In my youth I used to come back from overseas investment research trips brimming with new ideas and insights. Having spent much of the period since the superlative UK Investor Show in the US of A I would hope to be able to say that opportunities are a-plenty. But they are not. Here’s a few of my notes from speaking with global investors far cleverer / richer than me at a conference in California a few days ago:
With the year 2014 complete we now turn to think what it may mean for HSBC (HSBA) and the results to be published early in the New Year. A glance at the charts suggests – from the perspective on a one year view – that the shares are perhaps are towards the bottom of a sideways trading range in which the share price has found support at around 590p and a potential., imputed possibility of it getting back up to 640p or so in due time.
What first attracted me to HSBC (HSBA) as a tip of the year? The fact that I knew how cold and ruthless it could be. I have a certain amount of ‘inside information’ on this. When you look at HSBC... there is often something quite clinical about it. My sister has a bank account with HSBC... you would be hard pressed to easily find that it pays no interest at all. “This account pays no credit interest” it says in the small print. However, if she went overdrawn she’d be charged around 18% every year.
Season’s greetings share selectors. HSBC (HSBA) is going to be one of the shares to buy for 2015. As you know, I already hold shares in “The World’s Local Bank” and intend to at least hold throughout 2015, and maybe even add to them.
I’ve taken a while to absorb the HSBC (HSBA) Q3 results. It’s interesting to see how the market reacts a while after publication.
So Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC (HSBA) was pulled before a House of Lords committee to talk about the bonus cap enforced by the European Union. He didn’t like it: "We're an industry that's well paid but so are other industries. When you ask someone in the technology industry to join for cyber risk and say 'you'll be paid in seven years' they'll decline to consider it."
Peter Lynch’s ‘final checklist’ for selecting shares in One Up on Wall Street makes interesting reading. I’ll aim to pick out tips which haven’t been mentioned explicitly so far.
Shares in HSBC (HSBA) are currently trading at 657.8p, offering a yield of 4.59% and on a PE of 12.89. So are the shares a buy, sell or hold?
Hello Share Crunchers: It's not often I'm right. No shame in admitting that. We only have to be on the button 55% of the time to become very rich in the golden game. However, I have been lucky enough to be correct about the present mini recovery. If you had sold all your shares by following the sentiment of a bevy of bears on this outstanding website, you would sadly have lost a bag of money.
One of the great strengths of HSBC (HSBA) has always seemed to me the nature and depth of a well rooted banking culture which goes back to beyond the banking crisis that emerged and the end of the first decade of this century. It grew, I have always supposed, out of a conservative management style years ago, which watched capital ratios in a way that was necessary when your operations were on the other side of the world and your operating offices were not somewhere in the City of London.
Hello Share Shakers: The banks have had a hard time of it. Yes, I know that's a kind way of putting it. No sooner do they overcome one set-back than the next one raises an ugly head. At the moment, the big worry is that some overbearing authority will bang in another ludicrously big fine.
Banks are subject to an imperishable law of banking existence. That is to say, that just when you think you have seen the last of the bitter fruit of their earlier misdeeds another lot come along. Was it Bertrand Russell who observed that when you are waiting for a number 11 bus for a rather long time, three turn up at once? Or was it a bus inspector? It was certainly William Shakespeare who said that ‘troubles when they come, come not as single spies but in battalions.’ Except, in the case of bank troubles, the battalions keep on coming. Just you think you have seen the last march by, another one appears over the horizon.
What a terrible set of Q1 results from HSBC (HSBA). The company reported profit before tax and earnings per share both down 20%; sales revenue down 8%. Even the bank’s estimated underlying figures were no joy: pre tax down 13%! Jeepers, creepers! But hold on, my dear Watson the share price at 593p closed the day down only 0.45%. So what is afoot?
There are banks and banks. One should never forget that HSBC (HSBA) is one that sailed through the banking tsunami under its own steam without the direct tax payer assistance; a tribute to its strong traditions and culture about the importance of capital.
Hello Share Fans: The big UK banks keep on dropping. Well, maybe not all of them. The Honkers Bankers (HSBA) reported some good figures on Monday – and the shares duly rose between 2 and 3 per cent.
The market’s reaction to the recent set of interim results from HSBC (HSBA) was a bit ‘sniffy’; seemingly disappointing and not quite good enough! In any event the price has come down from 760p.
Describing yourself as the world's best anything can very often the kiss of death in terms of reputation, if nothing else It would appear that for HSBC, the world's local bank, a series of scandals and mishaps, have ended up in fines and red faces which continue to bite the banking group in the posterior, both fundamentally and otherwise.
The two big relative attractions of HSBC (HSBA) as a bank are its recent historic steadfast holding to its culture and its subsequent capital strength. The culture enabled it to steer the ship without tax payer help through the storm of the banking crisis.
HSBC (HSBA) performed strongly throughout the great banking collapse of the first decade, of the twenty first century like a good deed in a naughty world by hanging on to much of its custom, practice and culture, when other banks were swapping their dull conservative garb for emperor’s new clothes. Chief amongst the traditions kept by HSBC was a miserly Scottish grip on capital. A lucky break for HSBC shareholders and a lucky break for UK tax payers. In the bankers’ gospel does it says: ‘blessed are they who employ sufficient capital for they shall inherit the earth’. And that is pretty much what we see in these results for the year to 31 December 2012.
