1. @VVS our NSE is very unpredictable. In fact I don't have much faith in Buy and Hold strategy anymore. It seems safer to trade seasonal and rumour based trends, take profits and move on.

2. Fundamentally good stocks stay depressed for too long. More value is unlocked by takeovers and attempted takeovers rather than open market action e.g. Rea Vipingo, Access, Unilever, Carbacid, Stanbic, KK, Express, Unga, City Trust etc. Long frustrating wait for minority shareholders.

3. Few true Blue Chips. There is always something around the corner to strangle the prospects of good companies e.g. price/ tariff regulation for banks, Oil marketers, telecomms... impudent loans by public utilities... political interference/ theft on parastatals like KQ, Uchumi, Mumias... Arbitrary and excessive taxation on alcohol, cigarettes and airtime... toxic politics for tourism and services... tenderprenuerism in Oil Marketing and Digital broadcasting.

4. Weak regulatory structure allowing too much cooking of books. You can't tell if you have a gem or a monkey e.g. ADSS, Home Afrika, Eveready, Sameer allowed to con Wanjiku with pie in the sky projections.

5. Out of the 80 or so companies that listed on the NSE, less than 10 have been worthy of being held for more than 10 years. Safaricom, BAT, Jubilee, Equity, Kakuzi somehow beat the odds to grow in the longterm.

CMA considers special board for limping firms

Hujuma...

This country is simply messed up

In making investments, I have always believed that you must act with discipline whenever you see something you truly like. To explain this philosophy, Buffett/Munger likes to use a baseball analogy that I find particularly illuminating, though I myself am not at all a baseball expert. Ted Williams is the only baseball player who had a .400 single-season hitting record in the last seven decades. In the Science of Hitting, he explained his technique. He divided the strike zone into seventy-seven cells, each representing the size of a baseball. He would insist on swinging only at balls in his ‘best’ cells, even at the risk of striking out, because reaching for the ‘worst’ spots would seriously reduce his chances of success. As a securities investor, you can watch all sorts of business propositions in the form of security prices thrown at you all the time. For the most part, you don’t have to do a thing other than be amused. Once in a while, you will find a ‘fat pitch’ that is slow, straight, and right in the middle of your sweet spot. Then you swing hard. This way, no matter what natural ability you start with, you will substantially increase your hitting average. One common problem for investors is that they tend to swing too often. This is true for both individuals and for professional investors operating under institutional imperatives, one version of which drove me out of the conventional long/short hedge fund operation. However, the opposite problem is equally harmful to long-term results: You discover a ‘fat pitch’ but are unable to swing with the full weight of your capital. ~ Li Liu, Himalayan Capital