Professor Glen Arnold

Daejan (LSE:DJAN) was originally a plantation company with estates in the Dutch East Indies.  It was badly damaged by insurgency in the late 1940s/early 1950s. By 1959 it was a dormant shell company into which Osias Freshwater reversed his property empire. Osias was born in Poland in 1897.  In 1939, leaving his wife and children […]

I’ve bought Daejan (LSE:DJAN) for my modified price earnings ratio portfolio. It has two outstanding virtues. First its shares, at my buying price of £52.90, are merely seven times earnings per share when EPS is averaged over the last decade. Second, its net assets are worth £120 per share, thus it stands on a discount […]

I journeyed from Leicestershire to Swindon on Friday to attend Connect Group’s (LSE:CNCT) annual shareholders’ meeting. It was worth it. I was able to spend a considerable amount of time chatting with directors before and after the meeting, and the formal questions asked in official meeting were both welcomed and answered with as much openness […]

Character Group (LSE:CCT) operates in an industry with exceptionally high rates of return on capital employed (often over 30% pa). The firm also possesses some competitive advantages such as unique brands and licenses which help it to maintain high rates of returns. Both industry economics and  company-specific extraordinary resources, combined with competent management, produce good […]

The last newsletter looked at the toy industry as a whole and concluded that there are sound reasons for the documented high returns on capital employed. But industry analysis is only the first step. We need to examine Character (LSE:CCT) to see if it has any extraordinary resources allowing it to sustain high rates of […]

Character Group (LSE:CCT) is a toy-idea company: coming up with designs for new toys; striking deals with franchise owners (e.g. Disney); arranging out-sourced manufacturing, and; supplying retailers and consumers. There are a few companies with similar business models in the world. The four biggest are Lego, Mattel, JAKKS and Mattel. I’ve looked at their annual […]

This designer and distributor of toys has produced very high profits over the last decade relative to its share price, and relative to its net tangible assets.  This gave Character Group (LSE:CCT) a cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio of 10.3 when I bought it in October (or 9.1 when using the earnings expected in 2020 […]

On Friday I travelled to London to attend Character Group’s (LSE:CCT) AGM, and to discuss some key issues with directors after the formal meeting. They were very generous with their time. Jon Diver, Joint MD, was willing to chat for half an hour after the meeting; Kiran Shah, FD, and Michael Hyde, MD for the […]

Wynnstay (LSE:WYN) has shown average conventional earnings of 29.3p per share over ten years. With the 19.7m shares it has in issue today if it earned 29.3p per share then that would be a total of £5.77m. If I was to assume that this will be the earnings attributable to shareholders and, importantly, available to shareholders to […]

Wynnstay (LSE:WYN) today is a strong publicly-traded corporation with turnover approach half a billion, profits of over £7m a year and a quotation on London’s AIM. But it started as a small cooperative in Powys 100 years ago dedicated to helping farmers; and that heritage feeds through into the culture and the objectives of the […]