A New Hope......

So, today I took a risk ... although obviously it shouldn't be because you don't risk your future (by doing silly things like running your pension yourself without any financial services experience).

I have been reading about CAPE which is a way of measuring the value of a market against its average - it's supposed to be a real hardcore value investor approach to reviewing markets.  Unsurprisingly, Europe totally sucks at the moment - and it's CAPE reflects that.

So, looking down the list, where'd you think I went for? Greece? No. Portugal?  Yes, you got it - Portugal. 

But I went for a very interesting company there - one that my colleague at work commented 'how do you find these companies?!'.  EDP, or Energias de Portugal, is the former state electricity company - and it is awesome.  Why?  Well, a couple of things I really like about it:

1. It is the majority shareholder in EDP Renováveis - the world's third largest wind farm builder and operator
2. The Chinese have bought into it in a big way but do not control it.

It also has some tasty fundamentals which you can see on the investor's page - so it's paying consistent, increasing dividends - and the yield is 7.67% on Google Finance at the moment.   It's also got good geographical coverage - Spain, Portugal, Brazil, France, Poland, Romania, Belgium and the United States.  Dividend cover was 1.68 for the 2011 dividend - not initially attractive, until you consider this is a utility in a depressed state going through horrendous austerity because of Germany.  It's not going to get any worse unless the global financial system goes into meltdown (hopefully my gold holding will cover my ass in that eventuality!)

Other things I was looking at this month were getting involved in some forestry investment companies, or potentially more Unilever or Carnival Cruises - because they are both nice and boring with dividends that keep coming (60% of historic stock market growth has come from dividends, remember!).

Ok, that's all for today.  Hopefully no more African Barrick Gold events in this second Chinese-contacted business....