Last week Phil Oakley, who mainly writes for ShareScope/SharePad, published a very interesting article entitled “A Blueprint for Better Long Term Investing”. This described his investment style in essence and contained lots of good tips from an experienced stock market analyst. For example: “Focus on businesses not stocks”, “Don’t overpay for quality companies” and “Avoid information overload”. It’s well worth reading and is here in full: Oakley-Article
Experienced investor Richard Beddard also joined that company recently and published an article entitled “Shares to Hold to the Grave, and Beyond…”. Again it covers his investment style and how he analyses companies. It can be read in full here: Beddard-Article
As both of their styles are similar to my own investment approach, I thought I would have a stab at a similar type of article to cover my own investment style, particularly as there seem to be some popular misconceptions about it, and some misreporting on it of late. That is also a good starting point to some further plans for writing about stock market investment that I have. My article is entitled “My Investment Philosophy” and is present here: Lawson-Article
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
You say that you’ve beaten the all-share index, but it seems like a better comparison would be small-company funds. In my case I’ve felt that I don’t want to put the effort in to researching lots of companies so I’ve used the JPM Smaller Companies investment trust as my exposure to that part of the market – I bought at 208 in 1999 and the price is now 968, so about 11% a year including dividends which doesn’t seem too bad, and your 5.7 times over 19 years comes out a bit less …
The All-Share is the best benchmark because my portfolio includes both large and small companies. To focus solely on small caps, would increase the risk profile of my portfolio considerably. Smaller companies have done very well in the last few years but that is not always the case. Certainly if you don’t want to spend the time to research smaller companies, then a trust such as the one you mentioned is a good choice (as part of a portfolio).