Good morning, it's Paul here.
After spending the whole day on Sosandar (LON:SOS) yesterday, I was too tired to write about any other companies. So I've got up early this morning, to catch up with yesterday's other news, to get you started today.
Retail sector
I'm not sorry if a few people think I focus too much on retail here. That's my sector specialism, so that's what I lean towards & have historically made my biggest profits. Surely it makes sense for me to write about things I'm interested in, and understand best? Anyway, that's not going to change.
Also, retail has actually been a good sector for investors very recently. Buying good quality, but bombed out retail shares just before Christmas is often a very effective strategy. The market always seems to panic that Christmas is going to be a disaster, but it always happens in the end, just a bit later each year. I think Black Friday has skewed things negatively too - as canny customers hold fire on purchases in the autumn, waiting for desperate retailers to offer pre-Xmas discounts. It's a daft American cultural import, which should be sent packing in my view!
There have been excellent share price recoveries recently in some shares, on the back of a late surge in retail sales. E.g. I flagged that Superdry (LON:SDRY) looked tempting value at 380p here on 12 Dec 2018. It's now 545p - a 43% gain in less than a month, for anyone bold enough to buy on the market over-reaction to its profit warning. Catching falling knives is so difficult though, and often results in losses.
BMUS - my public portfolio
Just to defend myself on another point! Recent criticism that my portfolio (BMUS) performance in 2018 was dire, whilst true, overlooks the fact that it was spectacularly good in 2016 & 2017. Overall then, BMUS is up 155% since inception on 1 Jan 2015. Not too shabby! That excludes dividend income too. I think you'll find that beats most small cap funds & guru screens, by a country mile.
There's only really one stock currently in BMUS which has gone wrong, which is MySale (LON:MYSL) . I haven't decided what to do…
