Weekend Reading 23 January

The decision by European central bankers to start quantitative easing was always a question of 'when' and 'how big', rather 'if'.

But while it was no secret that monetary stimulus was on the way, the QE news this week still created a pop for Continental shares - as this FTSE Eurofirst 300 chart shows.

It's certainly a much better result for investors than last week's mayhem caused when Swiss regulators abandoned their currency peg against the euro. John Authers in the FT had some interesting views on the Swiss debacle, as did David Merkel, who wrote about the risks of relying on the kindness of strangers on the Aleph Blog.

Q€ Stocks in focus…

At Stockopedia, we had a look at which of Switzerland's battered stocks might bounce back the quickest with some great insights from Ben Hobson. Many don't realise that we cover European markets in great detail with just under 10,000 stocks analysed - check out the coverage in the European Share Directory and upgrade your subscription if you want to take advantage of stock specific Q€ opportunities.

Pearson came under the spotlight in Fortune Mag this week with the title “Everybody hates Pearson". With a UK StockRank of 76, Pearson is in the top quartile of our ranking system. The press negativity hasn't impacted the Financial Times owner which has just rocketed out of a long chart 'base' to threaten it's previous 2013 highs.

We've written extensively on high yield strategies - and the famous Dividend Dogs approach to income investing. In our regular syndicated article for Interactive Investor, we gave the strategy another once over.

Active vs passive

“I come not to praise forecasters but to bury them." Barry Ritholtz didn't hold back in his deconstruction of market forecasters - and anyone else who professes to know what's coming in the future. Meanwhile, Vanguard's Chris Philip's presented the case for achieving above average investment gains simply by being passive (which is clearly the company line). A more detailed, indeed epic, analysis of active investing was offered up by the excellent Monevator. And talking of epic, company trading updates have been coming thick and fast this week, keeping Stockopedia's small-cap expert Paul Scott chained to his computer - Monday's marathon was mightily impressive.

We've been flagging Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Millennial Invest blog for a while now, and his post this week on the wisdom of Warren Buffett is certainly worth a read.

Comfort doing nothing...

Would you prefer an electric shock over the prospect of sitting quietly for 15 minutes? It turns out quite a few people would take the pain rather than do nothing… Schroders' Kevin Murphy on The Value Perspective picked up an interesting theme this week about how investors can be often be their own worst enemies. That links up nicely with a blog by Tom Brakke at The Research Puzzle on the risks of being overconfident as an investor. And that in turn leads handily to a view on the value of meditation and mindfulness by Tadas Viskanta at Abnormal Returns.

New features…

Ahead of a whole new Ranking feature area that we'll be shipping in the coming weeks, we've made a couple of incremental - but highly useful - additions for Stockopedia subscribers. You can now see which direction the individual Rankings are moving in - with arrows in the StockRank widget on each Stock Report. Plus, we've added StockRanks to the ChartSignals tool (Toolbox > ChartSignals) So it's now even easier to zero in on stocks that have fundamental as well as technical backing. You can read about the new features here.

Safe Investing!