BY JAMES CARR
Investing ideas, an eye on the future Without a crystal ball, how do you spot the next best thing? Well, that all depends on your style of investing. James Carr, our Investment Analyst, explains more and looks at three companies that fund managers currently have their eyes on. Hindsight can often be a wonderful thing! It’s great to have the benefit of experience and perspective, however, with investing, hindsight can often be tarnished by regret and a feeling of ‘what could have been.’ Have you ever felt like you have invested in something you wish you hadn’t? Or taken profits too soon in a stock like Amazon or the next generation growth company? While the future can often seem uncertain, with hindsight the life-changing returns from organisations which have since become household names can seem so obvious. Surely Amazon was always going to be a success? How could I have missed that one? However, we forget that during the early 2000s Amazon’s value fell nearly 94% from peak to trough, leaving investors underwater for nearly a decade. This was because the company was spending aggressively to build out the infrastructure that powers it today. Holding or adding to Amazon during this uncertainty would have been a challenge for even the most long-term of investors. Despite this it would only have taken a £600 investment in them at the Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 1997 to be a millionaire today! Bringing all this back to today and as we look forward to the future, there are tens of thousands of companies listed globally across different geographies, regions and industries. So, how can you decide what to invest in if you are picking individual stocks? Broadly speaking, most of the fund managers that we invest with have a distinct ‘style’ of investing with the main ones being growth, value and quality.
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