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KIDS – Who Is Kidding Who?

Post Date: January 4, 2018

There was an interesting article published by Citywire yesterday on the subject of Hargreaves Lansdown removing 96 investment trusts from its trading platform. Such trusts as Dunedin Enterprise, Blue Planet and Oryx International Growth have been suspended. The reason is because they have not yet made available a “KID” (Key Investment Document) which is required by the new PRIIPS regulation and mandated by the FCA/EU from the start of this year (see https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/priips-disclosure-key-information-documents for more information). At present investment trusts are mainly ...

A Christmas Parable and Productivity

Post Date: December 24, 2017

No this is not an examination of how Santa Claus gets around the whole world in one night. But as my last post before Christmas, let me explain how I have automated the sending of Christmas cards over the last thirty years. I am by nature a lazy person, so handwriting and addressing the family’s Christmas cards was a task I chose to tackle with some automation many years ago. The first step was to put friends, family and business contacts ...

South African Politics, Pan African Resources and Mondi

Post Date: December 21, 2017

The election of Cyril Ramaphosa as the President of the ANC suggests that the country may be taking a positive step forwards. Under Jacob Zuma South Africa has become riddled with corruption and “state capture” where assets are sold off to favoured parties. Whether Cyril Ramaphosa can become President of the country in due course remains to be seen but it is worth looking at his background. He has a legal qualification and became a trade union activist. After being active in ...

LSE General Meeting and Blancco AGM

Post Date: December 20, 2017

I attended two company general meetings on the 19th December (I hold a trivial number of shares in each). Here’s a brief report on events, with the later one...

Investment Association Naughty Register

Post Date: December 19, 2017

I heard Chris Cummings(CC) CEO of the Investment Association on the BBC Radio 4 this morning launching their new naughty register. https://www.theinvestmentassociation.org/publicregister.html The interview went something like this: BBC Interviewer: "Would you have done it if the Government has not led this initiative?" CC did not say YES. CC said: "This was an industry led initiative." BBC: "Yes, but would you have done it if the Government has not pushed it?" CC again declined to say YES. I surmise IA was led kicking and screaming into this by the ...