Share price rebound, page-24

I agree with you that both SOL and WES are overvalued at the moment. I was actually very keen on WES in the low 40s but then they announced their Coles demerger and released a whole lot of value so I missed out (I'm going to keep a close eye on them post demerger because I actually prefer the WES basket of companies without low growth capital intensive Coles).

Even though we are talking about conservative investments you can still make quite good capital increases if you get the "timing" semi right. "Timing"is probably more of an art than a science but you can pick up a little value indicators if you follow the stock closely enough over a little bit of time (e.g average dividend yield and PE ratio are a couple of very basic ones. You just have to make sure those earnings are sustainable and the market isn't just pricing in a reduction already).

As for "conglomerates" their actually isn't much on the market apart from WES and SOL. There's Brickwork's which operates a building material business (e.g Austral Bricks) a property development business and owns over 40 percent of SOL (via the infamous "cross shareholding" arrangement) these structures actually went through a long period of being unfashionable and many conglomerates were "demerged" into pure play companies . SOL actually won a court case last year against Perpetual (a fund manager who owned a big stake in the company) who were trying to legally push for a "demerger" of the business but because their long term performance is so good it's been hard for anyone to get any traction with that argument.