Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

The fun thing about buying shares in retailers is that you can walk in and inspect your potential investment. Whether this is actually a useful exercise is debatable, as we run the risk of assigning too much significance to the factors we can see or easily imagine — the so-called ‘availability bias’. But it is hard to resist.

Private Equity has become increasingly fashionable in recent years and some investors have made chunky returns. Debenhams (LSE: DEB) is a particularly well known example. Its share price was languishing in 2003, so a consortium of private equity funds took the company private only to sell it back to the stock market three years later, having more than trebled their original investment.