The young man at the newsagent caught Covid so The Times doesn’t get delivered until lunchtime, when his manager closes the shop and makes the deliveries himself.
This creates a bit of a vacuum in the morning when productive things like Sudoku and crosswords hitherto were ticked off. Displacement activity is necessary and this morning I attended three webinars. The first two were recordings from last year by Capital Gearing Trust. The Trust is new to me but a friend sent me the links and has invested in this safety-first, Absolute Return fund. He points out that its name is misleading as it has no gearing. I’m not going to buy for two reasons. First, the trust invests in other safe funds – they hold two Vanguard funds – so why pay the monkey when you can go to the organ grinder? Another investment trust they hold is North Atlantic Smaller Companies, that you may remember from North Atlantic Drift, a post from 2017 more suited to the The Daily Mail than this site. Secondly, you cannot buy sweets from every jar in the investment trust sweet shop.
Then I just had time to do a spot of washing up before tuning in to a live webinar from McInroy & Wood. Unfortunately, because I did not consult The Old Berkeley Beagles calendar sitting on top of the microwave, so Robert knows my schedule, I am in Tardy Book (Google it!) and missed the first twenty minutes.
M & W bribe their clients with excellent lunches and dinners, sometimes preceded by a shortish presentation. I have been a grateful recipient. It is a good way to make their clients “sticky” and I approve. But a chance to listen to some of their stock pickers and management is a good way to evaluate M & W’s investment culture, the way they look at new investments and, most important, how collegiate they are; something lacking at the house of Woodford. I hope these online presentations by companies and fund managers will become a permanent feature of the investment landscape and I hope individual investors will be invited. I was excluded from a company presentation last year because I am not an analyst. A spotty analyst has no shares in the company – I could buy a small London flat if I cashed in my shares. Going forward, I hope there will be a welcome on the mat.