Professor Glen Arnold

I bought MS International, LSE:MSI, a good old-fashioned British engineer, for my Modified price earnings ratio portfolio almost exactly two years ago. Since then the shares have hardly budged (up from 186p to 195p), but at least it has paid 8p of dividends. The value hidden here is still to become clear to Mr Market; it […]

I’ve bought put options priced at 180, expiring on the third Friday in December.   Perhaps I need to unwrap that a little. Let’s start with what a put option is: a right, but not an obligation, to sell the underlying at a fixed price at some point in the future or over a period of […]

Today I have done something I will very rarely do – perhaps only once in a decade – I’ve bet against an entire market. I must quickly add that I’m not pessimistic about shares everywhere; I continue to hold a portfolio of deep-value UK companies. I just want to hedge my overall position, protecting the downside […]

The half-way mark for the year seems like a good time to look at the performances of the shares I’ve selected since starting the Newsletters. (Some of you have joined us recently so, in case you are not familiar with them, I briefly describe the criteria for my portfolios following the portfolio performance tables.) The 2013 […]

N Brown (LSE:BWNG) focuses on selling clothes for bigger (20+ sizes) and older people.   It started with paper catalogues and still sells that way, but most sales today (71%) are through the internet.   It has 4.3 m registered customers. Its shares fell from £5.93 in 2014 to £3.10 today, giving a market capitalisation of £879m. In May […]

At last I have some money to spend on shares.  I analysed Braemar (LSE:BMS) in March and N Brown (LSE:BWNG) in May when I was skint, and thought they were both good value investments. Since then, unfortunately, Braemar has risen from 260p to 285p (9.6%) and N Brown a whopping 18% from 268p to 317p […]

Some people think that China is but a faraway place that could not have much effect on UK shares. But consider this: China is now the largest economy in the world; it has contributed the greatest part of world growth over the last ten years; its banks and its corporations are enormous, currently hoovering-up massive […]

As you know, I’m somewhat concerned about the over-extended US equity market. On Friday, to protect myself and to make a bit of money should Wall Street have a major downturn, I asked my broker to buy put options on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I went for the 17,000 put options (labelled 170) which […]

Some bubbles are caused by a widespread feeling that things are getting better, that an asset class, or many asset classes, are going to deliver terrific income flows to those who own them. So the mob descends, buying up those assets in a frenzy of common believe, whether caused by erroneous extrapolation, a grain of truth […]

Kindleberger and Aliber’s book “Manias, Panics and Crashes” describes dozens of booms and busts, and looks for common characteristics. In today’s newsletter I’ll start to summarise some of the most interesting bubbles to try to get a grasp of share market manias and crashes (rather than bank-led manias, property manias, commodity manias, or other types). […]