Welcome to my blog

Financial analysis and non conformist thoughts from Bruce 

16
Mar
2023

Value Trapped

I’ve gone into podcasting, with Mark Simpson of Excellent Investing fame.  We decided to call the podcast ‘Value Trapped’ as a pun.  A ‘Value Trap’ is an investment that has alluring numbers, for instance a low price/earnings multiple, maybe a high dividend yield – the numbers are very attractive.  Then it turns out that there is more going on, the...
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4
Dec
2022

Food capitalism

Many years ago, while skiing in Chamonix I met a dreadlock haired, weed smoking snowboarder.  He was somewhat paranoid and full of conspiracy theories, suspicious of anything that was too mainstream.  He enjoyed music like this. He claimed that marijuana and psychedelics were not addictive. Governments knew this, but greatly feared these drugs were harmful anyway, because they encouraged people...
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30
Dec
2021

Money stays the same

I haven’t post much on this blog this year. That’s partly because I have been writing financial analysis to showcase the features and benefits of Sharepad. My original intention of the blog was to look at financial language, and try to assess it using Natural Language Processing, to make qualitative assessments of how management communicate with their investors. I still...
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30
Aug
2021

Making a market in disputes

I’m interested voluntary disclosure, the information that company management choose to reveal to shape a narrative, not the numbers that they are obliged to report by regulations.  I think Burford, the litigation funder is a fascinating case study.  First some context on litigation finance to understand what Burford does, then the story it’s trying to tell, including why last week’s ...
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31
May
2021

The Bees

For the first time since the 1940s Brentford FC have been promoted to play in the Premier League. I’ve been a Brentford supporter since being taken to the games as a 5 year old by my father, and I was even the team mascot one weekend. The club’s former ground Griffin Park, where I watched my first matches had a...
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5
Apr
2021

Greek (names) bearing gifts

Like most people, before last weekend, I’d never heard of Bill Hwang or Archegos. The name of his hedge fund that is now making headlines for spectacularly blowing up just doesn’t make much sense to me. Names are not just names, they come with an explanation or a story. For instance David Einhorn’s Greenlight  (because his wife gave him the...
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2
Mar
2021

The lowest risk bank on the LSE

Compared to even 5 years ago, there are some really excellent online resources for UK investors. Of course there is Sharepad (which you can subscribe to through this link here)  Another one is Mello Events, where David Stredder asks interesting companies, fund managers and other speakers to talk about investment. The evening finishes with a semi-competitive “BASH” (Buy Avoid Sell Hold)...
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7
Feb
2021

The original Q

I’ve been reading Bellingcat’s timeline analysis of QAnon and I was reminded that before QAnon, there was Q – standing for Quelle (source in German). Q is a source of sayings that appear in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. From this 19th century Theologians deduced that there was another source “Q”, which both writers were...
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26
Jan
2021

A compound interest parable

A friend asked me to help her calculate the cost of her pension (over 2% per annum).  I did a quick =FV(expect return %, number of years, annual payment amount) in Excel, showing the effect of a 7% CAGR falling to 5% CAGR over 35 years.  I then told her the cumulative absolute amount of costs, rather than the 2%...
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