As you may have gathered, I am increasingly of the view that London’s Alternative Investment Market is, to use the technical term, buggered. It is heading the way of the old USM (younger readers please do a Google search). Those who could save the day are simply too busy instead grubbing out deals to pay their bloated wages and expense bills, to make the changes needed The situation gets worse by the day…
Less than 20% of the companies on AIM are profitable. Such is the poor quality of many of them, and so limited is their earnings visibility, that I would not bet more than a few of Evil Knievil’s increasingly worthless Ruspetro shares on many of those 200 making a profit this year!
Chatting to Nigel Wray, “Britain’s Buffett” over the weekend, he made it clear that he had not invested in any new companies on Aim for several years. That says it all. Wray, arguably the UK’s most successful small cap investor of the past thirty years, would rather invest in private companies than on stocks listed on AIM. Why is that? Because Wray is an investor not a gambler.
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