The clock is ticking for ISA investors. Have you maxed out your £20,000 allowance for the 2019–20 tax year? If you haven’t, be quick! You have exactly one week to pay in. Use it or lose it!
It doesn’t matter what your attitude to risk is. We here at the Motley Fool believe that now’s not the time to pull up the drawbridge. The key to successful share investing is to only buy with a view to holding shares for a minimum of around 10 years. And there’s a galaxy of companies whose long-term profits outlooks remain quite brilliant.
Shine on
That’s not to say that cautious investors need to put themselves in unnecessary discomfort, however. How about buying shares in gold mining giant Centamin (LSE: CEY)?
With macroeconomic and geopolitical turbulence worsening as Covid-19 spreads across the globe, it’s likely that safe-haven bullion prices will keep rising. And Centamin is obviously a decent way to play this. It offers a dividend, after all, a perk which buying into a gold-backed financial instrument or physical bars and coins doesn’t.
Gold rush
Prices of the yellow metal really are ripping higher at the minute. They rose around $100 per ounce during the course of last week, representing the biggest seven-day gain since the start of the financial crisis back in 2008.
The catalyst? Increasing Covid-19 infection rates across the globe and a subsequent raising of quarantine measures by major economies. More central bank stimulus. And streams of more disappointing economic data due to the outbreak.
News that a shocking 3m US citizens have joined the unemployment queues dominated the headlines. It’s likely to be the first of a number of shocking datasets from across the Pond as the crisis continues, and a trend that could heap more and more pressure on the US dollar. The falling greenback following those jobless numbers has also helped gold to post chunky gains in recent days.
Still on course
So back to Centamin. This is a share which is expected to record a 130%-plus leap in annual earnings in 2020 on expectations of a strong gold price. That City forecast leaves it trading on a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of just 11.1 times, too.
These aren’t the only reasons why the FTSE 250 firm is such a brilliant safe-haven share to buy today, however. At current prices it sports a gigantic 5.3% dividend yield for this year as well.
Happily Centamin’s operations have so far been unaffected by the coronavirus breakout. On Thursday it said that its workforce have experienced no illness and that the company has “experienced no material disruption to operations, supply chain, or gold shipments.”
News that it has “sufficient internationally sourced critical supplies stockpiled for the next quarter,” and that it has “assessed alternative potential supply channels” also suggests that Centamin is on top of the situation. Things can change of course. But I’d argue that the digger’s low earnings multiple more than bakes in the possibility of production problems. In my opinion this is a share that’s worthy of inclusion of any stock picker’s ISA today.
