I first went to Brazil in 2003. The exchange rate was slightly less favourable than it is today but still excellent. And everything was so cheap! I really didn’t have to look at price tags. I remember buying a beer, and a beer worked out around 19p a bottle. The barman asked me how many,…
Not altogether surprisingly, I read today in the FT that blue chip dividend cover is at a six year low. You may remember me writing in July that profit warnings had hit a six year high; well, this is the same news, just a little further along the food chain. Apparently, many of these companies…
Whenever you take a position in the market you take on risk. There is no position without risk. If you buy some shares you risk losing the capital you’ve invested. With a house you risk losing your capital, repossession if you don’t make your mortgage payments, and total loss from flood or fire unless you’re…
Denial is, as they say, not just a river in Africa. People are always in denial about all kinds of things they wish weren’t true: their partner’s not cheating, Sue Perkins is a comedian, capitalism isn’t fair and, most pertinent to this article, the UK stock market and economy aren’t failing. They are and there’s…
With the revelation that VW have been hoodwinking customers and regulators, all over the world it seems, what can we take for granted? This is where politics and business collide. It’s a simpler analogy if we use human relationships to examine the kind of problem we’re looking at. There’s a piece of amusing advice for…
Over recent weeks I’ve been writing about the main markets showing weakness, and that persists. Obviously we saw a fall a few weeks ago, and it’s no secret that I’m expecting to see much bigger falls over the next six months. By and large markets ultimately fall (or rise), not because of actual reality, but…
I remember seeing an interview on TV with some guy who’d made millions from spread betting. Not doing it – selling it. And he came out with what I later determined to be a stupid thing to say: “trading is easy, it’s just 50:50. Things either go up or they go down”. What a crock!…
I was at the Royal College of Surgeons last night for the Sir Thomas Gresham Finance Lecture. It was titled ‘Public Interest versus Private Profit – New Models of Risk Sharing’ and was focussed on insurance. Particularly the role government plays in underwriting risk that the public need but which insurers are reticent to provide…
I got an email from IG Index saying how they’re offering some new enhancements on their deal ticket. I designed a much better deal ticket than any that exists in the market place over 10 years ago. There are certain things you need to know when you’re trading and most of them aren’t made available…
It’s a strange existence when you’re focussed on trading. Rather like a soldier has to dehumanise his enemy to be effective, we have to distance ourselves in a similar way to be objective. I got all excited yesterday about seeing some shops closed because it’s another brick in the wall of market failure. If you…
