“The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself“
Ben Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor
By John Kingham
According to various studies, most active private investors only achieve about half the market return. So if the market returns 10% per year over the long-term, they’ll achieve an average of 5% per year.
That’s a huge difference and I’ve seen, up close and personal, what a lack of knowledge and guidance can do to an individual’s finances.
That’s why the goal of this website is to help UK investors outperform the UK stock market rather than underperform it.
My particular focus is investors who – like me – are looking to build a portfolio of shares with good income and growth characteristics, and relatively low risk.
To do that, this website provides investors with a broad spectrum of information (articles, books, courses, newsletters, etc.) and tools (spreadsheets, stock screens, etc.), but leaves the final decision of what to buy, or not to buy, with them.
About John Kingham
I started investing in the 1990s, putting some money aside each month into a FTSE All-Share index tracker. That worked nicely during the late 90’s dot-com boom, but the dot-com bust of the early 2000s saw me lose almost half of my life savings.
To say that changed my view of passive investing would be an understatement.
So I decided to look into investing more seriously in order to understand exactly why the market had crashed by 50%.
I read dozens of books and tried every investment strategy under the sun (or at least that’s what it felt like) until eventually I read The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham.
Graham’s idea that investments should be viewed as part ownership of actual companies made complete sense to me and I was hooked on his value investing approach.
I began my journey as a value investor with a lot of passion but very little skill or knowledge. To help with the knowledge side of things, I decided to start a blog in 2007 called UKValueInvestor.com.
The idea was to write about my own investments and my thoughts on investing, and hopefully I could chat with other UK value investors in the comments section.
It was a success in that regard, and gradually this hobby took up more and more of my time as I refined my approach and became more and more interested in all aspects of investing.
In 2011 I launched the monthly UK Value Investor newsletter and supporting website for dividend-focused value investors and, after a few years as a side project, it now occupies me full-time.
As well as writing the UK Value Investor blog and newsletter, I also write the regular Dividend Hunter column for Master Investor magazine.
In 2016 I was very happy to have my book, The Defensive Value Investor, published by Harriman House.
In 2017 I contributed a chapter to the 2017 edition of Harriman’s New Book of Investing Rules: The Do’s and Don’ts of the World’s Best Investors.
About the UK Value Investor newsletter
The investment newsletter is where I publish the stock screen along with all of the current holdings in the UK Value Investor portfolio.
The portfolio is managed according to my defensive value investing strategy. Subscribers get to see a lot of detail about its current holdings and what companies are being added to or removed from the portfolio.
Subscribers also have access to an online version of the stock screen as well as worksheets and spreadsheets which can be used to analyse companies.
In short, all of my personal investment research and tools are available for subscribers to use as they wish.
Why investors subscribe to UK Value Investor
- It’s factual. Research is based on facts as much as possible and speculation is kept to a minimum.
- It’s educational. Jargon is kept to a minimum all buy and sell decisions are explained as fully and as clearly as possible.
- It follows a sensible, hype-free approach. UK Value Investor’s tone is calm, free of hyperbole and focused on quality companies and long-term results.
- It has a good track record. The model portfolio has beaten the FTSE All-Share since inception in 2011, with a higher yield, higher growth and less risk (although of course future results are not guaranteed).
Values, beliefs, standards
The overriding goal is to show subscribers how to build a high-yield, low-risk, long-term portfolio by applying a defensive value strategy. This takes priority over everything else and the newsletter’s core principles are encapsulated in the following list:
- Be professional. Put subscribers’ long-term interests first.
- Be transparent. Make public the model portfolio’s performance results as well as the final results of every individual investment.
- Focus on improvement. Work hard to learn from every investment, whether good or bad. Learning should never stop because no investment strategy is perfect.
Subscribers should:
- Be committed to achieving good results
- Have a long-term outlook
- Be able to cope with market declines without panicking at the first sign of trouble
- Accept that the future is an uncertain place and be willing to invest despite that uncertainty
- Ask questions if they’re unsure of anything, even if it seems like a daft question
- Give honest and detailed feedback on what they do or don’t find valuable in their subscription