Richard Ratner, who has died of a heart attack at the age of 58, was one of my favourite investment analysts. Always civil and invariably polite, he also had a mischievous sense of humour and almost always spoke his mind which made him eminently quotable.
A top-rated retail analyst at stockbrokers Seymour Pierce, where he was also vice-chairman, Ratner been described as one of the “great characters of the City” . Tributes have been flooding in since his death at the age of 58 on Sunday 7th October.
Seymour Pierce’s chairman, Keith Harris, said: “He was one of the City’s good guys, a man of great humour, combined with really sharp, penetrating thoughts. He was full of integrity and, while you didn’t have to agree with him, nobody disagreed with the way he delivered his message. He was just a thoroughly nice man.”
Sir Philip Green, the retail entrepreneur, said: “Ratty was a friend for 20 years. He knew the business and everybody involved in it. I probably spoke to him 365 days a year for the last 10 years and he was always in good form – I can hardly remember him ever being in a bad mood. He understood what was going on and when he wrote he didn’t try to score points.”
Stuart Rose, the Marks & Spencer chief executive, said: “He was very witty, very humorous and very good at what he did. He was one of the sector’s great characters and he will be sorely missed.”
Before joining Seymour Pierce in 1997, Ratty worked at Kitcat & Aitken, Williams de Broe and MeesPierson. Before that he spent nine years in the rag trade, working for the family firm UU Textiles. Admirably he never used the spreadsheets widely used in the City to forecast a company’s profits.
Instead he used his unparalleled knowledge of the retail sector, intuition and nous. He also astonished lesser analysts by also running an antique shop in his home town of Dorking in his spare time. We’ll never see his like again. My own biggest regret? I did not write about retailers enough when he was around.
Interestingly, his views on the latest City fad of sale-and-leasebacks were too strong for one of the publications for which I write. So here for the record are Ratty’s views (on sale and leasebacks) from beyond the grave, as told to me just seven months ago in February 2007.
“[Sale and leasebacks] can be a fate worse than death. Once a company has got rid of its properties, they’re gone forever. It is then locked into a rising rent roll, based on the retail price index, for a very long time.”
“People talk about all sorts of benefits to such deals but there’s a big price to pay afterwards. Anyone entering into them has to be absolutely certain they will be able to service the rental and also must be aware they may crystallize a capital gains tax liability that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.”
No holds barred until the last!
This blog post was published on 9 October 2007