Professor Glen Arnold

A subscriber wrote the following: Hi Prof any recent thoughts regarding N Brown as the price has dropped to approx 94 now.Are you buying more ? I believe the drop was due to ASOS having a recent trading update which was not as positive as expected with uncertainites with consumer confidence . Thank you I wrote […]

Warren Buffett’s 1986 investment in Fechheimer Brothers, the uniform manufacturer, produced good returns for Berkshire in the early years (returning its investment in seven years through dividends and still holding 84% of the shares).  But with increased competition, and the conspicuous lack of publicly available information on profits in more recent years we have to doubt that […]

In 1987 Buffett dubbed Berkshire’s seven largest non-financial businesses the Sainted Seven.  They were, Buffalo News Fechheimer Kirby Nebraska Furniture Mart Scott Fetzer Manufacturing Group See’s Candies World Book These seven alone – leave aside Berkshire’s insurance subsidiaries and its stock market share investments – had combined operating earnings before deduction of...

Buffett and Munger are strong believers that companies should stick to their knitting, stay within their circle of competence, and not try to stretch themselves to expand into other product areas.  They should also be very careful about trying to replicate success in one geographical area by investing precious money to trying to attract customers […]

Yesterday’s newsletter reproduced the invitation Buffett wrote in his annual letter to Berkshire shareholders for company bosses to contact him to suggest that Berkshire buy most or all of their shares.  In reponse to that advertisement, long-time Berkshire Hathaway shareholder Robert Heldman, chairman of Fechheimer Brothers wrote (January 1986) to Buffett explaining that the company...

The Fechheimer case study in the chronicles of investing is unusual because Buffett and Munger chose to buy a controlling stake from private equity sellers who had acquired their shares in a leveraged buyout five years before.  These smart cookies cashed-out making a good profit.  While there are often good reasons for private equity players […]

Connect Group (LSE:CNCT) has not had an attractive-looking balance sheet for many years. It had/has very high levels of intangible assets, especially goodwill, due to paying excessive prices for acquisitions. Even after including those doubtful “assets” in its balance sheet it could barely report a positive net current asset value.  On top of that, it […]

In 2014 the big idea at Connect Group (LDSE:CNCT) was to diversify into parcel delivery and at the same time gain synergy with the early morning News Distribution business by buying Tuffnells for £139m. Here are the performance numbers for Tuffnells under Connect’s ownership – not pretty reading for shareholders who forked out £139m now that […]

The Dawson Media Direct, DMD, part of Connect Group (LSE:CNCT) supplies newspapers, magazines and in-flight entertainment technology to over 80 airlines at 115 airports in 47 countries. It has the systems to deliver these items to strict time windows, and, importantly, it has the necessary security accreditation.   Profits have been consistently good for this business […]

Connect Group (LSE:CNCT) has two businesses that produce profits and lots of cash flow year after year.  Smiths News has a collection of local monopolies delivering newspapers and magazines to newsagents. It has a rival at a national level, John Menzies, but these duopolists tend to stick to their own territories in allocating their vans – […]