Retail stocks like Marks & Spencer (LON:MKS) can often be very difficult ones for long term investors because they operate in fiercely competitive environments in which previously established advantages can rapidly erode. The most obvious recent example of this is with Tesco. It wasn’t so…

In general the pub industry is a pretty tough one to be in for long-term investors. Not only are many of the pub companies totally hobbled by the silly levels of debt they took on before the 2007 financial crisis, but the industry itself is facing secular…

On a purely qualitative basis there’s a couple of reasons why you might consider a long-term investment in supermarket giant Sainsbury’s. The first is that with around 150 years on the clock it undoubtedly has a long history of continuous trading. When you consider that well over forty of…

Usually when you’re after a reliable income generating stock one of the core desirable characteristics is a long history of stable operations and dividend payments. Apply that to a long-term orientated portfolio of UK dividend payers and it would lead you to the usual suspects such as Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, Imperial Brands,…

From a shareholder’s perspective the performance of PepsiCo stock over the last decade is worth studying for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it encompasses a period in which the start and end valuations aren’t wildly different; freeing us from the effects of a changing valuation multiple…

In the early days of the oil price slump there’s a good chance you’d have pegged BP as being the weakest of the oil majors in terms of dividend safety. Not only had the company failed to post enough free cash flow to cover the dividend in three…