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OPINION

The great can be good

The great can be good
December 17, 2014
The great can be good

It's a dangerous sentiment, but you can see from where it gets its currency. Hindsight shows that, for shares in a comparatively small number of great companies, there rarely has been a price that turned out to be too high. True, sometimes an investor needed more patience than at others. But, given resilience, the outcome was almost always good.

Takes shares in Nestlé (SWX:NESN), the Nescafé-to-Perrier foods group. Buy the shares today at Swf72.45 (£47.60) and you pay 24.4 times the company's latest 12-month earnings. That multiple is even fatter than the fat content of Nestlé's 'chunky' Kit Kat bars to which Bearbull may be addicted and it's above the average multiple for the past 20 years, which is an ample 23 times. Yet history shows that paying 24.4 times earnings usually brings good rewards. From 1993 to 2010 there were seven occasions when an investor could have paid that multiple while Nestlé's shares were on a rising trend (rather than buying as the rating dropped through that multiple). On four of the seven occasions, that would have generated gains one year on (average gain for the seven - 12 per cent); five out of seven times there would have been gains over two years (average gain - 15 per cent); and six out of seven times there would have been profits over three years (average - 29 per cent).

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