broadcast documentary on the fraud at Olympus (BBC TV 4 Storyville under the title "A $1.7 Billion Dollar Fraud" - available on I-Player for the next few weeks). This was the story of Englishman Michael Woodford who was made President of Japanese public company Olympus Corporation, a large manufacturer of optical equipment (revenue $10 billion and 40,000 employees).  Although he had worked for the company for many years, he ...

Fundsmith Equity Fund Investors Meeting

Last night (3/3/2015) Fundsmith held its Annual Meeting for investors in London. It was a full house at the venue - about 300 people I would estimate. Terry Smith the fund manager did most of the talking and he is of course a good speaker. The format was very much like Warren Buffett's meetings for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders with questions having to be submitted in advance, and some clearly being rhetorical ones asked by the faithful as many investors will have ...

Moneysupermarket.com Results and Parliamentary Criticism

It was interesting to listen to the Preliminary Results on-line conference call of Moneysupermarket.com this morning.  The results were positive and better than analysts' forecasts but the interesting bit came in the question/answer session. Top marks though to the company for making the call freely available. Revenue of the company rose 10% and adjusted earnings per share were up 14%. The dividend was also raised by 10%. The company also noted that trading was strong in the first two months of this ...

Rensburg AIM VCT to Wind Up

Four years ago ShareSoc ran a campaign to shake up the Rensburg AIM VCT which historically had given a dire investment performance and had very high management fees. These things were changed but it still has the same Chairman, Richard Battersby, and other directors. We did question at the time what the future of the company might be because the company tended to return any cash from investment realisations to shareholders thus effectively gradually winding down the size of the company. The ...