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Game For A Shop
Jan. 6th, 2006 07:19 amA few years ago, just before the beginning of Lord of the Rings mania, I had a look at the share price of Games Workshop and idly considered an investment. I think that it was about 147p at the time. I had always maintained something of an interest in GW, going back as it does to the days of games fanzines in the 1970s. Tom Kirby is still CEO there. Tom was at TSR for quite awhile.
Anyway, because I always appear to myself to be congenitally incapable of making a correct investment decision when it comes to equities (this isn't true -- I just "forget" the successes and remember the failures) I didn't put in any money. Next thing I know, the rest of the City catches on to the fact that GW is selling kaboodles of LotR stuff and the share price rockets.
Did the investors expect this to last forever? What timeframe are these fund managers on? Three months? Anyway, for the past year or so the price has been coming back down as some of the fund managers have come to realize that, no, the super increase in sales at GW was not a permanent increase, but a "one-off" benefit.
Today GW has announced a fairly serious decline in profits, although it has adopted the standard trick these days of maintaining its dividend, and I guess the markets will hit it accordingly. But, once again, none of this should be a surprise. As GW points out, all the signs were there for anyone with their eyes open.
It all tends to make something of a nonsense of the "efficient market" theory and to lead one to believe that, yes, it should be easy to make money on the stockmarket if you devoted yourself to company analysis full-time and stuck to companies (and sectors) that you understood.
I particularly liked the line from GW that began "Greater operational efficiency from the capital investments at Memphis and Nottingham...
I dunno; they are just not two cities that you see juxtaposed in such a fashion all that often.
++++
Yesterday was just a plain shitty day at work. I like my job, even though it's a lonely job and getting up in the morning seems to get harder every year. I suspect that, like quite a few poker players, I am virtually unemployable, so the fact that I have a job at all is a miracle of modern economics.
But the company drives me mad. It seems full of 20 or 30-somethings who don't seem to care. There is virtually no emphasis on product -- everything is marketing and sales. And I think the marketing and sales groups see editorial as a necessary irritant. So, I'm isolated within an isolated environment. I feel no affinity for 95% of the people I work with and utter contempt for about 50%. It doesn't make for a happy life, and it's only the satisfaction I get from "a job well done" (usually in the face of obstruction elsewhere in the company) that keeps me going.
Oh, and the money, of course.
Anyway, because I always appear to myself to be congenitally incapable of making a correct investment decision when it comes to equities (this isn't true -- I just "forget" the successes and remember the failures) I didn't put in any money. Next thing I know, the rest of the City catches on to the fact that GW is selling kaboodles of LotR stuff and the share price rockets.
Did the investors expect this to last forever? What timeframe are these fund managers on? Three months? Anyway, for the past year or so the price has been coming back down as some of the fund managers have come to realize that, no, the super increase in sales at GW was not a permanent increase, but a "one-off" benefit.
Today GW has announced a fairly serious decline in profits, although it has adopted the standard trick these days of maintaining its dividend, and I guess the markets will hit it accordingly. But, once again, none of this should be a surprise. As GW points out, all the signs were there for anyone with their eyes open.
It all tends to make something of a nonsense of the "efficient market" theory and to lead one to believe that, yes, it should be easy to make money on the stockmarket if you devoted yourself to company analysis full-time and stuck to companies (and sectors) that you understood.
I particularly liked the line from GW that began "Greater operational efficiency from the capital investments at Memphis and Nottingham...
I dunno; they are just not two cities that you see juxtaposed in such a fashion all that often.
++++
Yesterday was just a plain shitty day at work. I like my job, even though it's a lonely job and getting up in the morning seems to get harder every year. I suspect that, like quite a few poker players, I am virtually unemployable, so the fact that I have a job at all is a miracle of modern economics.
But the company drives me mad. It seems full of 20 or 30-somethings who don't seem to care. There is virtually no emphasis on product -- everything is marketing and sales. And I think the marketing and sales groups see editorial as a necessary irritant. So, I'm isolated within an isolated environment. I feel no affinity for 95% of the people I work with and utter contempt for about 50%. It doesn't make for a happy life, and it's only the satisfaction I get from "a job well done" (usually in the face of obstruction elsewhere in the company) that keeps me going.
Oh, and the money, of course.
