2015 has got off to a volatile start for stock market investors, with the tumbling price of oil piling on the uncertainty. Stuart Rhodes, the manager of M&G's Global Dividend Fund offered up a candid assessment of his fund's underperformance last year, with the oil price being a major factor. This week at Stockopedia we had a look at some of the main dividend payers in the sector to see which might be most at risk of cutting payouts.
Elsewhere, one of our favourite investment gurus, Jim Slater wrote in the Telegraph about his current affection for investment opportunities in the United States. On that subject Andrew Lyddon at The Value Perspective took a look at some of the CAPE valuations of world stock markets. He found that while the US certainly looks fully valued, 'there will inevitably be a few cheap gems hidden amongst everything else'.
As an aside, it has been around a while but this video by Ray Dalio of investment firm Bridgewater Associates is an absolute must for anyone who really want to know How the Economic Machine Works.
Meanwhile, Lee Wild at Interactive Investor picked up on JP Morgan's 10 highest conviction trades and had a look at the valuation of sportswear retailer JD Sports. Stockopedia's resident small cap specialist Paul Scott gave a detailed assessments of the latest figures from the likes of e-invoicing company Tungsten and lighting specialist Dialight, among others.
At Stockopedia we've long been cautious of listening to everything that brokers have to say. So it was interesting to read this article by Brett Arends at MarketWatch on how a portfolio of the stocks most hated by Wall Street analysts beat the overall stock market by a wide margin last year. Talking of stocks that analysts love to hate, there was also some interesting commentary in the FT about how the fall of Tesco shows how free markets reliably dethrone the dominant.
Investment management firm Robeco are relentless in their studies of factor-based investing principles, which chime with a lot of our own philosophies. This week Eric Falkenstein presented some ideas about why, at a theoretical level, the finance profession – indeed, the whole field of economics – has yet to really digest the importance of the…
