• Catching Up With The St. Agnes Stock Portfolio

    One reason I find Peter Lynch’s books so enjoyable to read is because they have thoroughly stood the test of time. There’s nothing like diving into stuff written thirty years ago and finding that many of the principles apply just as well today as they did back then. Take the St. Agnes portfolio for example. This […]

  • More On Millionaire Buy-And-Hold Investors

    While skimming through Christopher Mayer’s book – 100 Baggers: The Stocks That Return 100-to-1 And How To Find Them – I was pleasantly surprised to see that the case of Ronald Read got a pretty big mention. For those who haven’t yet heard Read’s story, he was another high profile example of a ‘secret’ buy-and-hold millionaire.

  • Stock Market Returns In The Great Depression

    A couple of things might strike you as counter intuitive about investing in the stock market. One is that groundbreaking new industries don’t necessarily equate to high shareholder returns. Another is that vastly different outcomes can occur from notionally very similar investments. Take Coca-Cola stock as an example of the latter. Back in the late-1990s there was […]

  • Investing Lessons From The Nifty Fifty

    An article looking at the extended bull market in consumer stocks appeared in The Telegraph recently. While high quality consumer stocks are certainly in vogue right now, that was not the most interesting thing about the piece. No, that distinction fell to the Nifty Fifty, which the author cited as an example of what happens when investing in periods […]

  • Stock Market Returns From The Crashes Of The 1920s

    There are three or four great stock market crashes that instantly stick out: The Wall Street Crash of 1929; Black Monday in 1987; the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000; and, of course, the most recent stock market crash in 2007/2008. I’d add a fourth to that list, which is the early-1920s depression. It […]