magazine archive
magazine archive
Editor's View
Great start to the year for markets – where should you invest now?
Thursday 16 Feb 2023With markets having enjoyed a solid start to 2023, investors have become more optimistic about equities and bonds. While there are good reasons to be more upbeat, it’s important to understand what could go wrong as well as right in the months ahead. Markets are up because investors believe...
BT and Vodafone are both struggling to dial up growth – here’s why
Thursday 09 Feb 2023Here’s the good news for investors in Vodafone ( VOD ) and BT ( BT.A ) : over the past 20 years the pair have paid out a cumulative 362p combined in dividends per share. For someone holding 1,000 shares in each company the dividends paid add up to £1,682.90 for Vodafone and £1,992.30 for BT. The...
Broad parts of the market have rallied since October 2022 – can the good times last?
Thursday 02 Feb 2023On 6 October 2022, Shares wrote that it was time to start looking at small cap stocks again. The timing was impeccable, with this part of the market having perked up only a few weeks later. In the UK small cap investment trust space, Rockwood Strategic (RKW) has risen by 39% in value since our...
The real catalyst for the FTSE 100 to hit a new record high
Thursday 26 Jan 2023The FTSE 100 approaching a new record high puts the spotlight on UK stocks again. The index is full of shares which should thrive in the current environment – value stocks, energy producers, defensive sectors like tobacco and healthcare, and banks which benefit from higher interest rates...
ASOS turnaround? Don’t bank on it yet as one key indicator is still flashing red
Thursday 19 Jan 2023When a stock has collapsed in value it doesn’t take much good news for the shares to rebound, as witnessed by the performance of ASOS ( ASC ) . The key challenge for investors now is to decide if this is the start of a proper turnaround or just another unsustainable bounce. The fashion retailer...
Share prices jumping on job cuts: justified or not?
Thursday 12 Jan 2023It may seem odd that announcing job cuts is enough to drive up a share price. After all, the fact roles are being cut would imply that life isn’t going well for the business. However, this does happen, just as we saw with Amazon (AMZN:NASDAQ) earlier in January when its shares briefly rose on news...
Welcome to the third ‘sea change’ for investment markets in 50 years, says expert
Thursday 22 Dec 2022It’s fair to say that 2022 will go down in history as the year where investors’ portfolios were turned on their head. Many things that worked in the previous decade have become a drag on performance, most notably the large declines seen across mega cap US stocks including a 60% decline in Tesla (...
Are the worst performing sectors the best ones the following year?
Thursday 15 Dec 2022There is a widely held view among many investors that a successful investment strategy is to buy the previous year’s losers. The idea is that bad news might be fully priced in, and you’re paying a cheaper price to buy something that could rebound on good news. To test this theory, I looked at the...
Is it better to have conviction or hedge your bets when investing?
Thursday 08 Dec 2022It feels like we are once again on the cusp of change in the markets. Whether that’s a shift in central bank policy, inflation easing or a major development with the Ukraine war, there are plenty of levers which could put stocks on the move – either up or down. The difficulty is knowing which way...
Why it can pay to buy more shares if the market overreacts to bad news
Thursday 01 Dec 2022Overdramatic is the best way to describe the current market reaction to stocks that deliver the slightest bit of bad news. It certainly applies to Dr Martens ( DOCS ) whose share price fell by 23% in a single day after it guided for lower profit margins and a slowdown in growth for the direct-to-...