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Renishaw Profit Warning

No sooner had I completed an article for the latest ShareSoc newsletter on the wisdom of fund manager Harry Nimmo, with whom I had discussed Renishaw at the Standard Life UK Smaller Companies AGM, than moments later the former company issued a profit warning. Yes Renishaw issued an Interim Management Statement this morning which indicated revenue for the 3 months ending 30th September would be down from £92.2m to £75.2m compared with the prior year. The Far East, specifically China, was particularly ...

Royal Mail flotation – private investors losing out both ways

Some ShareSoc members are very disappointed that they will not get any shares in the Royal Mail flotation because they subscribed for more then £10,000 worth. These are my personal comments: This seems to be discrimination against the moderately wealthy and those who just happened to have some spare cash in the bank.  Either everyone should have got the same allocation of £750 of shares, or there should have been a graduated scaling back. It's just illogical. What is being done is that ...

Abbey Protection – a lowball bid offer

  Abbey Protection (ABB) is an AIM listed insurance company with a current market cap of £115m. The shares have traded between 116p to 122p in the last two months, with a reasonable volume for an AIM company. But yesterday the directors announced a recommended cash offer of 115p per share for the company from Markel Corporation. This is a very unusual situation because usually there is a “bid premium” for control of a company. The market price was presumably what willing buyers ...

How to pick small cap stocks – just follow Harry Nimmo

Yesterday was the Annual General Meeting of Standard Life UK Smaller Companies Trust and those who like investing in small cap stocks would have found it useful to go along and learn from the master – fund manager Harry Nimmo. Gordon Humphries said that the company is basically “Harry’s 50 best ideas”, i.e. it’s a conviction portfolio but with no individual holdings allowed to go above 5%. It has a fairly low yield at 1.4% currently but that has grown at a ...

City of London Investment Group (CLIG) – a confusing AGM today

City of London Investment Group (CLIG)  – a confusing AGM today I’ll try to tell you briefly “the way it was” to paraphrase the CEOs introduction to his section of the Annual Report. A full report is available here. Barry Olliff is the CEO and this company has succession problems just like Carpetright which was covered in my last blog post. Likewise, they are back at square one after losing a new CEO appointed at the end of 2012, but who departed with ...