
Whilst our investment in Costain, a UK-based company that designs and builds sustainable infrastructure, is showing us a paper profit of 25% since April 2024 - our investment in Taylor Wimpey has been disappointing.
TAYLOR WIMPEY: We invested in this company in August 2024 after being convinced by the governments promise of a surge in UK housing construction. Our purchase price was 166 and it is now sittig at 114, showing us a paper loss of 32%.
Well, you would think at our age we should know not to be swayed by government promises!
The company has been severely compromised by having to spend almost £88 million on cladding fire safety provisions. This meant that their pre tax profits fell from £237 million to just £99 million in 2024.
The company announced “Looking ahead Taylor Wimpey will enter 2025 with a strong orderbook and with its skills and tenacity in the strategic land market it is well-placed to take advantage of Labour’s reform of the planning system.”
We will continue to hold in the hope of an improvement during 2025. It is early days for us having only held the share for a few months.
Relx: On a brighter note our investment in Relx is looking promising. Relx is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers, enabling them to make better decisions.
In 2024 growth accelerated to 7% supported by the initial benefit of Lexis+ AI which applies generative AI to its authoritative content to drive significant productivity benefits for lawyers.
JPMorgan quoted: "Anything that mentions AI sounds like steps in the right direction".
Our average purchase price was 3613 and the share is now sitting at 3951 showing us a paper profit of almost 10%. We will hold onto this investment and indeed invested a further £1000 this month. As always we are an optimistic bunch of ladies.
Croda: Those who read our column regularly will know that Croda was one of the first investments we made back in the year 2000. We have added to our holding over the years, making our average purchase price 2887. The share is now sitting at 3307 showing us a paper pofit of just 15% (it has been much higher over the years).
Our Chairman, Hazel, reports on this share monthly and wrote the following article for our January meeting.
Celebrating its centenary this year, Croda began when founders (Crowe and Dawe)
became the first domestic producers of lanolin, a wax derived from sheep’s wool.
Today the specialist chemicals company is a global leader enjoying £1.7bn of sales in its
latest annual report, from a variety of products – including a substance that makes
plastic bags slippy so you can peel them apart.
Charles Stanley, whilst realising the shares have fallen sharply from their high of 2021,
thinks the ebb may be about to start flowing: “Many of its customers filled their stock
rooms to the brim during the pandemic. These companies have been slowly working
through extra inventories, so orders in many areas of its niche business have plunged.”
We are holding on to this share.
Raspberry Pie: Raspberry Pi Holdings PLC (RPI) is a company that designs and develops low-cost, single-board computers (SBCs). The company's mission is to make computing more accessible to people around the world.
We investigated investing into this company back in the summer of 2024, however decided against it. How wrong we were!
The share price back then was 400 - it is now sitting at 684 - an 80% increase.
Some you win, some you lose! We will continue to watch with interest.
Decisions:
Having seen some positive reports on Simec Atlantis Engineering, it was decided to invest a further £400 into this company. We now hold an impressive 90,000 shares in Simec -Wouldn't it be good if the positive reports come to fruition!
As previously mentioned we also invested a further £1000 into Relx.
So that's it for our January report.
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR FOLLOWERS
MAY 2025 BE A GREAT YEAR FOR OUR INVESTMENTS.
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