Bouleversee wrote:Agreed, Geng. I had been reading and posting on the other board and only posted here because someone had raised it. ...
Actually I wasn't responding to you at all, but the earlier posts in the thread, especially the OP - I hadn't even seen your post when I submitted mine! Not very surprising, because the times of our posts say to me that you submitted yours while I was researching and composing mine, and while the TLF software tries to let posters know if someone else has posted to the thread while they've been writing and give them a chance to reconsider, it does so in a flawed way... Specifically, it does the check each time one previews or submits, only checking for posts since one last previewed, or started the reply if one hasn't yet previewed. If somebody has posted since then, it tells one about it in a very noticeable way if one is submitting, but in a very
unnoticeable way if one is previewing...
Bouleversee wrote:Do you buy tobacco shares? ...
I have bought very small holdings of BATS and Imperial Brands in the '1/8th scale' real-money versions of my demo portfolios GDHYP and CHYP1, and might do some similarly small top-ups of them in the future. Other than that, no, I don't buy tobacco shares. That's for ethical reasons, and the fact that I do hold them in the demo portfolios is because of a conflict between two ethical principles of mine, which I have managed to resolve to my satisfaction. That resolution only works because the demo portfolios are a tiny fraction of my overall investment portfolio - well under 1%. (I won't go into further detail of my ethical reasons here, as their only relevance to the board's topic is that they're personal feelings that affect my own HYP choices. If anyone does want to discuss them, I think the
Other Investing board is probably the most suitable one on TLF.)
If I didn't have the ethical objections that I do, yes, I would buy them.
Bouleversee wrote:... Also very specialist retailers and probably a declining market. ...
No, they're not very specialist retailers - they're not retailers of any kind! They're
producers of tobacco products.
And to anticipate an obvious reply to that, yes, they are very specialist producers. But producers of one type of product or another are a far higher proportion on the companies on the market than retailers, and they're generally more specialised than retailers. Those combine to make a prejudice against specialist producers much more difficult to maintain in practice than one against specialist retailers.
In any case, as I said, none of the points I raised is enough on its own for me to rule a share out of my HYP. I do regard being a very specialist producer as a point against tobacco companies - it renders them potentially very vulnerable e.g. to anti-tobacco legislation or to changes in public attitudes towards tobacco - but not one serious enough to rule them out. Basically,
every HYP share has some bad points...
And those vulnerabilities are mitigated by the fact that they're global companies. A tobacco company whose market was purely the UK or purely any other single country would be horribly vulnerable to that country's government deciding to pass stringent anti-tobacco laws or tobacco use becoming deeply unfashionable among that country's people, making it risky enough that I would be very reluctant to include such a company in a HYP even if I had no ethical objections. For companies like BATS and Imperial Brands, however, any single country undergoing such developments would basically be just a pinprick.
As for the declining market, maybe - but if so, it's a very slow decline and so (a) the companies have plenty of time to adapt to it; (b) I don't feel any confidence in any views I can form about whether it will reverse or not before its effect accumulates seriously, nor in anyone else's views on that question. Basically, predictions are hard, especially ones about the future - and
especially especially about the long-term future!
Gengulphus