Professor Glen Arnold

Imagine that you expect to buy something on a regular basis for the next couple of decades, say a Big Mac or golf club membership.  So the question is: would you prefer it if the purchase price fell or went up over time? Exactly.  You want prices to fall so that you gain the value […]

It is hard work being a true investor – so many things to analyse. This means you do not have time to waste on pointless activity. The vast majority of your attention must be directed to business analysis. As Peter Lynch said “Stocks are not lottery tickets. There’s a company behind every stock. If a […]

A golden rule of investing is to understand what you are buying. How can you possibly understand a company unless you spend time analysing it – looking at its strategic position, the quality of the managers, its financial position, and so on? Instead of that hard graft the inverted-commas-investors – who should really be called […]

Looking at some of my recent newsletters you may be getting the impression that you need to be a top-notch professional investor to out-perform the market. After all, you are required to be intensely curious about business, economics and world affairs, and be familiar with key accounting tools, finance, corporate strategy, and so on. And […]

John Templeton, one of the early pioneers of global investing, founder of the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 which grew into one of the most successful investment funds, once said that  “To be successful in investing, you have to keep changing your ideas all the time, more than once a year.”         .     […]

The market has been having a hard time of it recently. In 2022 the FTSE250 index of medium-sized companies fell 19%, followed by no return in the first quarter of 2023.  Fortunately, I guessed there might be tough times, and in February 2022 moved to 40% of my portfolio to cash, ready to deploy when […]

Perhaps you think the answer is ultra-high intelligence? Or extensive memory, or mathematical acuity? Or great knowledge of accounting, or economics, or corporate strategy? All wrong. All the maths you need for sound investment you learned by the time you were 10 – if you were paying attention! Peter Lynch observed: “People who have been trained […]

It’s often the case that investors buy into a company that has a terrific economic franchise, one that allows it can charge a premium price and achieve high ROCE, and then, a few years down the line profits start to decline. The world has moved on. Whether through technological change making competing ways of delivering […]

It seems that there are a lot of investors around who follow people like Warren Buffett into companies that have strong economic franchises. Indeed, they often buy-in years after Warren has bought. This seems particularly true of well-known consumer brand companies, e.g. Coca-Cola or Kraft Heinz. What they often forget to do is ask a […]

As you know, we value investors spend a tremendous amount of time trying to thoroughly understand the businesses we put money into. This has a number of aspects, including: . The quality of the business in terms of competitive/strategic positioning. Does it have any pricing power, something special that allows a good gap between costs and […]