Professor Glen Arnold

Dewhurst, a Buffett-style share in my portfolio, has reported a very pleasing steady improvement in its businesses in this week’s preliminary results – I’ll post a report putting that in context next week. Also Titon, already my best performer, reported a terrific 48% rise in earnings per share in its prelims published today. I’ll write […]

Warren Buffett may have been wary of buying minority stakes in the Go-Go stock market of 1968-9 but he was excited by the prospect of picking up majority shareholdings in brilliantly organised businesses. After all, he had already experienced very pleasing outcomes from the purchases of National Indemnity (Newsletters 15th – 20th Oct) and Associated […]

Warren had already told his investors (October 1967) that he could not go on living the way he was, obsessing over achieving returns through share picking. The market had gone nuts, and besides, he wanted to switch emphasis to working on a day-to-day basis alongside people he liked, trusted and admired in companies that he […]

Warren was so fed up with the new-era investing approach adopted by others in the market and the scarcity of bargains in 1967 that he penned a few sentences which came as a bombshell to his partners: “When the game is no longer being played your way, it is only human to say the new […]

MS International (LSE:MSI) operates in three distinct markets, 1.Defence – selling naval guns, etc. around the world; 2.Forgings – making forks for fork-lift trucks; 3.Petrol Station Superstructures – making petrol station forecourts, etc. (See my Newsletters dated 18.7.15 – 15.7.15 for background) Since my July purchase at 186p the shares rose to 220p, but the […]

In the late 1960s Warren was searching for both quantitative bargains and companies with excellent qualitative features. But, in 1967, he was having great difficulty finding them. He was stymied by the weight of speculative actors moving the market. He is fed up with the fashion for speculation. There were millions of people now punting […]

If you are interested in TClarke you really ought to listen to an interview with the CEO and CFO. Paul Scott, a regular contributor to ADVFN bulletin boards (PaulyPilot), with a particular focus on value investments, conducted the half hour interview yesterday, and kindly made it available to us all http://qualitysmallcaps.co.uk/ The main points that […]

I’m sorry to report this, but there are no net current asset value shares meeting the criteria – now I’ll search the market for cyclically-adjusted price earning ratio bargains. Until such time as I find one I’ll discuss more of the Warren Buffett story. We are still in 1967-8. Growing from the Graham root The […]

Warren was so irritated by the market’s odd behaviour in the late 1960s that he wanted to get across the point that the market can do some strange and irrational things. It cannot, therefore, be predicted over short periods, meaning months and even years. In his July 1966 letter to partners he repeated that he […]

I’ve searched the entire market for net current asset value investments. It’s not looking too hopeful as only four were shortlisted for further investigation. If one of them does turn out to be worth investing in I’ll write about it next week. In the meantime here is some more of the Buffett story – timeless […]