Page:Hints About Investments (1926).pdf/166

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

over they also add, what appears to be a sentence that is inserted regularly in all their reports—"the directors consider that they have made sufficient provision for contingencies which may be reasonably foreseen."

So having built up an ordinary Reserve Fund of a million pounds, they have now started a new fund called Reserve for Property Depreciation, with £100,000, of which £27,000 comes out of the amount carried forward out of past profits and £73,000 out of the profits of the year under review.

It is this policy of building up reserves which has to be explained and almost apologized for to shareholders, which gives the ordinary shareholder in a prosperous company the great advantage that the value of his property is continually increased for him by an act of periodical saving and reinvestment, which is carried out on his behalf by the Board, and brings compound interest in to work for him with its rapidly accumulative effect.

In this case it has made him not only a shareholder in what is perhaps the best-known brewery in the world, but also a part proprietor in an investment company which holds investments standing in the balance-sheet at £1,824,000 and so not far from