Chart Update, page-1805

Tied to Athena's traits mentioned earlier, there is the question of motivation and personal style. Some folk are flashy, impulsive, energetic, et cetera, but useless at boring things, and thinking long-term is not their strength. These people may be good at starting, companies, but they can be hopeless at managing them later. Then you get managers who can steer a steady course for decades. In a time and milieu when NWH performed well, RCR Tomlinson, Brierty (BYL) and others in the same sector floundered.

The debt collecting and short-term unsecured loan sector (poverty stocks) attracts a fair share of criticism, and firms like Collection House (CLH), Pioneer Credit (PNC) and Thorn Group (TGA) have had their problems, but it is a mistake to think it is an inherently bad sector. CCP is a stellar company under a management team that rescued it in 2008 from the Flash Harries who ran it before. CCP's current management are superb at making serious money, that suffices to fund generous dividends and grow concurrently in a sector where others have failed. CCP is my best investment by a mile, with NWH being second best. Brierty and Thorn Group were my worst.

I often pair investments, and I paired BYL and NWH, and similarly TGA and CCP. It is the personalities behind NWH and CCP that made such a remarkable difference in respect to these two sets of pairs. Watch top management traits like a hawk. I also hold a small Perth-based company, FFI, that is superbly managed by an honest man, Rodney Moonen, who is very thrifty, and he pays himself very little by comparison with similarly sized companies, FFI is an illiquid stock that I do not recommend for that reason, but which I have happily held for yonks.