Back in October I bought shares in Rolls Royce (RR), saw them ride up to over £10.50…and Monday – after another profits guidance warning – saw them back at the aforementioned c. £8 level. A true Grand Old Duke of York share: riding up to the top of the hill and then riding down again.
I am a strong believer in accountability and that’s why you will often find me referencing previous articles (good or bad) I have written on ShareProphets. Chemring’s (CHG) results stood out to me today as I have written before about the specialty defence company noting approximately a year ago at approximately the same share price that the share was worth holding.
Hands up if you know someone who is still crazy about loom bands? If I had asked that question a year ago I would have been inundated by parents bemoaning the hundreds of tiny plastic bands everywhere in their homes not to mention the number of ‘right on’ people actually wearing the luminous creations. But today? Tumbleweed…
My name is Chris, I am an experienced investor with years of successful institutional and personal investing behind m,e but I would like to confess guilty to the charge that I have made a bad call. I accept that the Sheriff of AIM in a rare cross-jurisdictional move into the Main Market is correct in his judgements in his generous oral testimony here.
The Depression era US President Franklin Roosevelt is probably not often mentioned on this site but his dictum that ‘there is nothing to fear but fear itself’ is inadvertently one of the best pieces of stock market advice you are likely to read. Let’s consider this in respect of some of Britain’s best loved bank shares Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds (LLOY).
The only story of real interest in UK larger cap shares today is a strategy update by the banking behemoth HSBC (HSBA) which has finally got some focus on what they it wants its business to look like in a few years time. I noted a little over a month ago that:
I read on the internet that ‘the Vodafone logo was designed in 1997 by Saatchi & Saatchi. The colour is red (Pantone 485)’. Well then yesterday there are Pantone 485 coloured faces amongst certain professional investors, as the FTSE-100 giant Vodafone (VOD) said in a regulatory statement today that it was ‘not in discussions with Liberty Global concerning a combination of the two companies’. At the time of writing this knocked a couple of percentage off Vodafone’s share price which now sits over five percent off its multi-year high of a week or two ago.
You have to be careful of trading rules because as soon as they become gospel they tend to not work. I have noticed however that when a stock is booted out of the FTSE-100 it often provides a buying opportunity. This is because in today’s panicky financial market world passive tracker vehicles, which mechanically buy or sell shares depending on inclusion (or not) in an index. Add in the impact of certain ‘clever’ fund managers attempting to anticipate this impact by selling before any such judgement and the quarterly index change period can throw up some opportunities.
