Subject: Re: Unite Group (UTG), UK, falling knife.
It's been my own experience that the more effort is needed to understand if an investment at a given price is basically amazing or dreadful, the better it is to avoid it completely.

Seems like a sane approach.

If there are risks here, they aren't to be found in a couple of dodgy property investments.

Offhand the biggest risk I see is that the entire UK education system got a little overbuilt by people mistaking it for an industry, and an export industry at that. Globally, on average the number of university students equals the number of filled university places. What law of nature grants the UK a perpetual surplus? I'll grant that the UK has some advantages in quality and some places in the world have a shortage of decent places, but I do think it got turned into a bit of a bubble in the UK, and the brand got milked a bit. More than a bit. It was easy money, the schools' budgets were getting squeezed on every other front, and they piled in too hard and got addicted to the foreign fools who pay too much.

It would be entirely plausible to me if the number of foreign students in the next 25 years averaged half the recent peak, say. And not because of any potential Reform policy, simply because Chinese and other students will see better value elsewhere, and see that degrees from outside Oxbridge aren't guarantees of riches.

That isn't a forecast, but it wouldn't shock me, and I'd want to game out how that affects the various players. Some bankrupt second/third tier schools, to begin with. And not very good for the student accommodation players in those places.

Jim