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The Sun will shine on shares again
You might have heard that there was a total eclipse of the Sun over the Australian mainland last week. Indeed, you might even have been one of the tens of thousands that crammed into Far North...
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Minding our own business on executive pay
The Financial Review’s survey of executive pay makes interesting reading again this year. One of the most notable things to come out of it is that for the first time in a decade none of Australia’s...
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‘15,568 days to the end of oil’
‘Oh my goodness,’ exclaimed my wife, ‘there are only 15,568 days left till the end of oil.’ We had just entered the ‘ecologic’ section at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and in front of us was a crumpled up...
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CBA, Telstra, JB Hi-Fi get reporting season underway
Get ready folks for the greatest show on earth. Twice a year, around the second full moon following the solstice, they start to appear early in the morning, first in ones and twos, but eventually...
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Get over it Warren and pay a dividend
Warren Buffett doesn’t want to pay a dividend – geddit? The Sage of Omaha devoted almost three pages of this year’s shareholder letter to an uncharacteristically dry explanation of his dividend policy...
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Spain’s answer to Warren Buffett
We hear a lot about famous American value investors (Graham, Buffett, Schloss, Lynch), the odd Brit (Slater, Templeton) and even the occasional Aussie (Maple-Brown) or South African (Neilson), but it’s...
View ArticleSic Pig brings euro train wreck closer
Maybe people thought it was too small to matter, or just that it didn’t fit in the famous PIIGS acronym, but Cyprus has stayed very much on the periphery of investor consciousness during the euro...
View ArticleCentral banks should come clean: money printing is forever
The sharemarket is seeming to suggest that the worst of Global Financial Crisis 2: Sovereign Debt is over, but if Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is right in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, we’re not out of the...
View ArticleWild punt – or a careful speculation?
Anyone who knows me will know that I live and breathe the value investing philosophy: of careful analysis, margins of safety, circles of competence and investments rather than speculation. But anybody...
View ArticleMagellan backs Microsoft
Microsoft, once the doyen of the tech sector, has had a rough old time since the sector blew up a dozen or so years ago. After its share price peaked at around $57 (adjusted) in December 1999, it...
View ArticleTablets to overtake PC shipments
At current rates of growth and decline, global tablet sales will overtake sales of PCs some time around September 3 this year, at about 6 o’clock in the morning AEST. That’s not bad for a product...
View ArticleInvest in airports not airlines
If you want to make a small fortune farming, the saying goes, you need to start with a large one. Racehorses and football clubs can achieve the same result with ruthless efficiency, as Nathan Tinkler...
View ArticleBuffett says stocks are cheap (or at least they were in the 1950s)
I recently came across an article written by Warren Buffett wrote for Fortune magazine in 1977, titled ‘How inflation swindles the equity investor’. In the article Buffett explains how the high...
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Is Masters going places?
A quiet day in the Masters car park As mentioned in today’s Stock Take podcast, after last week’s update on Woolworths (see Woolies under the hammer), and following a shaming on our Ask the Experts...
View ArticleSteer clear of the sharemarket crowd
In the context of human evolution, going along with the consensus has generally been the smart move. For one thing, the majority opinion – in terms of such things as where the food was and when the...
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Big banks brought to book
Probably the simplest valuation tool in the investor’s toolkit is the price-to-book ratio. You get it by dividing the total value of a company’s shares on the market (its market capitalisation) by the...
View ArticleSelling out on Rudd and McMillan
It’s a standing joke that any time a stock falls for no obvious reason the newspapers label it ‘profit taking’, but it’s hard to see today’s 3% fall in McMillan Shakespeare as anything else. As we...
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