Transcript: Investing Roundtable – IPOs, Politics And Emerging Markets

Flotations, politicians and emerging markets: which is riskiest?

| More on:

The content of this article was relevant at the time of publishing. Circumstances change continuously and caution should therefore be exercised when relying upon any content contained within this article.

When investing, your capital is at risk. The value of your investments can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you put in.

Read More

The content of this article is provided for information purposes only and is not intended to be, nor does it constitute, any form of personal advice. Investments in a currency other than sterling are exposed to currency exchange risk. Currency exchange rates are constantly changing, which may affect the value of the investment in sterling terms. You could lose money in sterling even if the stock price rises in the currency of origin. Stocks listed on overseas exchanges may be subject to additional dealing and exchange rate charges, and may have other tax implications, and may not provide the same, or any, regulatory protection as in the UK.

You’re reading a free article with opinions that may differ from The Motley Fool’s Premium Investing Services. Become a Motley Fool member today to get instant access to our top analyst recommendations, in-depth research, investing resources, and more. Learn More.

Owain Bennallack talks investing with Mark Rogers – our youngest and keenest team member at the Motley Fool – and with Stuart Watson, one of our most experienced. All that worldly wisdom comes in handy as the guys debate that graveyard of new investor enthusiasms, IPOs, also known as flotations, as well as political risk and the recent sell-off in the emerging markets. Finally they debate the prospects for Victrex (LSE:VCT), Ashmore (LSE: ASHM) and Persimmon (LSE: PSN).      

The following is an unedited transcript of this Fool podcast:

Owain:

Hello, and welcome to Money Talk, the investing roundtable from The Motley Fool.  I’m Owain Bennallack, and with me in the studio today, as so often, is Mark Rogers, the youngest and keenest analyst here at The Motley Fool.  We’re also joined today by Stuart Watson, who looks after our Champion Shares Pro and Share Advisor services. Stuart knows a lot, but let’s face it, he’s seen a lot too.  He’s like one of those old, cynical cowboys who sits under a porch on the edge of town, shaking his head and spitting out gum, or tobacco, or whatever they spit.  Hi, guys.

Stuart:

I think if I was going to be a cowboy, I’d be more the sort of Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.

Owain:

I like it.  I’ve gone for a bit of colour, but you’re welcome to riff on that.  Would you ride a horse?

Stuart:

Possibly.

Owain:

Nice.  Mark?

Mark:

I’m getting quite jealous now, because next time I’d like to be introduced as the cowboy instead, if that’s okay.

Owain:

Mark, I will certainly work on a colourful introduction for you next week, next time, and we’ll see how you like it. Right, well, we’re going to need a bit of Stuart’s worldly wisdom this week, because I want to talk about floats, IPOs as our American friends call them, and why we think listeners need to tread carefully. It’s been a while since we’ve seen any IPOs, so people might not be au fait about how they work.  Then we’ll pull a hard right to talk about political risk, and how much you should let the short-term shenanigans of our appointed leaders sway how you invest. Then we’ll execute a sharp left, come back to stocks, and we’ll ask whether Unilever’s warning earlier this month, that it’s seeing emerging markets slowing down, is something to be wary of.  Finally, we’ll cruise through three companies that we think are interesting.  I don’t know where all these driving metaphors have come from.

Mark:

I’m surprised you didn’t manage to get Fiat in there somehow.

Stuart:

Or Tesla, yeah.

Owain:

Yeah, Tesla’s hit a speed bump as we speak. Are we ready to put the pedal to the metal?

Mark:

Let’s go for it, guys.

Owain:

Right, well let’s start with flotations.  I don’t mean your waterwings, Mark, that you wear at the local swimming baths.

Mark:

Thank you, Owain.

Owain:

I mean, of course, IPOs, and Stuart, could you put us straight about flotations, IPOs, what IPO even means, I guess.

Stuart:

Well, IPO stands for Initial Public Offering.  Some people say it sometimes stands, for “it’s probably overpriced”, or “imaginary profits only”.  It’s basically when a company first comes to the market, it’s the first list of its shares, so it’s the first chance you get to buy them.

Owain:

Okay, well we saw last year the big and badly-bungled float of Facebook, which was so popular that it pretty much overwhelmed the NASDAQ’s systems.  But besides that one, and a few other tech stocks like LinkedIn, IPOs have been pretty thin on the ground for a few years.  But now it seems we have a rash of them, so the Royal Mail in the UK; we’ve had Foxtons recently; there’s a big London-based firm come to the market called King from a sector which I used to work in, which is the video games sector, and there’s more UK floats in the pipeline, plus there’s another biggie in the US, Twitter.  You’re soon going to be able to buy shares in Twitter.  I’m going to raise you to the offering for that one, Mark.  Stuart, it’s all very exciting, but why is it happening now?

Stuart:

Do we need a reason, when it comes to the stock market? Basically, I think investors have become slightly more confident. The stock market’s been steady for a few months now.  The crisis in Europe seems to have abated, although it’s come back again recently; worries about the US government, and stuff like that.  People are just a bit calmer, and they’re just ready to buy really.  Investors think they can better prices, when they come and sell these companies.

Owain:

Yeah, I mean the thing, I guess, is that some of these people have been sitting, waiting for the moment for a while, so they probably can’t wait forever.  If you put money into Twitter ten years ago, five years ago (I don’t even know if it existed ten years ago), you want your exit eventually, which means flogging them to us.  But should we be so confident in these IPOs?

Stuart:

We need to be careful. They can be very risky.  Some things you need to look at, some of these companies come to the market, and they’ve got a very limited track record.

Owain:

Because I guess a lot of people will be thinking about the 1980s, when people made a lot of money on privatisation. Those were pretty much rigged, weren’t they, to make a profit?

Stuart:

Yeah, they were sold very low, sold very cheaply, because the government wanted people to make money on them.  Obviously, you can go forward to the 1990s, when we had all these high-priced IPOs for things like Lastminute.com, and people got a bit shafted on that really.  But there are definitely risks there, as I said.  There’s a sort of a limited track record with a lot of these companies. The Royal Mail’s probably an exception. They’re quite old, and you can see the history there.  A lot of these companies, they’re not used to being public companies, they’re not used to being in the public eye. So maybe Sports Direct is quite a good example, when that first came to the market a few years ago, so Mike Ashley was a bit like a truculent teenager basically. He did what he wanted, and the shares got hammered after they quoted, but now they’ve come back, re-emerged, and they’ve just recently joined the FTSE 100, so it can take a while for these companies to get used to being in the public eye.

Owain:

Something that people should think about is, if I go onto the market tomorrow to buy shares in Tesco, they’ve been traded for a long time.  A lot of people have made up their mind about what Tesco is worth.  With an IPO, it’s pretty much just a bunch of investment bankers trying to get as much as they can pretty much, isn’t it?

Stuart:

It can be, yeah, but they also want to make sure there’s what’s known as a good after market, so they don’t want to price it too high, what happened with Facebook last year. They want to make sure that people are buying and selling the shares after that, because they still made these shares to be sold.  That means something like, for example, the Royal Mail, the government’s only selling part of its shares.  It’s going to have to come back in a couple of years’ time, in a few months’ time, and sell the rest, so they want to make sure there’s some sort of orderly market there, and investors don’t get stuffed.

Owain:

I remember that, with Direct Line. That was a good one from that perspective, because RBS had a lot of Direct Line to sell, so if they had put the price too high, then people would have thought, that’s a dead duck, they wouldn’t have been able to sell the rest. Mark, you tend to like investing in companies that have been around for years, if not centuries.  Does that mean they have to have been listed for years?  Would you be prepared to look at a prospectus, because obviously these IPOs come with a whole load of trading information theoretically, business history.  Would you prepared to look for all that, and invest in one you liked?

Mark:

Yeah, well theoretically I’d like to, just like in any other kind of investment situation, try and weigh up the company, what it might be worth, and see if the price makes sense, like I say, just like any other type of share that’s already listed on the market.  But obviously, it becomes a bit more difficult when you have a situation where something doesn’t have a track record as a public company, and of course as Stuart mentioned, the seller would set the price, and so risks of paying too much as well.

Owain:

I definitely think we shouldn’t overlook this shift to being a stock market-listed company.  Was it Branson who was listed for about two years, and said it was the worst two years of his life as an entrepreneur, because you can’t make all those decisions any more.  You can’t think necessarily long term, because you have the markets looking at quarterly results.  It’s going to change the culture.

Mark:

Oh definitely, and I think as well as that, you look at something like Berkshire Hathaway, that’s obviously enjoyed quite a lot of success because CEO, Warren Buffett, likes to practically abdicate control of these companies to the managers as if it was privately run as a separate individual family-run enterprise, for example.  You can see the results, it does tend to act as a motivator.

Owain:

Stuart, what would your top three tips be for investing in IPOs, apart from, do it in the 1980s?

Stuart:

The first one, read the prospectus.  I’ve just been looking through the Royal Mail prospectus, all 500 pages of it, that’s good fun. But there’s often good sections there on how the company operates, and the markets in which it operates.  Even when you’re buying a company that’s been trading for a few years, it’s often worth going back to its website, and looking at the prospectus, because there’s often lots of good information there, quite impartial, about how business operates, and what are the risks facing it, so it’s good to get an overall picture there.

Owain:

Some of those, the risk section, you would never buy anything, if you read.

Stuart:

They do go a little bit extreme.  Some of them, you’ll probably find maybe three or four ones which you didn’t really think about before, so they’re worth looking at, but a lot of them are sort of boilerplate ones.  Secondly, I would look at who’s selling the business, and how much of the business they’re selling. So quite often, you’ll get maybe a private equity or venture capital company might be selling the business, and they’re quite well-known for running a business quite hard, when they own them, so they might cut costs, not really invest in the future of the business, so the profit margins might look very good when it comes to the market. They might load it up with debt as well, to sell it.  I’d be more cautious there, when you’ve got a venture capital seller.  Thirdly, I think generally be cautious.  You’ll probably get another chance to buy the shares, possibly at a lower price. With Royal Mail, we’re seeing quite a wide price range.  I think it’s 260 to 330, so you don’t actually know how many shares you’re going to get, and what price you’re going to pay, so you don’t want to go too crazy.

Owain:

Yeah, and also sometimes you don’t actually even know how many shares you’re going to get.  Let’s say I want to put £5,000 in, but if everyone else thinks they want to put some thousands of pounds in, then you might end up only with a thousand; or you might think the opposite, and get the £5,000.  You might put £5,000 in, hoping to get a thousand. Basically, it’s just not like conventional investing. It’s a different kind of ball game.

Stuart:

It is, but I think at the same time, you do have to also think of it in that same sort of economic sense, like you do other investments.  So it’s a different process, but I think the way that you think of it as an investor should be broadly similar to the way you invest in other things.

Owain:

Okay, well that’s a good summary of avoiding some of the risks of investing in a new listing, but now I’d like to look at an even more difficult risk, because it isn’t something that we can really quantify with that toolset that you’ve just mentioned, Mark, and that’s political risk.  Mark, there was a time when investing seemed to be about factories, orders, profits and losses, but now it seems to be about worrying about who’s in power, and what they’ll do next, especially if you count central bankers among the power-makers.  Just this month, we’ve seen wrangling in Washington; wrangling in Italy (which perhaps is reassuring, because there’s usually wrangling in Italy); the worry was, in fact, that Merkel wouldn’t get elected, and then when she was elected, actually I heard a load of people saying that was bad news, because she would carry on being really austere.  What on earth should investors make about this focus on politics and politicians?

Mark:

I’m going to have to be careful here, because I don’t want to say too much about politicians, but at the same time it’s worth remembering that, for the most part, these kinds of political stand-offs don’t mean too much in the long term for the intrinsic value of many of these businesses, even if the share prices do decline, as they often will during a time of uncertainty like that. That being said, it’s not like this kind of political wrangling like we’ve seen in the US recently.  It doesn’t have a real economic impact on confidence, and you’ll see the consequences of that, at least in the short term.

Owain:

But there are some sectors that are more vulnerable to political risk, though, aren’t there?

Mark:

Yeah, there’s certainly some sectors more prone to regulation and interference for political reasons.  We saw an example of that very recently. The Labour Party conference, for better or worse, the utilities were picked on a bit, for political reasons obviously, either rightly or wrongly.

Owain:

And that is very different, because if you’re Coke, to pick the classic example; although having said that, Coke apparently does face some political risk, because people might put a tax on sugary drinks, but in general, that’s almost to defeat my own argument, if you’re Coke, you can set your own prices.  There’s no danger of Ed Miliband waking up one morning and saying, Coke will now cost a pound.

Mark:

Yep, but there’s certainly some sectors that are more prone to it than others, and you can use examples like financial services in the EU, and healthcare in the US, in the last couple of years, that you’ve really seen these kinds of political situations develop where, either for votes or anything else, to please funding or anything else, there’s a few risks there that the shares or the businesses are going to end up being affected.

Owain:

What about changes to pension laws, that kind of thing.  Is that political risk, or is that something else?

Mark:

I’d say it probably is, but with pensions you could argue there’s bigger risks in terms of the size of the pension fund relative to the company, and the long-term asset returns.  So political risk is something you need to consider, but it’s probably not the major factor there.

Owain:

But if a politician comes along and says, as they have done recently in this country, you have to contribute to your employees’ pension schemes, which we might think is a good idea, or not, but certainly risk for the company, because that’s going to take up some cashflow that they didn’t expect before?

Mark:

It is, yeah. I’m not sure how you plan for those sort of risks really.

Owain:

That’s the playing field.  Often, we should also say that political risk can produce opportunities, which is why we’re investing.  I remember a couple of years ago, there was lots of talk about sequestration in the US, which I’m not really sure anyone really knows what that word means, but the prevailing wisdom was that defence would be hit really hard, and I think it was hit a little bit, but the shares were hit a lot harder, so it can obviously bring up opportunities.

Mark:

Yeah, I definitely agree with that.  You end up in a situation where you’re guessing ahead of time what the effects are going to be.  The stock market is guessing, and you’re going to have to be very careful assuming outcomes that might not occur.

Owain:

Okay, well one area that used to have a discount for political risk were the emerging markets.  It wasn’t so much obscure pension laws in those days.  The risk was more that your company could be nationalised in a people’s revolution, or the country invaded by the one next door.  I think it’s fair to say now though that the bigger emerging markets are a bit more mainstream, and they tend to suffer from the same sort of mundane matters that we do, such as economic slowdowns.  Stuart, on that note, we have heard some worrying words from Unilever, haven’t we?

Stuart:

Yeah, we have, so earlier this week, Unilever, like some nasty spivvy AIM stock, released a trading statement, I think about five pm, saying they expected lower sales growth in the third quarter.  It was 3 – 3.5%, as opposed to 5% the last two quarters, so that knocked its shares a few percent, and it had a knock-on effect to some other stocks that were heavy in emerging markets too.

Owain:

Unilever is massively exposed to emerging markets now, isn’t it?

Stuart:

Yeah, something like 55, 57% of its sales are in emerging markets, depending on how you define the emerging markets, obviously.

Owain:

Which is amazing really, for a company that people would think of as a boring old stalwart.  Well, what I think is most interesting about Unilever’s dire warning, which is slightly overdoing it, is that it was issued in US trading hours, I’d guess we’d probably say, wouldn’t we?

Mark:

Yeah, it was issued at around about …

Stuart:

Five pm, UK time.

Mark:

Five pm, UK time, so definitely focused on the US investor there, I think.  I don’t think that’s the first time, either.

Owain:

But what was most interesting about the short warning was that it was really put down to literally sales slowing, because we’ve already seen quite a lot of volatility in emerging market investments, but hitherto that’s either been what Mark was describing earlier, with political risk as the kind of guessing game, or it’s just been investors pulling money out of those countries, so this is a more perhaps tentative sign that the emerging markets themselves are slowing down?

Mark:

Well yeah, the equities in emerging markets have certainly had a very rough 2013 to date.  The Brazilian stock market’s down about 13%. China’s down about 5%.  Of course, this is all compared to the US market, which is up 15% year to date.  So on a relative basis certainly, there’s been a real continued loss, a lack of confidence in those markets, and the currencies as well, which is something worth considering.  So you could say there’s a lot of pessimism prevailing at the moment, in the city at least, with regards to these emerging markets.

Owain:

Which is incredible.  There was a time, it was probably around the time I started at The Motley Fool, Stuart wasn’t quite so grizzled in those days, it was about two years ago, maybe three, and any article you wrote, someone would tack on the end, well, you should only be invested in emerging markets.  It is perennially amazing to me how the markets turn on a dime.  On that note, these slowdowns could potentially mean that emerging markets are cheaper.  Do either of you guys worry that emerging markets are really down and out for a decade, or is this a blip?

Mark:

I certainly agree with you, about it being a cheaper situation, and I think Stuart will probably agree with me on this.  I don’t see these countries being down and out at all.  I see this as being a fairly natural occurrence in the economic cycle.  You end up with good patches and bad patches.  In a country like China, I cannot imagine a future where, ten or fifteen years from now, China isn’t consuming a lot more, and producing a lot more than it is today.

Stuart:

Yeah, I’d definitely agree with that.  I think the emerging markets in general tend to be a bit more volatile, so you do get even more pronounced up and downs than you do in economies like the UK.

Owain:

They’re faddish basically, aren’t they?

Stuart:

Yeah, a little bit.

Owain:

Okay, well let’s conclude with our usual quick look at some shares on our radar.  Mark, you know the drill, so do you want to kick us off?

Mark:

Sure. I’ve been looking at a FTSE 250 company called Victrex this month.  I think it’s a really interesting business.  It’s from Lancashire as well, which can’t help, since that’s where I’m from. Basically, Victrex is the world’s leading producer of this specialised synthetic material called PEEK polymers, which are used in the aircraft industry and in modern vehicles.  It’s very durable and very lightweight, as you can imagine. So there are real advantages efficiency-wise, where even reducing a slight amount off the weight of one of these vehicles is going to make a big difference in terms of fuel efficiency, and so very important to those companies.  I think what’s interesting is that Victrex is really the world’s leading producer of these materials.  Its patent, interestingly, for PEEK, expired over ten years ago now. Kind of like the Colonel’s eleven secret spices at KFC, you have all this proprietary knowledge and reputation in how they make it, and so this interesting situation where they’re achieving really high margins, high returns on capital.  It’s not exactly cheap at the moment, nineteen times forward earnings, but at the same time, they’ve got a lot of cash on the balance sheet, and I think long term, it could be an interesting place to look.

Stuart:

And when you’ve got a company with a high-tech product like this, as a layman it’s difficult to know obviously what’s going on there.  Do you look at the financials, do you look at the competition, or do you rely on the industry?

Mark:

I think you have to look at all those things, and I think it’s a real risk, as you mentioned. For someone like me, I’ve obviously never made PEEK polymers myself at home.  It’s kind of difficult for me, or anyone else, to look in as an outsider, and start making industry judgements like that. So judging them, I think, can be quite difficult, but it does show up in the long term returns that the company’s achieved over the last ten to fifteen years.

Owain:

Have you seen the film The Graduate, Mark?

Mark:

I’ve seen scenes from the film, The Graduate – Al Pacino?

Owain:

Dustin Hoffman.

Mark:

I’m thinking of the other one. 

Stuart:

That’s The Godfather, you’re thinking of.

Owain:

The reason I’m mentioning, before we start turning this into movie hour, the reason I mention The Graduate, it was filmed, I guess, in the late Sixties, and Dustin Hoffman, not Al Pacino, is a young graduate, and he asks someone for advice about what industry to do into, and the guys says, “plastics”.  Obviously, it’s hard to imagine now, but it would be like saying smartphones, I guess, or something today.  So you’re the Dustin Hoffman of the studio today?  You’re touting futuristic polymers.

Mark:

Well, I just think, in situations like this, where these companies are able to gain some kind of competitive advantage, even if it’s hard for us as laymen to understand exactly how it works, how it’s put together, etcetera, we understand that if you have a product that is in very high demand, there’s a lot more demand than there is for supply out there for it, they’re going to have some degree of pricing power, and they’re going to have some kind of moat over their competitors, if they’ve been producing it for a long time.

Owain:

Okay, it’s a compelling case.  Stuart, what are you looking at at the moment?

Stuart:

I’m going to stick with the emerging markets’ theme, another FTSE 250 stock, Ashmore, which is a fund manager, mostly in emerging market debt, rather than equities.  Now basically, it’s about 300 people, but turns over about £360 million profit, of £260 million, I think, before tax, so obscenely high profit margins.

Owain:

Nearly a million pounds of profit per employee!

Stuart:

Yeah, it’s quite incredible.  But it’s got a lovely dividend, so it pays out, I think, a forecast yield well over 4% at the moment, and it’s quite near its all-time high. The total value of the business is about 2.7 billion, I think.  If we do see some weakness in emerging markets, then that could be one to look at.

Owain:

It did wobble a bit, didn’t it?

Stuart:

It did a bit, yeah.

Owain:

It’s come up on my radar.  My question to you, Stuart, would be, one of the reasons that has been chalked up for this emerging market wobble today is that, when the US starts raising interest rates, which is, how long’s a bit of string, but probably sooner rather than later now, money will start leaving the emerging markets that sort of flooded in there, looking for yield.  Instead of getting a treasury paying maybe nothing in real terms, or a percent or two, you might get eight percent in some government bond of an emerging market.  But if people can get a safer yield of 5%, which is probably still a couple of years away, they wouldn’t necessarily risk their money for 8% in an emerging market. Long story short, has Ashmore ridden this low interest rate bubble in the US, and will it suffer if that reverses?

Stuart:

The business has been going for about twenty years now, I think, and it’s probably riding a longer-term story.  So I think they look at emerging markets, and they see governments and companies which generally have less debt than in the developed world, and they see, perhaps unfortunately, their debt situation coming nearer ours in the long term, so they’re riding a longer term wave, rather than the short term situation.

Owain:

Okay, well as always, I’m last, and definitely least.  I thought I would quickly explain why I’ve been looking at Persimmon recently.  In fact, I bought the shares recently. I bought the shares after they fell, because they said that they were going to not build any more houses in the Welsh valleys where no-one buys houses. It was a strange reason for shares to fall.  But I think it’s indicative of the kind of tentativeness that people have about the housing market, because we’ve seen these help-to-buy schemes being announced by the government.  We’ve seen that have a demonstrable effect, certainly on the share prices of the companies, and to a lesser extent on approvals and whatnot.  The Conservatives have pulled forward their rollout of next year’s help-to-buy scheme.  Scotland, we’ve seen a help-to-buy similar scheme introduced, just in the last couple of weeks.  I don’t really have any doubts that the UK needs more houses.  I do have some doubts that the UK needs more houses at this price, this price of houses, but that’s not really necessarily where the housebuilders make most of their money. They buy the land cheap, and obviously they’re not immune to rises and falls in house prices, but if we have to go back to building 250,000 houses a year, which I think we do, I think Persimmon, which is the largest housebuilder in the UK, and it’s pretty big – it’s over £3 million, I think it will do very well over the next ten years.

Mark:

Owain, I’m going to set you up nicely here, because I have a feeling I know roughly how you’re going to respond, but at the same time, it’s no secret that housing has been in a stage of recovery for a while now.  The stock market has certainly reacted to that. Does there come a point any time soon when valuations for these kind of players already starts to reflect that, and, in your opinion, how far off is that?

Owain:

It kind of depends what timescale we’re looking at. With Persimmon, I think it got up to about £13 before it had fallen about 20%, but an interesting thing about Persimmon is, it’s kind of got this capital management plan that it stole off Berkeley Group, where it has said it’s going to return over £6 to shareholders over the next ten years or so, and at the end of that ten years, it will still be a bigger company, with at least as much land, at least as much potential, and that’s very attractive.  If you do the sums, it’s quite a lumpy dividend payout, but it works out as something like a yield of about 8 or 9%.  So in answer to your question, I think if they were £15 tomorrow, I would sell.  I don’t think there’s like an infinite valuation on these things at all.  But it would not surprise me, if we were sitting here in ten years, and the shares were £30.  This has just begun. The one thing you can know about this country, you can argue about house prices until the cows come home, they’re almost certainly too high, but the country needs more houses, and someone’s got to build them.

Mark:

Yeah, that sounds feasible to me.  Just mentioning Berkeley Group there for a moment, would you say that Persimmon at the moment, at the current prices, represents a relatively more attractive opportunity? – because I know that you like quite a few of these names, have been a big advocate of this sector for a while now.

Owain:

Yeah, I have enjoyed some nice gains over the last eighteen months from housebuilders, and they were certainly really cheap eighteen months ago, and now it is a slightly more tricky proposition. My problem with Berkeley Group, it’s by far the best company.  It’s got the best guy running it, it makes incredible amounts of money; it’s a machine. The problem with it is, it’s massively exposed to London, and that’s been brilliant so far, but if there is a bubble in valuations, that could hit a company. It’s had to replace the land that it’s built on with new land. It’s paying a premium for that, because everyone knows that oligarchs and whatnot are buying houses in London.  I just think Berkeley Group’s a little more exposed.  Persimmon doesn’t have any, it has south-east exposure, but not London-specific exposure.

Mark:

I think it’s up something like 45% since the start of the year, or something along those lines.  I know you can probably say that about a lot of these companies, but coming from Berkeley’s position where it was, I can certainly understand your point of view there.

Owain:

If you look at a share price graph, you’ll just think, well, I wish I’d bought it a year ago.  It’s the same with this one, and some of the others that I like. The price is going up for a reason.  The situation is changing.

Mark:

It’s probably correcting a lot of slack that was in those, but certainly from 2011 or so onwards, you can look at some of the outstanding recoveries in some of these shares that many people had written off as being doomed for the next decade, or something.

Owain:

Well, we’ll have to rely on the economy to pull us along, but if it does, then send your thank you cheques to me.  I think that’s the end. Cheers guys, for coming in.

Mark:

Thank you, Owain.

Stuart:

Cheers, Owain.

Owain:

We’ll hear us in a month or so.

If you’re keen to earn great returns with small caps, this free Motley Fool report — “10 Steps To Making A Million In The Market” — could help you on your way. The report highlights how choppy markets can still provide the big winners to take you to that magic million. But hurry, the report is available for a limited time only. You can download the report by clicking here.

Should you invest, the value of your investment may rise or fall and your capital is at risk. Before investing, your individual circumstances should be assessed. Consider taking independent financial advice.

More on Company Comment

Hand of person putting wood cube block with word VALUE on wooden table
Company Comment

Value has been building behind the Diageo share price

Despite the business growing, the Diageo share price first reached its current level just over 19 months ago and hasn't…

Read more »

Older couple walking in park
Investing Articles

5 stocks to buy for high and rising dividend income

I can see a host of shares to buy on the FTSE 100 offering me exceptional levels of income. Here…

Read more »

Young mixed-race woman looking out of the window with a look of consternation on her face
Investing Articles

I don’t care if FTSE 100 shares fall further, I’m buying them today

I'm happy to go shopping for FTSE 100 shares today, even though I accept that they could have further to…

Read more »

Happy young female stock-picker in a cafe
Investing Articles

Rolls-Royce shares are down 18% in a month and I’m finally going to buy them

Investors who bought Rolls-Royce shares have been repeatedly disappointed, but I'm willing to take a chance on them before they…

Read more »

Storytelling image of a multiethnic senior couple in love - Elderly married couple dating outdoors, love emotions and feelings
Investing Articles

How I’d invest £10k in a Stocks and Shares ISA today

Now looks like a good time to buy cheap FTSE 100 shares inside a Stocks and Shares ISA. These are…

Read more »

Black father holding daughter in a field of cows
Investing Articles

Today’s financial crisis is the perfect moment to buy cheap shares

I'm building a portfolio of FTSE 100 stocks by purchasing cheap shares whenever I see an opportunity. There's a good…

Read more »

Long-term vs short-term investing concept on a staircase
Investing Articles

I’d buy Tesco shares in October to bag their 5.4% yield 

Tesco shares have fallen lately but I think this makes them attractively valued for a dividend stock I would aim…

Read more »

Young mixed-race woman looking out of the window with a look of consternation on her face
Investing Articles

I would do anything to hold Diageo in my portfolio (but I won’t do that)

Diageo is one of my favourite stocks on the entire FTSE 100 and I'd love to hold it, but one…

Read more »