The Investment Page
Some currently interesting investing ideas include:
1) Buy Gold. With the US and other governments printing money to finance budget deficits, Gold is an attractive 2 to 3 year bet. It looks like rates will stay low making the cost of foregone yield negligible.
2) Buy Oil. With Available global reserves already past the "Peak Oil" point, and emerging market demand likely to continue to grow, Oil could rise by 50-100% over the next 3 years given supply constraints.
3) Some interesting small cap stocks (all AIM listed in the UK) worth looking at include: West China Cement; Pantheon Resources and UKR Product group. The latter is a Ukranian dairy producer which trades on c 11c 1H09 annualised earnings but only 4.3x 2007 and 6.2x 2008 and would appear to have some upside from current levels with minimal net debt.
4) Ryanair is currently has a Mkt Cap of c€4bn has €1bn of excess cash and probably earn c€300m as a sustainable runrate putting the stock on c10x stable earnings. Within 3 years, earnings can probably reach €400m implying c30% upside. Key person risk remains since Ryanair strategy critically depends on Michael O'Leary.
Update on Ryanair 20th December: Ryanair announced on Friday that they were terminating negotiations with Boeing to buy 200 aircraft and are more likely to pay a large cash dividend to shareholders as a result. The Ryanair share price has appreciated 20% in the last two weeks. We continue to find Ryanair attractive at current levels.