The best and the worst performing JSE shares: 2010-2015

http://financialmarketsjournal.co.za/the-best-and-the-worst-performing-shares-2010-2015/

Best on return

Calgro
Finbond
Adaptit
Alaris
Micromega
Eoh
Trustco
Indequity
Santova
Fortress


Best Top 40

Naspers
Mondi
Aspen
Woolworths
Steinhoff
Mediclinic
Richemont
Old Mutual
Discovery
Sanlam


Best risk-adjusted

EOH
CapCo
Coronation
PSG
Calgro
NEPI
Fortress
Mondi
Resilient
Naspers


Worst

Alert Steel
African Bank
Evraz
1Time
Aquarius
Rare
Great Basin Gold
Sea Kay
Delrand

Miranda Mineral 

Jeremy Grantham GMO on markets

"Jeremy Grantham, founder and chief investment strategist of GMO, a $118bn investment house based in Boston, expects the stock market to continue to march higher in the coming year, eventually sucking in retail investors and setting up a serious decline around the time of the US elections in late 2016."

Online Stock Analysis tools

http://quotes.wsj.com/SPG/research-ratings
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/spg/analyst-research
http://money.cnn.com/quote/forecast/forecast.html?symb=spg

The life cycle of firms

People tend to parrot Warren Buffett too often. One of my pet peeve "Buffet-isms" is "our favorite holding period is forever". We as humans cannot gauge the future, how the economy will shift, what new technologies will arise, or how consumer preferences will change.

The important message from Warren Buffett is that it is good to have a long term holding period, but personally I think this should be much shorter than 'forever'. You don't want to focus on quarterly performance and overtrade, so a good middle ground is 5-10 years.

A good example of a company that shifts, GAP.
What they sold was just not in fashion anymore. Management, no matter how skilled, cannot fight this trend.

GAP could have been a great buy 10 years ago. But its a very different world now.

Explaining US growth outperformance

PIMCO recently out out a short note talking about US economic outperformance relative to DM peers. Their summary is reproduced below:

Q: The U.S. appears to be the furthest advanced in its post-crisis normalization among developed countries. Why? And what is the chance of a surprise to the upside for growth or inflation? 
Mather: There are three key reasons why the U.S. is furthest along. First, the U.S. was more aggressive in its response to the financial crisis through monetary policy, with interest rate cuts and quantitative easing. Second, private balance sheets were cleaned up more quickly, even if through defaults. Third, new regulation forced banks in the U.S. to recapitalize sooner than those in other countries. Many developed nations simply took longer to respond to the crisis for a variety of reasons, so it is not unexpected that the U.S. is further along in the normalization process.

This is the standard explanation of the US economy since the crisis. In my personal opinion this is an INCORRECT representation of the economic forces that were at play. US came just into a period of surplus, primarily from the fracking boom. This created a jobs, investment and current account boost that outweighed all policy actions that were taken. It's a recurring problem that investment analysts downplay the enormity of the US fracking revolution. 

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