by The Investor
on December 16, 2009
One way that foolhardy brave investors look to beat the market is by following the share trading of company directors in their own company’s shares.
Directors are not allowed to trade on inside information.
But they are arguably best-placed to read the runes about their industry, and to know how much their own confident talk is hot air, versus a hot tip.
At the very least, if the financial director of Widgets, Giblets and Co. is prepared to put £50,000 into shares of the company he manages, you can be pretty sure it’s not about to go bust.
Now academics have produced research that claims to prove that following director buying of Value stocks can indeed generate superior returns.
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by The Investor
on December 15, 2009
A reader emailed me yesterday thanking me for my overview of the ins-and-outs of absolute return funds, but wondering if I knew where they’d all emerged from.
As a long-time UK investor, “N.W.” said he’d heard similar promises from funds before, but he’d been struck by how both the term “absolute return fund” and advertising for such funds had proliferated in recent years.
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by The Investor
on December 12, 2009
My regular roundup of the week’s blog and financial site links.
I am going to start highlighting a blog post that made me think each week, followed by a quick personal response. I’d like to put the emphasis back on the excellent sites out there.
Wealth Pilgrim found out this week that his buddy doesn’t do the dishes.
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by The Investor
on December 10, 2009
A couple of readers have asked what I thought of the one-off levy on bonuses announced in the pre-budget report, given that I’ve advocated here and elsewhere a windfall tax.
To be honest it’s become such a mainstream topic that I wasn’t sure Monevator readers would want more opinion / hot air on the subject, especially as I have no special insight beyond common sense.
From the earliest days of the credit crisis I believed the financial services industry should pay a price for their collective greed and idiocy. That has happened, with companies like Northern Rock, Lehman’s, Merrill Lynch, and HBOS all going belly up, amongst many others.
I also wanted the culpable to pay on an individual level, and there’s far less evidence that this has happened.
From Fred the Shred getting his multi-million pound pay-off down to 28-year old traders on a million a year who loaded their banks up with lousy debt and have mostly been re-hired by rivals – even if they were booted out in 2008 – to take part in this year’s credit bonanza, most bankers haven’t done badly from the crisis at all.
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