Over the past 10 years, I’ve learned a lot about the stock market and what it takes to start investing and successfully and build wealth. Most new investors trip up because they make some simple mistakes, which are quite easy to avoid if you know what to look for in the first place. However, if you don’t know what to look for, these mistakes could become costly learning experiences. With that in mind, here are my five simple steps to…
Investors currently have to grapple with one of the most uncertain investing environments in recent history. There are so many things going on right now it’s challenging to figure out which is the most pressing, especially from an investment perspective. The coronavirus is a global health emergency, and it has caused untold economic pain around the world. Brexit is also on the agenda once again. It’s looking increasingly likely that the UK and EU will fail to reach an agreement…
At the time of writing, the MSCI World Index is up around 21% from its March low. This performance has stunned analysts and investors around the world. It seems to me this is one of the most hated stock market rallies of all time. It is easy to see why analysts are skeptical. The global economy is reeling from the coronavirus crisis. While governments are doing everything they can to help businesses survive, surging levels of unemployment, rising corporate failures,…
According to Investopedia, 630,000 companies are traded publically on stock exchanges around the world. Of these, less than 5,000 trade on US exchanges and 2,080 are listed on the London Stock Exchange, which claims to be the world’s most international of global exchanges. With so many options out there, investors are spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing investments. But this level of choice is not necessarily a good thing. Most companies underperform Of the thousands of public companies…
Warren Buffett has been investing in stocks since his teenage years. Over the past seven decades, he’s bought and sold thousands of stocks across sectors and industries accumulating hundreds of billions of dollars in value for himself and his investors along the way. During his lengthy career, Buffett has become skilled at calculating intrinsic value, the underlying value of a business based on its fundamentals. Warren Buffett: Starting with the cash flow statement The exact process Buffett uses varies from…
Before he became Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger ran his own investment partnership where he established an impressive track record for himself. In fact, the Munger partnership performance earned him a place in Warren Buffett’s now-famous essay, The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville: “ … is the record of a friend of mine who is a Harvard Law graduate, who set up a major law firm. I ran into him in about 1960 and told him…
Over the past few decades, there has been a boom in demand for so-called “low volatility” stocks. These companies tend to be high-quality Consumer Staples, Heathlcare of Industrial names, like 3M Company or PepsiCo, Inc. However, in most cases, the boom in demand for these names has not matched their growth. As a result, we’ve seen historical valuation correlations between peer companies and relative valuation metrics breaking down as investors clamour to buy these stocks without considering the underlying fundamentals…
Real estate is a great way to build wealth, and owning property has made a lot of people a lot of money over the years. However, equity investing has yielded similar, if not better results over the years (although this varies from market to market and depends on which benchmark you use.) The one primary difference between real estate investing and equity investing, however, is liquidity. The liquidity issue It is very well known that investors are their own worst…
Since the mid-1950s, global indebtedness has exploded to record levels. At the beginning of 2019, the IMF reported global debt reached an all-time high of $184 trillion in nominal terms at the end of 2018, equivalent to 225% of 2017 GDP. On a per capita basis, the world’s debt now exceeds $86,000, which according to the IMF is “more than 2½ times the average income-per-capita.” Further data show that the private sector’s debt has tripled since 1950 making it “the…
Mohnish Pabrai is widely considered to be one of the best value investors managing money today. He runs the Pabrai Investment Funds, a group of hedge funds modelled on Buffett’s original partnerships. Returns since inception have been highly impressive. $100,000 invested with Pabrai on July 1, 1999 (inception) was worth $1,164,600 at the end of 2018, a compound annual return of 13.4% net of fees. I’ve learned quite a bit from reading and listening to Pabrai’s advice over the years,…