investing etc. 0021

Networking edition: What friends are for, Focusrite, Raspberry Pi, Treatt, Tristel, 5 Strikes, Decision Engine

As I walked back to the car park with some friends after running a parkrun last November, my daughter, knowing that I was home alone for the weekend, asked what I was going to do for the rest of the day.

“It’s funny you should ask,” I replied, knowing my answer would surprise everyone, “I’m going to program my Raspberry Pi Pico”.

A Raspberry Pi Pico is a microcontroller board. They cost about a fiver and you can wire them up to sensors, LEDs, switches, robotic components, displays and things, and program the ensemble to do pretty much anything.

My old friend Keith has rigged up a Pico to control his grandson’s model railway (we know it’s Keith’s really).

Keith lives a long way away these days, so he wasn’t with me at the parkrun. But the friends that were there looked at me as if I had said “I am going to have another crack at deriving the whole of mathematics from first principles”.

There is a good reason for their amazement. Cambridge is known for its university, and its technology cluster and most of my friends are technologists or educators or work in related fields. I am an outlier in this group.

A bidding war followed. Each friend dropping the job title of a senior person they know at Raspberry Pi, which is headquartered here in Cambridge.

Either their children go to the same school, or they are a neighbour, or they are a work contact. Naturally the winning bidder knows Ebon Upton the chief executive.

At the time I just thought it was a funny story, although I may have joked about sending them to fraternise with Raspberry Pi executives on my behalf.

But it got me thinking about informal networks of friends, runners, tennis players, mountain walkers, old school and work and uni mates, and family. Our investments mean we often cross paths with their careers.

One of the things I think about as I approach the beginning of my seventh decade (sounds a lot worse than it is, I am 58!), is staying young. Not literally obviously, I’m not that guy vampirically syphoning off his son’s blood.

I want to make sure my knowledge still reflects the world my children are inheriting.

I started dabbling with the Pico because I felt that I had become a consumer of technology, when once I actually knew a bit more about it.

But maybe I need not be too worried about obsolescence. Currently, it feels like I am going through a golden age when a lot of my friends are at the peak of their careers, my children and their friends are at the beginning of theirs, and I have a bit more time to mess around.

Christmas Day parkrun at Coldhams Common, Cambridge. Just look at that vast potential network behind us! Photo: Chris Worrall

At Christmas, when younger and older generations mixed at various gatherings, it was fascinating listening to a young quantity surveyor talking to a commercial lawyer about the contract bidding process. And a young midwife and the director of a real time translation service provider discussing the trials of communicating with mothers who speak only the obscurist of languages.

It made me think that perhaps the best networks are not the ones we set up for people with common interests (like investment clubs for example) but these loose and much more diverse groups.

More prosaically, I thought I should spend more time in 2025 listening to friends and family.

I am sure they would agree!

Research

• A Christmas stocking filler
  Single Board Computer maker Raspberry Pi is an unusual choice for me, inspired not by its track record but my desire to upgrade my technical skills.

Score

• An uncommonly profitable company
  Tristel is a unique company selling a unique hospital disinfectant. It has a pristine financial track record. As you might expect, the shares aren’t cheap.

• Still enthusiastic about this top 10 stock
  A disrupted market has given Focusrite shareholders whiplash, but its audio equipment is highly regarded and the shares have been beaten up badly by traders.

• Can this decent business get even better?
  Everything about flavour trader and processor Treatt has changed except its strategy. Perhaps it’s getting stronger, as it moves up the value chain.

Setting things straight for the New Year

• New Year’s guide to 5 Strikes
  I down tools to document my 5 Strikes system. It finds new investment ideas using a ShareScope filter and custom table.

• My final scores of 2024
  In 2024, I rolled out a new version of the Decision Engine. This article explains how it works now.

• A financially sound pseudo-conglomerate
  At the end of the year, the Share Sleuth portfolio is profitable, cash generative and debt free. By my reckoning it is dependable, distinctive and directed.

Trade

• It pained me to sell a winner that made 700%
  Share Sleuth gets a new member, Softcat, and it loses Tristel, which has been a tremendous investment.

etc...

• I am making headway with John Kay’s The Corporation in the 21st Century. Kay’s an erudite economist, and a keen populariser. His book is enormously ambitious, a kind of history and critique of companies. Sometimes, though, I feel he leaves the reader hanging on the edge of comprehension...

• ...Some of the book's many short chapters are revelatory. He tells us that shareholders do not own corporations, that corporations are not bound to maximise profit or shareholder value, and why the notion they should has often destroyed value.

• ...The unifying theme I am detecting is that a successful corporation is a collective intelligence that works in the interests of all. But I have yet to reach the end of the story...

Thanks for reading

We had our first snowfall of winter in the first week of the year. It wasn’t impressive, but people made the most of it.

investing etc. 0022 will be with you on Friday 7 Feb.