Laura Foll, Lowland Investment Company Fund Manager On Finding Value In UK Stocks Where Others Don’t

Holly Mead (00:00.898)
Welcome to Good Money Guide and the latest in our series of fund manager interviews where we aim to find out more about the people managing your money and where exactly they’re investing it. I’m Holly Mead and today we are joined by Laura Foll. She’s manager of the Lowland Investment Company. Hello. So tell us a little bit about what Lowland does because unlike a lot of funds, the name is not exactly doing what it says on the tin there.

Laura Foll (00:17.07)
Thanks for having me.

Laura Foll (00:25.806)
No, Lowland wouldn’t give you much of a clue. So it’s a UK equity income trust. And the difference with it is that it invests across the market cap spectrum. So what I mean by that is that it invests in small, medium and larger companies. And the theory behind that is that we’re looking across the UK market for the best opportunities for our shareholders for both capital and income growth.

Holly Mead (00:45.518)
And does it tend to be quite consistent the split of small, mid and large cap, or do you have periods where you are massively into one of those buckets?

Laura Foll (00:53.838)
Yeah, it’s a good question. The short answer is no, in that at the moment we’d be more large cap than we have been historically. We’d be about 50 % large cap at the moment. And that’s because for a number of years, I think a lot of watchers would probably sympathise. It’s been a very uncertain market, a very uncertain economy. So we’ve sort of retreated in a way to some of those FTSE 100 more defensive names that I think would be familiar to a lot of people, the kind of GSKs and HSBCs of the world. But actually, if anything, we’re now slowly shifting back the other way because those small and medium sized companies have had often a really tough time share price wise, not always fundamentals and sort of how they’re trading. Share price wise, they’ve had a tough time. So we’re sort of slowly shifting back to small and mid cap.

Holly Mead (01:34.734)
Okay, and does your heart lie in one of those areas in particular?

Laura Foll (01:38.666)
I suppose, being honest, my heart probably lies in small and mid cap because in a way it makes my life easier because there’s less people covering it. So if you spend more time with a smaller medium sized company, getting the management, going on a site visit and that kind of thing, there’s just less people trying to cover those companies with you. Whereas if you look at how many people are trying to know the absolute most about HSBC or Astra or whatever it is, that’s really hard to compete with.

So think we’re more likely to have an edge, if you like, at the smaller mood cap end.

Holly Mead (02:11.714)
Like it’s probably harder to get a site visit at HSBC for example just ’cause you’ve picked that name out than and to then get really under the skin of a company.

Laura Foll (02:22.058)
Yeah, I think it’s more the latter. You can probably go to wherever you like, to do a GSK site visit. You know, they’re in the middle of Oxford Street in London. It would be quite easy but would it give you… These companies are so large. If we’re about the FTSE 100 companies, would seeing one site or meeting one senior manager give you that much of an insight in such a large company? I don’t know. Whereas if you go on a site visit to… I went on lots of site visits. It’s now been taken over.

I went to see Epwin, which is sort of doors and window frames in the UK. Lots of times I would meet the CEO, we would go around together. You know, you spend so much time with the CEO, the CFO that you, really felt like I was one of the people that knew that company. Probably the best in the market because there just weren’t many people looking at that company. And realistically, that’s very hard to replicate with the much larger FTSE 100 names.

Holly Mead (03:15.534)
Yeah. So give us a flavour of the portfolio at the moment. What are a couple of names in your top ten?

Laura Foll (03:21.518)
So the top 10, not to sort of cop out of your question, but Lowland has 100 holdings. It’s not, it’s the way we do the investment process is it’s value and it’s quite contrarian. So we deliberately have quite a long list. So the top 10 doesn’t necessarily give you a huge amount of flavour for probably the more interesting names, kind of lower down.

Holly Mead (03:41.634)
What percentage of the portfolio is the top ten?

Laura Foll (03:44.142)
Oh, it would be 20 % or it would be pretty low. But to give you one name in the top 10 that is maybe a bit different that wouldn’t be held elsewhere would be something like Serica Energy, which is one of the biggest North Sea oil and gas producers that has come up from AIM. It’s still on AIM, although it’s about to move to the main market. And when it does, it would be in 50-50. So it will probably get more attention once it makes that move. But it’s really benefited, as you probably imagine, from the Middle East situation and therefore oil and gas prices going up.

So for something like Serica Energy, which hasn’t hedged all of its gas production, this higher gas prices would be really meaningfully positive for that type of company.

Holly Mead (04:22.744)
Do you have many investments in AIM?

Laura Foll (04:25.058)
We do, it would be a sort of teens percent of the portfolio, but to be honest, we don’t differentiate hugely between say the FTSE small cap and AIM and actually we’re seeing quite a few of the more established AIM companies that we’ve held move up to the main market. So something like a Johnson Service Group, which is textile rental, has already made that move and we’re seeing quite a few companies think about making that move. So we don’t spend a huge amount of time thinking, well, this is on AIM and this is on the main market, because actually I think they can be quite interchangeable.

And we’ve seen one holding actually go the other way. Ultimate products went from the main market to AIM, so they do switch around. they doesn’t. That’s a more unusual move at the moment, but know, companies, Johnson Service Group has actually gone up and down a couple of different times, so it’s not something we worry about too much.

Holly Mead (05:12.078)
Is AIM a harder hunting ground these days? ‘Cause y you’re not getting as many companies wanting to be there or listing there, it seems. It seems like a bit of a shrinking market.

Laura Foll (05:22.796)
Yeah, it’s shrinking in as much as takeovers are happening across the UK market and some more established businesses are moving up. Mean, in a way that might be creating some opportunities for those that are still looking in the area because it has been out of favour, unloved for quite a number of years, really and has underperformed really meaningfully, say the FTSE 100 over the past five years or so.

Holly Mead (05:46.038)
Yeah. But the FTSE one hundred, when you look at the figures, it’s not got any of the love or the intention from investors, but you look at it over the long term and if you’d reinvested all your dividends, it’s actually been a great place to be. Why aren’t people seeing it?

Laura Foll (05:57.55)
Exactly right. I think a lot of UK fund managers have tried their hardest to make that point that actually the returns from the UK look good in any absolute sense. It’s only when you compare it to say the returns from the US that it’s stuck on a relative sense. It looks like it’s underperformed, but from an absolute perspective, particularly as you say, dividends are a much more material part of the total return in the UK because of the types of companies that we have. We tend to have more established, more cash-generated businesses in the UK. You think Shell and BP, you think the banks, think the miners. We don’t have much tech. Let’s be honest, the large cap tech rating is basically one company at Sage. And you can’t get away from that, but we do have some really good, more established businesses that in a time when the interest rates are higher and there’s more value on cash being made today, that those businesses have shown that they are really worth something and can throw off some cash and therefore some good dividends for people.

Holly Mead (06:58.264)
Would you like to see more tech businesses in the FTSE? Because w when we do see some of those technology minnows listing, it feels they’re going elsewhere, aren’t they, at the moment?

Laura Foll (07:09.346)
They are, I would really like to see some IPOs in things like the fintech sector because we have such a thriving fintech industry in the UK and it would be brilliant to see some of those come to market. I think when it comes to the IPO market, your CEOs, boards, they are purely rational beings and if they can see that they get a higher valuation and there’s more of an investor appetite elsewhere, then of course that’s what they’ll do. But that’s not to say that we don’t have really good in-depth expertise in some areas in the UK. And I think financial services would be one of those areas as with things like consumer staples. We had some of the bottling companies come here because we have a lot of depth in consumer staples. We have the Unilever and the Rekits already listed here. So yes, it would be great to see some tech companies listening here. Maybe FinTech, because of our financial services, industry expertise in the UK, maybe FinTech would be the more relevant subsector rather than some of the larger tech companies.

Holly Mead (08:10.926)
So with a hundred holdings in the portfolio, does that mean turnovers slightly higher than an average fund?

Laura Foll (08:18.136)
The turnover would be about 20%. So the average holding period would be five years. It would be pretty long term. And that’s a reflection of our more contrarian style. So when we’re buying things, often, you they’ve not got every box ticked. You know, we’re buying something that we think is a good quality and well managed company, but there might, there’s likely to be some sort of question mark about it. So that question mark might be, you know, the sector’s having a tough time. It might be say building materials at the moment where, we’re not building many houses in the UK so the end markets are under pressure. Or it might be that the balance sheet has got some restructuring that needs doing. So we’re buying what we think are good quality companies, but where there’s some sort of question mark about them and therefore the valuation is low. But we don’t quite know when that’s going to come right. So it lends itself to having a longer list of holdings rather than say a 40 stock list, because realistically, some of the new things we’re buying, you wouldn’t want to put two, 3 % of the portfolio in on the off.

Holly Mead (09:19.362)
How big does that question mark have to be before you don’t invest? Like it’s unusual to hear a manager say, I’ll invest while there is a question mark there.

Laura Foll (09:29.046)
It’s a really good question. For us, comes down to do we think, and we will get things wrong obviously, but do we think the issues are structural or do we think they’re cyclical and can be solved? So we have tended to avoid, not through any great foresight, but we have largely stuck to hard asset type businesses where we know that those products will still be needed in a few years time. So say, to give you a more tangible example, we have kept with something like a Marshall’s, which is a building materials company. It makes paving stones, it serves products for the water industry and that kind of thing. It’s had a really tough time because we’re not building many houses in the UK and where people can defer big items of spending, like a new patio, say, they are often doing that because those are more, they’re quite expensive projects.

So you just sort of kick them down the road. But we’ve stuck with and actually added to a holding like that because we think we will still need pavement stones. We will still need big products for the water industry, roofs, that kind of thing. But it’s having a cyclically tough time. So that’s how we sort of judge if, yes, it’s having a tough time right now, but we think the earnings can recover in the future. Whereas if it was a company where we were worried about, say, AI disintermediation or new levels of competition, then we might move on or not go into that type of holding.

Holly Mead (10:53.068)
Tell me about one of the newish names in the portfolio that you have a slight question mark over but you’re feeling good about.

Laura Foll (11:03.31)
So Marshals we’ve held for a while, but something like Breedon would definitely also fit into that subset. Breedon would be about 0.6, 0.7 % holding in Lowland. It makes aggregates, cement, concrete that would go into similar industries to marshals. And has been having a similarly tough time in the UK. But for Breedon, the UK is about two-thirds of earnings, and then it’s got 20 % in Ireland and 20 % in the States. And those two markets, Ireland and the US, are having a more comfortable time than the UK. And I think people have a tendency to think of it as a UK company and maybe underestimate just how much is overseas there. So, Breedon would be a new one and the question mark there would be the end markets.

And then another new one where the question mark again would be the end markets would be something like Young’s, which is a premium pub operator in the Southeast. It just will cub it, you know, some of those quite premium pubs in London. So, the question mark would be people’s real wages might be under pressure, particularly later in this year from the Middle East and things. But these are really premium pubs that are trading at the moment, know, at the last trading update quite well. But the shares have been pretty poor. And we bought it when it announced it was moving to AIM. So there were some shareholders that needed out because they didn’t want to move to the main market. So we sort of tried to take advantage of some technical selling and bought and holding them.

Holly Mead (12:24.726)
Do you quite commonly then see that you would buy new shares or introduce a new company into the portfolio and it would kinda get worse before it gets better?

Laura Foll (12:37.749)
Yes, sometimes that does happen. When we’ve done sort of back testing on the portfolio, it’s shown that the decisions, thankfully, do tend to come right. But sometimes with a time lag of things, I think timing is really difficult. When we’re the types of investors that we are, being more value, being more contrary, getting the timing exactly right is really challenging. And actually our view is it’s better to be there and be a bit early rather than miss it entirely. Because sometimes turnarounds, if I think back to things like M&S, that turned around a lot quicker than I thought it would turn around with the clothing business. I thought we’d be waiting quite a few years to see things like the women’s wear turn around, but actually they did it quicker. So I’m glad we didn’t sit on our hands and wait for the signs of a turnaround because we would have missed it.

Holly Mead (13:27.918)
So I wanted to ask you what kind of investor you are with your own investments and I’m particularly curious here because, you know, that value contrarian thing, is that innate or is that something that’s just for work? Or how does that side of things play out?

Laura Foll (13:44.59)
So I think a lot of fund managers, you ask them about their personal investing, it’s so far down the list as in I spend so much of my time thinking about the funds, the trust that my own personal funds are kind of at the bottom. I just own the trust that I manage basically and then a couple of other trusts because I just can’t spend much more time thinking about it. So in that sense, I am contrarian and it’s not been brilliant in that I’ve been almost 100 % UK, you know, rather than having MSCI World Trackers and that kind of thing. So in that sense, it is contrarian because it’s very UK dominated, but I don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about my own person. I probably should.

Holly Mead (14:30.846)
When you were like training and learning your profession, was being contrarian always innate in you or did was that something you had to sort of learn?

Laura Foll (14:41.832)
No, that’s a really interesting question. I’d say it’s more innate, to be honest. I think from my experience, being a value investor gives you more of a margin of error. As in, I’ve seen lots of different companies trade on lots of different multiples. So what I mean by that is something like Relx, to give you a recent example. It was very recently trading on 30 times earnings, roughly.

and now it’s trading on mid-teens-ish. And when I joined and shortly after I joined, it would have been trading on low-teens, if not high single-digit. As in that company has gone all the way from sort 10 times to 30 times and now back to 15. So you can think, you know, you might think you have a bit of an angle about the earnings growth next year for that type of company, but you would have been absolutely wiped out by that multiple going from 30 times to 15 times.

I think valuation levels and your starting point are really important. That’s just innate and it’s from watching companies derate. Really good quality companies can still derate really quite savagely on you and that can wipe out any view that you have about say next year’s earnings or six month trading. So I think valuation is really important and that’s through I suppose experience and sort of watching things over a long time.

Holly Mead (16:09.998)
Feel like this brings us quite nicely to me asking about what your best and worst ever investments are, talking about being wiped out.

Laura Foll (16:18.638)
So my worst investment, let’s start with the worst, my worst investment was this probably 10 plus years ago now. I wonder if you’ll remember it as a company. It was called Cupid and it was an online dating agency that was listed in the UK. I’m pretty sure it was on AIM and it got wiped out by Tinder basically. So it was a subscription model and then Tinder came along and totally wiped it out and over a fairly short time period actually. So it was a quite brutal experience. And what it sort of taught me is I’m still to this day really wary of companies where their only barrier to entry was how much they were spending on advertising. So they used to spend a lot on TV advertising, I think online as well. And that was their route to getting customers the only barrier was how many TV ads can they buy. And I think that’s probably why or partly why I like companies with hard assets like Marshall’s where I know that that product will still be needed. That Tinder can’t come along and wipe, you know, the equivalent of Tinder can’t come along and wipe them out. So that was a fairly brutal lesson, but one I still definitely bear in mind when I meet new companies and how much they’re spending to acquire their customers.

Holly Mead (17:39.308)
Yeah, that makes sense. Well let’s onwards and upwards. Best investment?

Laura Foll (17:43.682)
Best investment. I’m trying to make this a more relevant recent one, something like Babcock, which is the defence contractor for the MOD, its biggest customer is the MOD. They do things like submarine commissioning, that kind of thing. And what made it a good investment was that the core of the bit, a bit like M&S, the core of the business was good, but it had somewhat lost its way. It had moved away from being a purely defence contractor. It had done some expensive acquisitions, it had built up too much valiantly debt. And then a new management team come in, two guys from Cobham, a new CEO and a CFO, both called David, come in and they just say, we’re taking the business back to what it was originally good at. And I find often with turnarounds, that’s what happens. It takes someone new to come in and say, no, we’re not doing this expansion, we’re going back to what it was that made us good in the first place. And then maybe after that’s fixed, then maybe we can go and do something else.

But refocus, sort out the balance sheet, move the margins up because Babcock was making some really poor margins, improve the cash flow, tick, tick, tick. And the really powerful thing about that kind of recovery investment is that you get the earnings uplift and the valuation uplift at the same time. So something like Babcock went from being sort of 10-ish times earnings to 20 times earnings on a much higher earnings number. And that’s when you can really make an amazing total return without it being explosive levels of earnings growth. Just that combination of valuation and earnings can mean, went from sort of three-ish pounds to 15 pounds and now it’s, I think it’s back to sort of 10, 11, know, these things always do that. But I think, so that’s the type of opportunity that they’re always, they’re quite rare but you have to really be on the lookout for those ones where we think we’re sensing a turning point and you can get both at the same time.

Holly Mead (19:43.438)
And when you do get one of those isn’t you know, the hardest thing is how long do I run this winner for?

Laura Foll (19:49.014)
Also good, yeah. It’s genuinely hard because you’re quite anchored to the problems of the past and you’ve probably not timed it brilliantly well. You’re never going to get the timing exactly at the bottom. So you’re probably thinking, this is brilliant. This is coming right. I’ve been proven right. And you want to sort of take some profits and lock it in. But I think the important thing is almost to do the opposite. And I think having a team around me has been really good at those kind of points to be like, Laura stick with it. You know, it is coming right. Don’t sell it at the, you know, having May 50 cents, stick with it. But you do have to have the valuation discipline. We did, we did take quite a lot of Babcock something like last year because it got to a rating in the twenties PE wise that frankly I didn’t think I would see it on, but the defense backdrop has changed so meaningfully that that’s also been a tailwind for it. So you know, when it got to a really quite high valuation level, we did take a big chunk of profit. But I think when you get these, when there’s successes, whatever you want to call it, it’s really important to let them run.

Holly Mead (20:59.434)
It’s so hard. You almost have to reframe it of if I didn’t own it, what would I do today?

Laura Foll (21:04.718)
Yeah, exactly. I think that’s really important and actually just keep judging it. know, something like it has now derated again, so it might be an interesting opportunity again. That’s the lovely and sometimes frustrating thing about being a stock market investor that there is no end point. in, every day is a new day. You might have made the right decision yesterday, but today is a new day. Things can change. Things change all the time, every single day. So you just have to keep reassessing whether you think you’ve made the right judgement, which can be exhausting but fun.

Holly Mead (21:41.144)
Well, I mean, you said it there, things are changing all the time and I feel like that has been particularly true. I mean, I was gonna say this year, but maybe I think I saw something that is ten years since the Brexit vote this year in June. So maybe it’s been since then. But what are you expecting from the next twelve months or so?

Laura Foll (22:03.176)
Being really upfront with you I would have given you a different answer two, three months ago before the war, as in what we were expecting this year was a steady, gradual inflation comes down, interest rates come down, that probably benefits the consumer. And that’s all changed now. I think most likely, or my view is what is most likely is that we probably see a steady stage bumbling along in very technical terms. For the UK economy, we’ve seen it grow 0.6 %-ish so far this year. The whole economy is only supposed to grow about 0.8 % for the year. So flatlining, bumbling along, whatever you want to call it, I think we’ll see some pretty modest economic growth for the rest of this year. I think we’ll probably see interest rates near enough flat. The expectations at the moment are that we see maybe a tick up in rates, having previously thought they would tick down, I think in my view, we’d probably like to see more flat for the rest of the year. So not a lot of help for domestic companies from the general backdrop, which means that if we’re going to invest in domestic companies, there needs to be something else behind the investment case whether that’s infrastructure spend, we own things like Costain, which does a lot of work for the water companies where clearly there is a lot of work that needs to happen or some of the defense names where there is a defense upgrade that needs to happen. So there has to be a very specific reason for holding those more domestic names because I don’t think we’re going to get a huge amount of help from the domestic economy unless something else changes.

Holly Mead (23:42.67)
What you think it would take for investors to fall back in love with the UK?

Laura Foll (23:48.856)
So from a UK market point of view, I think we’ve got to be careful to always make the distinction between the UK market and the UK economy, as in the UK market is about three quarters-ish overseas. So it’s very tempting. I think more about domestic UK because my companies tend to are often smaller and therefore are more tied into the domestic economy on average. But for the UK market as a whole, it is pretty overseas, so about three quarters.

I’ve got to remember that we do have some really good, yes, they’re listed here, but they’re effectively international companies listed here and they’re often trading at big valuation discounts. And I know a lot of UK fund managers say that, but I think the level of takeover activity that we’re seeing in the UK to me shows that it’s not just a spreadsheet that’s showing that there’s a UK valuation discount, that it is real. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing the level of bits that we’re seeing.

It’s really live, know, every week when I come into the office, it feels at the moment that there’s another takeover happening.

Holly Mead (24:55.854)
You see people, you know, bemoaning that these companies are getting bought up or taking their listings elsewhere. But I don’t know what the solution is.

Laura Foll (25:06.478)
I think the solve has to be, you if you think the UK market’s up about 20 % over the past year. So that’s a definite re-rating, as in we haven’t seen earnings go up 20%, but the market’s up 20%. If we were to carry on with that type of trajectory, I’m not saying the market’s going to be up 20%, but when you get that re-rating, we get closer to the international valuation, and therefore you’re more likely going back to that point about boards and company management teams just being purely rational.

if they can see that the valuation is more in line here than it has been for number of years, then they’re more likely to list here. So I think we don’t want to get too downbeat. I think where we can give the right level of valuation, we can see that IPO pipeline come back. actually, frustratingly, before the war in Iran, I was starting to see some early look meetings being put in and it’s just this sort of beginning bubbles of an IPO, modest, I don’t want to overplay it, sort of modest IPO pipeline. It can happen when there’s a bit of a return of confidence.

Holly Mead (26:10.424)
Suddenly, a lot of meeting cancellations in the diary popping up. Is there anything that you can’t invest in because of the remit of the fund that you wish you could?

Laura Foll (26:21.774)
I yeah, I mean, the short answer is yes, there’s always something right. But within the confines of, if we stick to the UK rather than say, oh, you I should have bought NVIDIA. I think sort of realistically within the remit of what I do, the types of things that I sort of kick myself about are things like Halma, because we have in Lowland a big industrials rating, you know, we’ve had some good success has come out of the area, but we didn’t own Halma. And Halma’s been just the most amazing success story. It’s got to 40 times earnings. I had a look this morning, it’s compound total return over the past 20 years. It’s made 20 % a year on average. That’s absolutely phenomenal for the UK. That’s the kind of thing I kick myself about.

Holly Mead (27:12.556)
Why didn’t you invest in Halma?

Laura Foll (27:17.966)
Valuation. Being too dogmatic, whatever the word is, being too strict on sort of valuation discipline. So that’s the first thing. And then also the fact that it’s a classic sort of buy and build strategy Helma. I’m generally, this is a brilliant, it’s been a brilliant success, but I’m generally quite skeptical of that level of takeover activity. And I’ve had a couple of companies where they’ve had that sort of buy and build strategy and it’s turned out that they haven’t fully integrated what they’ve bought. And then it just becomes a bit unwieldy and eventually becomes a bit of a mess and needs a huge restructuring. So that’s kind of given me, put me off that type of business model, but it’s been the sort of the exception to that rule and it’s been brilliant. And then the other one I kicked myself about is Next. You know, we’ve had turnaround self-work, things like M&S, but we’ve missed the kind of classic compounder in the sector, if you like, where Simon Wilson’s just done the most phenomenal job of that.

So these are the kind of things that I sort of kicked myself about, I think you’ve got to accept that you won’t change who I work with. You can’t be at every party.

Holly Mead (28:26.998)
Or every Next store. And ten years ago I wouldn’t have been seen dead in a Next store but they’re delightful places to be now.

Laura Foll (28:35.234)
The funny thing is you might not even now, but you might go and buy some kids clothes or something, you know, something you need the next day. It might not be completely. But for me, next is the classic, you being honest, do I buy my clothes there? No. But if I need something for, say, a kids party the following day, then yes. And I think that’s what they’ve been brilliant at.

Holly Mead (29:01.24)
So in your time in the industry, what is the biggest change that you’ve seen, whether investment wise or culture wise?

Laura Foll (29:10.222)
I think the biggest change is, so I’ve been in the industry for context for about 16 years. And when I joined, the UK market was probably a high single digit percent of the MSCI world and the US was probably 50 % of the MSCI world. And in that just under 20 year period, the dominance of the US has just grown and grown. And when I think about when I joined things like Facebook, Meta,these things were really quite small companies, pretty nascent, and they’ve just gone on to be these absolutely humongous companies. We’re probably looking at a huge IPO year in the States. In a way, the UK market has become more esoteric. I feel like you need to convince people of the reasons to own the UK in a way that you didn’t when I joined.

And I think we need to shout a bit louder about actually having the Netx and the Halmas and companies that have, you know, the smaller ones that are maybe less well known as well, sort of in the mid cap space. And that we do actually have really good companies here that have generated a good total return, a really good total return over time. But we don’t maybe have that explosive growth that they’ve shown themselves as capable of having in the States. So I think the dynamic in the market has changed. Now I think we really need to make the case for the UK as a whole in a way that wouldn’t have really been part of the debate when I joined.

Holly Mead (30:43.714)
So something we always ask everyone is if someone asked you for a book recommendation to learn more about money or investing, what’s your go to book?

Laura Foll (30:53.198)
I’ve read a couple of times, but this has reminded me to go and read it again. I really like Howard Marks. So I like reading his memos, which you can just read on his website for free. Then his book is called, well, he’s written lots of books, “The Most Important Thing” is a really readable, mean, it’s value investing, so I’m biased. So I like it for that reason, but it’s just a really good, sensible, and the main takeaway is price versus value and making sure you’re not overpaying. That’s the main lesson of the book. So I would, if someone’s starting out, I’d really recommend that, but also just reading his memos and he always has really interesting snippets to take away.

Holly Mead (31:32.566)
Nice. And then the last thing I always like to ask is for anyone who’s thinking about investing in the fund, why should they invest?

Laura Foll (31:42.094)
You get a good yield. It’s about a 4% dividend yield that’s growing at the moment above inflation. And not only that, but you get the chance of capital growth as well. So in the past year or so, Lowland’s grown about 30 % in terms of total return, so that’d be ahead of the benchmark, which is about 20%. So you get the yield, but then you also get the potential capital upside as well.

Holly Mead (32:01.336)
Thank you for joining us. And thank you for joining us as well. And if you enjoyed this video, please do like it, share it, and be sure to follow us at Good Money Guide Online for more.