investing etc. 0019

The joy of investing: Dunelm, Inchcape, Volution, PZ Cussons, Renishaw, FW Thorpe, Pets at Home, James Halstead, Meditations for Mortals.

It’s been a long month. Literally, a long month. October has 31 days!

My working life revolves around the first full week of each month. This is the busiest week because I have an extra article to write: The Share Sleuth portfolio update. In fact I have two, because once I have put Share Sleuth to bed, I write investing etc.

Share Sleuth is the axis around which everything else swings. I spend the month researching and scoring shares, then I trade in the Share Sleuth portfolio, then I go back to researching and scoring.

October had five weeks of researching and scoring, unlike September, which had four. It was a long month, but a joyful one.

The joy of investing

The joy of investing is something I’d like to write more about. There is a gap in the market. Most books on investing are dour, technical, worthy perhaps. 

But investing is no less joyful than any other activity.

I once owned a coffee table book called “For Love of Insects”. I had no love for insects before I read it, and I had no love for insects after, but I loved the beautiful and intricate science it described. 

I experience the joy of investing when everything fits together and I reckon I have identified a business worthy of investment: One that makes most of us, customers, suppliers, partners, staff, and shareholders, happy most of the time.

I feel it again when I come across these businesses in the wild, and they confirm my impressions.

For example we flew to Rome in October on Jet2, something of an ambition, and it really felt like the cabin crew had more time for us than our experience with other short-haul airlines has accustomed us to.

I experienced it again last week, when I noticed the complete works of Freud on display in a glass cabinet in Heffers bookshop. Bloomsbury, one of my shares, recently acquired the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield.

I may actually have punched the air, when I learned that technicians using a Renishaw spectroscope determined that Stonehenge’s altar stone came from Scotland and not Wales, as much of Stonehenge did. 

While Stonehenge may be the UK’s most famous Stone Age relic, everyone who has visited Orkney knows that its older and no less magnificent ruins have a strong claim to being a, or perhaps the, centre of the neolithic world.

Renishaw, a company more famous for making machines that automate factories, had played a bit-part in the movie of the archaeological part of my life (which resides mostly in my distant past!).

Investing makes the modern world more meaningful, in a similar way, I want to say, as observing or studying nature connects us more strongly with the natural world.

Research

• Asset managers, love them or loathe them (SharePad)
  Basically, they’re not for me

• “M” is for marmite, and market leader (SharePad)
  First look at Dunelm, second look at Inchcape

• Making money from clean air (SharePad)
  On becoming a fan of Volution

Score

• Is the game up for this risky small-cap? (ii)
  Too much going on at PZ Cussons

• An each-way bet on future of manufacturing (ii)
  Renishaw is growing even though it doesn’t look like it
  A top 3 stock with pristine finances (ii)
  All that stopped FW Thorpe getting full marks was the Budget

• Two new ideas for my stock list (ii)
  Head to head: Dunelm and Pets at Home 

• This profit machine must grow faster (ii)
  James Halstead: Show me the growth

Trade

• Performance over 15 years, and a share sale (ii)
  Unsurprisingly, PZ Cussons heads for the exit. With the help of a reader we document three indifferent years, nine great years, and three indifferent years.

etc. 

• Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals gently encourages us to put less pressure on ourselves. It’s the kindest of self-help books that asks nothing more than we take in its lessons. Reading it may have imbued this newsletter with more positivity!

• Having finished the meditations, I have yet to commit to another non-fiction book. I’ve been nibbling at John Kay’s The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century in Waterstones, and it is tastier than the title implies!

• Much like The Martian, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is an escape room drama in space, although this time it's interstellar and there is an alien bromance running through it. I’m sure the science is clever, but I’m mostly along for the ride.

• We ran Marathon Eryri (aka Snowdonia), the grandest of marathons. It was my tenth, and one of the better ones. I still run too fast in the first half, when I’m fresh and there is more downhill. Payback comes, when the climbing starts in earnest...

Here’s a gratuitous picture as I approach the High Street finish in Llanberis. I had left 99.999% of myself on the road and trail around the mountain. 

Thanks for reading

The next scheduled investing etc. should be with you on 7 December, at the end of that busy first week of the month.