Professor Glen Arnold

I bought MS International (LSE:MSI) shares in July 2015 at 186p for my Modified price-earnings ratio portfolio.  Since then it’s paid 19.25p in dividends with another 6.5p due next month.  With the shares at £2.25 – £2.38 (market capitalisation £37m – £39m) it has produced a 35% return in three years. I also bought some […]

At last month’s Meeting in Omaha Buffett and Munger were asked their view on usefulness of what is conventionally taught about investing.  The questioner at the Berkshire Meeting asked: “Warren, you and Charlie have been critical of business schools in the past and what they teach. With respect to value investing, in “Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville,” […]

Connect (LSE:CNCT) has net debt of £83.6m, but continues to be profitable and has a healthy positive free cash flow. Today I’ll undertake Piotroski analysis for the half-year results to the end of February 2018 to examine a number of distress risk factors. But note, there has been a deterioration since February due to the […]

Connect’s (LSE:CNCT) Pass My Parcel idea seemed like a good one at the time – 5 years ago, when it was launched.  The idea is to offer companies such as ASOS and Amazon.com shipping of parcels to and from newsagents all over the country. Consumers can then pick up their purchases from a convenient local store. […]

On my way down to Braemar’s (LSE:BMS) AGM on Friday I re-read my newsletters on the company and its latest annual report.  I was agitated by the unhealthy tendency to emphasise “underlying” earnings, and for the company to have much higher underlying profits than statutory profits year after year.   This was disturbing.  I had not met […]

The managers who started off working for Smith News (later named Connect Group, LSE:CNCT) back on 2006 when it demerged from WH Smith could see that they were heavily dependent on the simple business of delivering newspapers and magazines to newsagents.  They thought it best to diversify, and to build an empire. They bought Bartrams […]

Yesterday’s Newsletter described the consistently strong, if not growing, profit contribution from the News Distribution business of Connect Group (LSE:CNCT).  Another profitable business, which Connect has run for years, is the supply of newspapers, magazines and in-flight entertainment technology to over 80 airlines in 50 countries under the Dawson Media Direct, DMD, name. It has […]

Connect’s (LSE:CNCT) managerial team came with the demerger of Smiths News distribution business from the WH Smiths group 12 years ago. Their expertise, honed over decades, is in efficiently gathering newspapers and magazines each day at its depots, and then sending out thousands of vans to deliver to newsagents up and down the country early […]

Last week I bought shares in Connect Group (LSE:CNCT) at 27.98p and 28.75p, (weighted average: 28.5p) for my 2018 Modified cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio portfolio.  This follows a precipitous fall in Connect’s shares from 104.6p, last September, when I first bought into this company – not my best bit of timing ever! But I […]

Buffett and Munger make it a policy to avoid a sense of hostility with the managers of companies they buy into.  A few months ago a bid by Kraft Heinz, which Berkshire Hathaway controls together with 3G, for Unilever was withdrawn because Buffett felt that the managers of Unilever did not want it to go […]