Unlike April I've had a rather busy month on all fronts in May - so much for sell and go away. To a large degree this activity was stimulated the investor events that I attended. The key one of these was Mello London in Chiswick where I spent a happy two days listening to company presentations and learning from keynote speakers. As usual there was more happening than you could possibly take in (which is a big plus) but I enjoyed catching up with a number of interesting companies and posing questions directly to management - these are often more revealing than the presentations. On top of this Mello had some excellent speakers in the main hall with these ones being the highlight for me: Stephen English - Swiss Army Knife Investing, Judith MacKenzie - Importance of Corporate Governance, Richard Bernstein - Activism and Mark Crossman - Understanding Market Makers. Most of these will have been filmed by piworld and I recommend viewing when they're available.All in all Mello is a top-class event that's only getting better as it matures. I heartily recommend it to any private investor who fancies meeting like-minded individuals that won't fall asleep when you mention a P/E ratio.
Also this month I finally managed to attend the Financial Statements Seminar put on by Graham Neary. While I know my way around a balance sheet I decided to sign up because it's always useful to have a refresher and there are definitely gaps in my knowledge from learning this stuff piecemeal. Let me just say upfront that this was a great decision! It's clear that Graham has put an awful lot of work into this course in order to take you from the absolute basics to some quite sophisticated concepts. For me the really useful part was seeing how different sections in the accounts are interdependent and can only change in a balanced manner. Usefully the course contains lots of examples that you have to work through and this is far more useful than watching slide after slide. Suffice to say I think that this is a great investment and it should definitely pay for itself in the long run (and I'm not even being paid by Graham to say these nice things!).
Now Robbie Burns is not someone that I follow closely but it's hard to avoid the Naked…
