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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 ...

Affected by the Oil/Gas Price slump? Weir, Petrofac and IDOX

I don't think any investor will be unaware that the price of oil has fallen off a cliff in the last few weeks. It was good to hear at the IDOX AGM this morning (26/2/2015) that the impact on their business was relatively minor - they supply engineering management information software plus public sector software and the former does have about 11% of sales in the oil/gas sector. The share price barely moved after a positive announcement in the morning that ...