Richard Beddard's Blog

More speculative than it looks
With an oligopolistic position in the milk recording market National Milk Records is a promising candidate for the Thrifty 30 but its pension obligation leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

What it does:

Good business, bad liabilities
Johnson Service’s operational heart is beating strongly, but its strengths as a business are weighed down by hefty liabilities. Maybe management makes the difference.

What it does:
Johnson Service is mostly a textile rental and cleaning business. It supplies clothing and linen to hotels and caterers as well as industrial workwear, operates Britain’s biggest chain of drycleaning stores, and runs a smaller facilities management business.
Category: stalwart

Exposing Johnson’s beating heart
If you scrape away the nasties, the pension fund, the debt and the operating leases, there’s a perfectly viable business at the heart of Johnson Service on sale at a reasonable price. I reckon it earns a 12% return on capital, also promising investors an earnings yield of about 12%, perhaps more, at the current share price.

Quantitave Value Investing in Europe: What Works for Achieving Alpha
There is a growing literature on statistical methods to beat the market inspired by the original classics, Dremen‘s Contrarian Investment Strategies and Greenblatt‘s Little Book, but a new report uniquely focuses on Europe and adds momentum to the mix of factors tested. Like other studies, it shows simple value measures beat the market, but with a surprising twist.