Monthly Archives: December 2014

Having recently returned from a comprehensive tour of healthcare companies with our friends at UBS, we gleaned a highly important understanding of where the bargaining power lies in the industry. From this tour, it was abundantly clear whose interests matter most.

In essence, every element of the health care sector is dependent upon the doctors – this is across hospitals, health funds, pathology, service providers and medical device distributors. Continue…

by Ben MacNevin Posted in Health Care, Insightful Insights, Investing Education.

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In this interview with Ross Greenwood on December 8, Roger looks at the slide of the market, China slowing down and struggling retail as a result of very low consumer confidence. Listen here.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Radio.

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There are all sorts of coincidences that can be mistaken for signs that a crash is imminent. We don’t put much store in those, however it is never uninteresting reading about them. One that is gaining a little traction is something known as the Edifice Complex.

In conventional terms, the Edifice Complex is the desire to build lasting edifices or buildings as a legacy to one’s greatness. In today’s context, the Edifice Complex represents the historically coincident construction/completion of these buildings with stock market crashes. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Insightful Insights, Property, Value.able.

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In this column published in The Australian, Roger looks at the balance of payments current account deficit and the issues with selling assets to repair debt. Read here.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in In the Press.

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Sadly, we live in a country where the overwhelming belief is that people are almost always better off with lower prices. It’s short-term ideology that fails to recognise the long-term damage suffered by Australian businesses when they simply cannot match the prices offered by better-resourced and more competitive foreign businesses. And it’s ideology again that suggests these businesses should be left to fail.

The result of course is that local businesses do go broke or are bought out by foreign businesses. And as we have seen with Ford and Holden, selling out to foreign enterprises does not secure jobs nor does it guarantee ongoing ‘investment’. We should think of this is we sell off our land, our farms and our infrastructure. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Consumer discretionary, Insightful Insights, Investing Education.

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Following on from our recent blog post here and our Head of Research, Tim Kelley’s video blog – on the changing supermarket industry landscape – we are naturally watching the developments in the sector closely (from the sidelines), taking a keen interest in the half year result reported this week by Metcash Limited (ASX:MTS).

To quickly summarise: their half year results showed continued deterioration to which the market has reacted accordingly, with their share price down circa 27 per cent since. Continue…

by Russell Muldoon Posted in Companies, Consumer discretionary, Insightful Insights, Investing Education.

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In this article, Roger takes a different view of dividends and suggests businesses, shareholders and even Australia as a whole are missing out by the grovelling to investors’ demands for income. Read here.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in On the Internet.

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There’s not much point in being a successful value investor, if you aren’t seeking value in other aspects of your financial life. With your savings and personal wealth in mind, we think you should know the ACCC has relaunced its petrol price cycle page on its website.

The site will provide information on petrol price cycles in the five largest cities. Price cycles do not occur in Canberra, Hobart, Darwin, or in most regional locations across Australia. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Insightful Insights.

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Alert readers will recall that in June this year we set out to explore the merits of applying machine learning technology to stock selection. We went through a process of “training” a learning algorithm called a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to pick stocks, and then in mid-June we asked it to nominate a top 20 and a bottom 20 from the ASX200. Continue…

by Tim Kelley Posted in Companies, Investing Education.

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In this column published in the December/January issue of Money magazine, Roger covers why the benefits of fully franked dividends may have been overstated, especially when compared to the long term advantages to company from the retention and profitable reinvestment of earnings. Read here.

by Roger Montgomery Posted in In the Press, Value.able.

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