Apparently people used to hedge against inflation with Pork Bellies futures. They’re no longer traded, some may say as a part of some imagined Zionist banking conspiracy, but that seems doubtful! If you believe the government then there is no inflation any more. Perhaps that’s why – there are no pork bellies futures any more,…
I wrote about the US market on 7th July and the subject perhaps deserves revisiting now. The Dow Jones has developed an interesting pattern. It’s basically ‘rolling over’. I’ve marked the rolling on the chart in black. Remember it’s been six years of rising prices now, and although the US economy still appears one of…
I had a theory that I wanted to test. It was the idea that weather might affect the attitude of traders in London and New York. For example, if it was raining we might expect the day to be more lacklustre than if it was sunny. I wondered if there was any kind of correlated…
The airline industry should be having a bit of a golden age just now with oil prices so low. This represents a massive windfall, seemingly, on one of their biggest running costs. I used to work for BA and the view inside certainly, and outside usually, is that it’s a superior airline that is a…
I was talking to a friend about mortgage rates the other day and they were wondering what would happen to interest rates. The short answer is the same as it is in the US. So how likely is it that US interest rates will rise? Increasingly likely I would say. Which in turn would lead…
Two profit announcements today that are quite interesting… First off: Barclays (BARC). I wrote about banks in my blog of July 16th. Barclays did reasonably well out of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. They picked up Lehman assets for a song and sold them in the last reporting period, making almost £500 million profit. The…
If you want to know the time, ask a policeman. Don’t bother asking them to attend a burglary though, if plans go ahead to stop attending them. Apparently it’s part of an effort to ‘prioritise’. It’s an interesting move at a time when clearly Osborne’s budget has reduced the income of many quite sharply. I…
You may not know that profit warnings have hit a 6-year high in the UK. Of course, some companies blame exchange rates, others low oil prices, but I think it’s something else. The list of companies is diverse and tends to imply a more structural problem. Balfour Beatty I mentioned the other week in a…
I’ve said before that the only reason we’ve appeared not to have a recession in London and the South is because foreign money has parked itself here as a safe haven. I mentioned property in particular before, but in case you didn’t know more than half the stocks listed here in London are owned overseas.…
I used to play online poker quite a lot. Actually there are a lot of similarities between trading/investing and poker. You have to maintain your capital, there’s a cost of being in the game and if you’re going to win you have to try to take a stand with something which has a good chance…
