Good morning! I'm on a bit of a go-slow this week, so these reports seem to be evolving from about 10am. 

Although this Thursday's report will be early, because I'm off into London for the London Value Investor Conference - this is the Rolls Royce of value investing conferences, so I'm excited about attending - the speakers were literally world-class last year, and I'm sure they will be this year too. It's like having your value batteries charged up again once a year, and although it's expensive, is worth every penny in my view.

I shall be doing a couple of write-ups here about the most interesting talks, probably this coming weekend. For anyone interested, here is Part 1 of my 3 part series of articles from last year's conference.

 

 

 

 

Bloomsbury Publishing (LON:BMY)

I've been hovering around this share for at least a year now, with it never quite being cheap enough for me to hit the buy button, but coming very close several times. What put me off was a TV documentary I saw recently about how Amazon is not only dominating the retail of books & ebooks, but is now also beginning to dominate publishing too. Apparently people are often self-publishing through Amazon, hence it's difficult to see why traditional publishers are still needed.

The company put out a positive-sounding trading statement on 16 Jan 2014, and I recall almost buying some shares then, but a rather negative broker note issued at the same time put me off.

As a reader commented here recently, publishers might still be needed as aggregators of content, but having seen how cheap old economy stocks can get, such as Trinity Mirror (LON:TNI) hitting a PER of one in 2012, I'm reluctant to get involved again in any sector that apears to be in structural decline, as the market can be brutal in its valuation. It always pays to remember that market valuations do not have to be rational - they are just the balance of sentiment between buyers & sellers at any particular point in time. So valuations can & do become wildly irrational at times.

Anyway, BMY has today published its unaudited results for the year ended 28…

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