In 2008-09 we had a financial crisis; a credit crisis that required immense levels of government intervention in global financial markets. In the case of the UK, this included hundreds of billions of pounds in quantitative easing and an effective elimination of positive interest rates. Several UK banks required direct injections of capital and one […]
Sovereign Debt Crisis: The economic consequences of COVID-19 Read More »
I was speaking to a fellow investor over the Christmas break about how they had positioned their portfolio for 2021 and the challenges in finding growth in the UK stock market. In today’s article, I’m going to recap on some of our conversation points about the challenges facing the Financial Time Stock Exchange indices (FTSE
Where will UK stock market growth come from in 2021? Read More »
Most investors will be aware of the 60/40 model for cautious investors seeking growth in the markets whilst avoiding the turbulence of a pure equity portfolio. In this model, the portfolio is comprised of 60% equities and 40% bonds. Historically, bonds have much lower volatility than equities, causing the overall value of the portfolio to
Last month a friend kicked off a bit of a storm on Twitter one morning by calling out traders failing to make more than 50% returns a year from spread betting. The thread went on for a good hour or so but it made me start to think about what I consider to be a
Reader Question: What is a good return for an investor? Read More »
During a recent investor event I attended I met a reader of this blog who asked me about protecting against inflation and what options I’m considering. For those of you old enough to remember such things, there was, once upon a time, a thing called inflation; a rate by which prices would increase every year.
I was on a call with a reader talking about what direction global equity markets might go next. Obviously, not possessing a crystal ball, my thoughts were purely speculative but this reader had been a little spooked by the market decline in early 2020 and although they hadn’t sold everything wanted my opinion on what
A few years ago, I had the good fortune of bumping into someone (let’s call him James) that had a significantly more advanced financial life than my own. He’d made money in construction a few decades ago and now lived a relatively comfortable life on the proceeds. Some of their family still worked but mostly
A few months ago, the thought of Corbyn and his gang of magic money men was genuinely making me wonder whether we’d still have an economy by 2021. Ironically, the ruling Conservative party seem to have gone completely the same way; FREE MONEY FOR ALL! Billions of pounds in furlough money, billions of pounds in
NIRP – Negative Interest Rate Policy. ZIRP – Zero Interest Rate Policy. For around fourty years, bonds have been in a huge bull market with rates falling further and further. For as long as I can remember, the basic formula of lending money has been a simple one; “I lend you money and after an
In part 1 of this series, I covered the ’spectrum’ of how to run an economy; from a full ’free market’ economy to a ’socialist’ utopian central planning model. When government spending gets to a high percentage of GDP (think 45-50% and above) there can be obvious benefits including a highly educated workforce, efficient healthcare,
If you’ve managed to move out from behind your sofa recently and take a peek at the news, you might have noticed an uptick in the number of central banks announcing ’interventions’ to support the UK economy. Further rounds of quantitative easing, rate cuts, loans and grants to small businesses, mortgage and bill ’holidays’ and
I was chatting to a reader about share prices and was asked whether I consider a falling share price to be a negative indicator. Surely, if the market is a combination of hundreds of individual investors expressing their opinions then a falling price indicates that more people have found a reason to sell than to
Reader question: Is a falling share price a negative indicator? Read More »
The Bank of England is a comparatively modern institution when held against other national banks such as the Bank of Geneva (founded in 1345) or the Bank of Venice (founded in 1157). It was originally conceived by a merchant by the name of William Patterson in 1689 and was incorporated by William the 3rd in
Ever since 2008 the global economy has been experiencing an unprecedented period of low interest rates, but in 2016, the US Federal Reserve began to tentatively increase rates with a view to staving off inflation caused by a decade of cheap and plentiful money supply. In addition, in late 2018, the Fed decided to start
The US Federal Reserve reverses their rate hikes policy Read More »
Stories have recently started appearing in the media that Italy, the third biggest economy in the Eurozone, has successfully passed initial proposals to create a currency alternative to the Euro, it’s current currency of choice. During last year’s elections, the ruling coalition ran on a platform of policies that toyed with the idea of returning
Italy opens proposals for new alternative currency Read More »
