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I’m pleased to announce you (and some new readers, hopefully) will now be seeing some Wexboy posts syndicated over on Stockopedia! Of course, you’re the very first to find out. Well, after my dear old parents, that is… C’mon, it’s been sooooo long since I could bring home a rosette (look left/scroll down) 🙂 What’s this digital crap anyway, I want the real thing! To add to my dusty gymkhana rosette collection...

Here’s the first syndicated post: Correlation…Schmorrelation!

Uhoh, I forgot there might be comments popping up there… And the first comment’s a goody! Yes, agreed, Begbies Traynor (BEG:LN) management certainly seems pretty clueless – judging from the share price & my own reading to date. But they’ve been cutting a lot of dead wood recently (good restructuring practice, eh? ;-)), so it’s worth a deeper dig to figure out how they’re shaping up now. But I have other UK candidates (in the ‘distressed‘ business) to look over, which I suspect will offer far better operational/financial histories.

Oh Lord, now I’ve just got to figure out how to keep up & comment on Stockopedia too. A good complaint, though… You know, I experienced real guilt for the first time in years when I started neglecting my Facebook (FB:US) 😉 Ever get that feeling? What a drag… And now Facebook’s becoming an intolerable mash-up of links, likes, dodgy apps/bots, and creepy/clumsy marketing. Which is starting to completely obscure the original cool feature(s) of Facebook – the ability to keep up with your (extended network of) friends…without having to actually interact with them! The fact people’s individual pages have now become virtually unreadable (with the new Timeline) is goddamned annoying too. Having one’s entire family, including some dear old aunts, on there now certainly doesn’t up the coolness factor either!

The cliche really is true – I’m sure the IPO marked a significant milestone. And I think Facebook’s basically doomed... Well, OK, I don’t mean literally! But its coolness, its usability, its addictiveness seem to have clearly peaked. Something like (Total Users * Total Usage per User) would be a v informative metric I’d like to see them calculate & track – pretty sure they won’t! Ultimately, I suspect Facebook as we know it will mutate, or be submerged, into something else. Funnily enough, I think that future might prove strangely familiar for some folks – I hope to return to that subject another day…

Anyway, back to Stockopedia: Check it out!

Yes, they do have a monthly (or much cheaper annual) charge for certain sections of the website – i.e. tools, screeners, reports etc. If you’re backing away now in alarm, that may actually be a good sign…you’re probably a more serious (value?) investor. Bearing that in mind, note they might just have some v useful stuff for you..!

If you’re not persuaded, no worries – I can just point you to plenty of free, lively & v informative (full of nods & winks) message boards instead 😉 Oh, er – perhaps they’re not as free as they seem. God, there are far too many naive investors out there reading those boards, and they’ll inevitably wake up some day with most/all of their savings gone up in smoke (or should I say, dust)…

JJB Sports (JJB:LN) is the latest in the ongoing parade of bloody disasters these message boards cluster (****) around. It was amazing to see people merrily buying shares here, when the board had already warned ‘there can be no assurance that any proposal or offer that may be made would attribute value to the ordinary shares of the Company‘. And that was over 3 bloody weeks ago! When will people ever learn? If a board starts saying ‘no assurance’ & the like, what they really mean is: Computer says No! The dunce hat should really go to the message boarder who came out with that old chestnut: Plenty of upside here, folks, and only 0.4p of downside – worth a punt! Yes, that’s right, only a likely 100% of downside there… I’d post a couple of the more entertaining/egregious links for your entertainment, but it would just get the inmates far too bloody excited…

But seriously:  Stockopedia is probably about the best UK investing site available, with a large readership and a great mix of screening/investment tools, analysis & commentary. Here’s a nice tour of the site, and a free trial – give it a whirl! They’ve also published an excellent book recently: ‘How to Make Money in Value Stocks’. I can definitely recommend a copy – after all, yours truly pops up once or twice in it, how can you resist?! In fact, I’ve already written a book review (and commented on their analytics) here – I’m a fan.

Looking back at that post, I can’t help but finish up with a repeat of a recent gem my wife said to me – make of it what you will!

‘I don’t get it – you’d literally lie down in the street & cry if you lost a twenty, but you don’t even blink if you lose 5 grand on your portfolio…WTH?!‘*

* Yes, I know, I originally wrote ‘WTF?!‘ Knowing my wife, and my mind, I’m pretty confident I was in the wrong there… I’d be in a little bit of trouble if she actually kept up with reading this blog faithfully like she promised xoxo