Who writes this and why is it about investing?

I’m Rawdon Adams, raised and educated in Barbados, the US and the UK. I now live in France and write Capital Chronicle from near Grenoble. Why Grenoble? Click on the image above.

I began investing at university - it looked straightforward enough; you could buy, sleep, wake up the next day and magically be worth more than the day before. My first investment was in the mid 1980s in the US company Claire’s Stores (now in private hands). It tripled inside a year - that was the hook and a fluke!


What do you know about it?

My 'employee' background is operational finance, the coal face of most Finance Planning & Accounting departments: first at the UK's Treasury; then Xerox; and then General Electric.

I have worked as either an analyst or controller on both the P&L (revenue and base costs) and balance sheet; and have had responsibility for key aspects of working capital control - most notably inventory. My last two financial control roles encompassed budgets of US$50m (controller, R&D) and US$150m (consolidation & analysis, European pole inventory) - generously sized numbers which were mostly a function of working for the world's largest company by market capitalisation at the time.

It is nonetheless useful to have had my arms around budgets sometimes bigger than the market worth of the companies I now analyze. For, inevitably, significant operational experience teaches much about coming in on budget, deadlines, auditors, provisions, revenue recognition, reserve allocation etc etc. And experiencing the internal pressure a firm faces in managing its finances – particularly its working capital – helps subsequent investment analysis in a way perhaps not always apparent to others. A straightforward example might be the relationship between inventory turns, sales and cash.


Why publish?

I co-founded an equity investment vehicle in 2000; and writing was initially a means of testing an idea - publishing, and its attendant potential for embarrassment, encourages logical rigour (usually). But along the way the writing itself has become an important pleasure.


Why the revamp of the site in March 2008?

Three principal motives: firstly, to tinker with a better design - fun for a gadget lover.

Secondly, to create advertising space the absence of which, although this is what euphemistically may be called a ‘niche’ site, has led to me being officially labelled a moron in my own home.

And thirdly, to expand on small-company analyses which the new layout should permit to be warehoused more systematically and, hopefully, usefully to readers.

A footnote to the small company writing: an expansion in output here is a result of several factors the most important being that it is an area in which most investors are not spoiled for choice when it come to free information and pertinent comment. It is also the closest to my real job the site gets.

Please have a read of the ‘Investment Approach’ section for more detail.


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