• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • About This Website
    • A polite reminder
  • How To
    • Use this website and benefit from the subscription option
    • Pick a financial adviser
    • Ensure your investment adviser is delivering good value
    • Get expert help with running your own portfolio
    • Pick a ‘tax wrapper’
    • Pick a Trading Platform
    • Diversify a portfolio in today’s world
    • Invest in line with your conscience
    • Research (screen for) a specific fund requirement (m)
    • Pick a fund for the future or how to be a contrarian (m)
    • Find the ‘next best thing’ and make rational sell decisions (fund switching) (m)
    • Time investment sales (skim profits) (m)
    • Interpret a Morningstar X-Ray (m)
    • Use Trustnet for Research (m)
    • How to review a neglected portfolio when the world has moved on (m)
  • *Important Information*
  • Real World
    • A Frank Introduction to Investing
    • Costs
    • Investment Risk – Your Starter For 10
    • How are advisers fees worked out?
    • 10+ top tips for investors
    • An actual portfolio review (m)
    • Benchmarks – a thorny subject
    • Disinvestment from fossil fuel businesses – are there better options?
  • Tales of the Unexpected
    • Lola
    • Round and Round the Mulberry Bush
    • FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and the lazy mind.
    • Property Development Schemes
  • For More Experienced Investors
  • Glossary with a Difference
  • Member Only Content (M)
    • Example of simple cash flow planner (m)
    • Long Reads
      • What is market shorting and is it a bad thing?
      • How to conduct a periodic portfolio review (m)
      • Investing without management (passively) – a better way? (m)
  • Portfolios and Funds (m)
    • Lessons in Portfolio Construction and Maintenance – Introduction
      • High Level Asset Allocation
      • Selecting Funds
      • Cash Flow and Tax Issues in Portfolio Construction
      • Setting Objectives and Understanding Risks
      • A suggested portfolio for Alex Bright
  • Multi Asset Academy (m)
    • Some basic basics
    • Who are Vanguard?
    • Are multi-asset funds expensive?
    • Cheap and cheerful?
    • Its all about asset allocation, but…
    • Myth and misunderstandings
    • Taking money out of multi asset funds – the pros and cons
    • Distribution funds – the forerunner of multi asset investing?
    • DIY Multi Asset – adding risk controls
    • Benchmark Fog
  • Member Login
  • Logout

Its Not Harry

Comment and opinion for retail investors in the UK

Mark Potter

YAP – a video! Please watch and let me know what you think!

12th November 2024 by Mark Potter 4 Comments

If it does not work initially, my apologies, I am experimenting, so please come back later! I am starting off with YouTube as my video server and I can’t control what they might suggest to you at the end (not yet anyway!)

Filed Under: Uncategorised

YAP – Snippets

8th November 2024 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

President Trump

I summarise below (next heading) the main points from a useful Morningstar webinar on the impact of the US election for European investors, presented ahead of the result but assuming a Trump win (it was from their Irish based European markets specialist).

I have been interested to see what the main UK and US media economics and finance commentators are already saying, relative to the factors I listed in the third, most speculative strategy review example I gave in my November Deep Dive.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In. Not a Member? Join Us

Filed Under: Asset Allocation, Economics, Markets, Politics

YAP – (video worth watching) – a true guru of markets

5th November 2024 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

I came across the video referenced below this week. It tells an interesting story very concisely and it’s one that all investors would learn from.

You may think that I studied the career of Peter Lynch earlier in my life if you have become accustomed to my investment philosophy, which has valuation, being in the market for the long term and making personal decisions about how much you can commit to riskier assets at its core, but in truth all that is in the linked video was completely new to me!

I suspect that all experienced investors come to the same unavoidable conclusion that buying at the right price is the most important skill that an investor needs, and that there are long periods when the price can be right (both when it is moving up and moving down), but they rarely extend into the time when the mass media discovers the ‘opportunity’

Here is the link:

Filed Under: Education, Markets, Portfolios

YAP – IMPORTANT – TM Crux funds divide after takeover

4th November 2024 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

Following a sale of the Crux business to facilitate the retirement of veteran fund manager Richard Pease (a European market specialist), the new owners Lansdowne Partners have decided to focus on European markets and 3 UK specialist funds, including the one run by the Richard Penney (UK Special Situations) have moved under a new roof at Oberon Investments.

I have to confess to having no prior knowledge of Oberon. An internet check tells me that they are a UK listed boutique investment house. Their shares are owned in quite large percentages by other specialist UK investment businesses and the founders. I was surprised to note that a longish photo gallery of fund managers and analysts includes not a single woman.

Interactive Investor lists no Oberon funds as far as I can see. I assume they will have to communicate with investors in the TM Crux UK funds on their platform to explain what they are going to do.

I own the former TM Crux UK Special Situations fund and am putting it on immediate close watch. Recent past performance has been very poor, but Richard Penney is a genuine deep value investor who can make money very fast on a market rotation, or at least he has done in the past. He and his team may end up subsumed into Oberon’s operation (they seem to have a special situation manager already), or sit as a side show – that cannot yet be known,

Filed Under: Announcements, Funds

Deep Dive – November 2024

1st November 2024 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

(a continuation of the October 2024 Deep Dive)

Stage 3 – What data do you want to focus on?

Is it difficult?

Writing this section has been a challenge for me and for some it may only be of limited use.  Perhaps each person will go about strategy review work in their own way, but I hope I can give you a few tools to use.

As I thought about what to suggest to help investors acquire and apply information that is freely available these days, a saying of my late mother came to mind.  A rather blunt lady, she was inclined to express frustration at we children not doing things right,  usually by pronouncing the phrase ‘oh, use your common sense!’.  I think maybe that was a well used expression of the 1960s.

I am not going to leave my advice at just that, but I don’t think one requires qualifications in economics, accountancy or investment portfolio theory to use relevant data to make good decisions. 

I have all those qualifications (of course, acquired ages ago!) and perhaps they occasionally give me an extra insight, but I think my personal methodology in moving to a new or updated viewpoint on investment markets (which readers have likely observed over the years) is based on my life experience working in the business sector (as have nearly all my readers) and a keen interest on what is going on in the world, which is so very often a cyclical pattern. 

What goes around comes around is a very useful cliché to keep in mind! For that reason, being old (or having plenty of experience) is a bonus!

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In. Not a Member? Join Us

Filed Under: Asset Allocation, Education, Members Only, Monthly commentary

YAP – snippets

23rd October 2024 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

To offer some practical support with the ideas outlined in the Deep Dive article series I started at the beginning of this month, I have decided to pass on to subscribers some condensed notes of the material I see in my own reading. Some of my news feeds are only available to those who can pre-register as financial services professionals, supplying some supporting data about their occupation, so I may get earlier or more specifically focused data that could have an impact on strategic investment themes.

I would also claim that I can more quickly add some qualitative interpretation and keep out most of the ‘noise’, a skill I wrote that everyone ought to try and develop.

[Read more…] about YAP – snippets

Filed Under: Announcements, Asset Allocation, Education, Markets, Members Only, Monthly commentary, Portfolios

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 14
  • Page 15
  • Page 16
  • Page 17
  • Page 18
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 97
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Mid-month Musings – September 2026
  • Deep Dive – September 2026
  • Mid Month Musings with Mark (not me!)
  • Thank You
  • Deep Dive – August 2026

Archives

Categories

  • Academic theory
  • Announcements
  • Asset Allocation
  • Basics
  • Cost of investing
  • Economics
  • Education
  • Funds
  • House rules
  • Humour
  • Innovation
  • Markets
  • Members Only
  • Monthly commentary
  • News
  • Opinion
  • Passives and Trackers
  • Politics
  • Portfolios
  • Rants
  • Research tools
  • Site Content
  • Sustainability/ESG
  • Trading
  • Uncategorised