The goal of this page is to get you up to speed as quickly as possible so you can get the most from your subscription. But before you begin, could you please answer this quick one question survey? Thank you.
Finding your way around
The best way to navigate around this website is by using the dashboard. It contains links to all the subscriber-only parts of the site, including the latest monthly newsletters, tools such as the interactive stock screen and investment worksheets, background reading materials and your login details.
You may be itching to look at the interactive stock screen or the latest monthly newsletters. If you want to have a look at those first then that’s fine, but I would suggest you come back here to learn more about the underlying investment strategy.
Understanding the ‘defensive value’ investment strategy
One of the best places to get started with understanding the defensive value approach is to take a look at the free resources page. It includes:
- A brief investment strategy guide. This will give you an an overview of the defensive value strategy and should only take a few minutes to read.
- Company Analysis Worksheets. There are worksheets covering both the quantitative and qualitative sides of the investment process. Use these to do your own investment research.
- Company Analysis Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will automatically calculate all of the various factors that the stock screen is based on (such as growth rate, growth quality and so on).
- Portfolio Analysis Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will work out how diversified a portfolio is in terms of position sizes and exposure to particular sectors. It will also allow you to rank whatever stocks you like (even those not on the stock screen) using the same ranking system as the stock screen.
Applying the investment strategy
Building a defensive value portfolio – If you’d like to organise your own portfolio along the same or similar lines to the model portfolio then you should read this article. It contains a few ideas about how a portfolio can be moved from cash, investment trusts or similar, into a diversified portfolio of shares.
Other useful websites
You won’t find vast amounts of financial data for hundreds of stocks on this site, mostly because there are many other sites already doing a good job of that and much of it is available for free. Here are some sites that I like:
ShareScope/SharePad – This is where I get the long-term financial data needed to build the stock screen and analyse companies in detail.
Morningstar – Provides 5 years of financial data on UK and international stocks for free.
InvestEgate – This is my preferred method of reading company results and announcements. It’s quick to browse and easy to set up company-specific notifications for new regulatory or other news.
London Stock Exchange – You can see 5 years of financial data for free, and they also provide email alerts of regulatory and other news.
Sharelockholmes – Not free, but you get a lot of data for a low price. It’s the service I used before switching to ShareScope.
If there is anything else you’d like to know then please email me at john@ukvalueinvestor.com. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch as I’m here to help where I can.