As regular readers will know, I’ve been avoiding bank stocks for years now – since April 2007 to be precise. As I predicted in ’08, banks have become a cash cow for government as well as a popular scapegoat. The extra corporation tax on banks that was announced in the budget was just the most…
Stories on the markets, in general, usually unfold very slowly and in plain sight. Before all the great crashes there was ample warning from the technical trader. I wrote recently about signs that we might be seeing the 6 year rally running out of steam. The worrying thing with that is that the companies who…
I’m moving soon so I’m having a bit of clean out. I think it’s far more tempting to keep financial stuff for years on end than most documents. If you’ve ever worked in corporate accounting, then there’s almost an unwritten rule to keep things for seven tax years. Actually for companies it is written! So…
I think the British love affair with home ownership really started with a vengeance in the ‘70s. The rampant inflation was kick started by decimalisation. In February 1971 when it came in a loaf was around 7p. In old money that would have been 1/5d (or 17 old pence). The smallest price increase in old…
Here’s a picture of a very casual bloke on a roof opposite my house on the ‘mobi’ to his ‘Bezzie Mate’. Climb up your roof too, and have a look around. What do you see? He’ll be seeing a lot of cranes. There’s plenty of building going on. So you wouldn’t expect the Construction sector…
Broadly speaking I think that anyone who has voted for a Labour government over the years since the war has become increasingly disillusioned with what they’ve got in return, and I think that’s set to continue because the whole idea of the Labour party is now obsolete – Socialism has outlived its usefulness and relevance.…
I was looking at some photos of a long past trip. I’m in hardly any of them because I took them. Remember that? Nowadays, of course, it’s the opposite. Probably a majority of photos, certainly on social media, are of the person posting them, and more often than not, ‘selfies’. I suppose the correct word…
One of the key things in trading is to be able to anticipate what may happen, because preparation is everything. Not every signal will develop into an expected outcome, but once they start lining up you can be increasingly more confident that something is going to happen. We’ve been in a bull market for some…
Lots of people trade news. In fact many companies, the ones that make money from the number of trades you place, encourage you to. And why shouldn’t they? It can be demonstrated that there is enough volatility at such times to make money. What is not illustrated is how unpredictable news can make markets, nor…
Nowadays you don’t have to join the Navy to see the world. In fact joining the Navy might never have been such a great way to see the world, unless you wanted to see exotic places before they got blown to smithereens. Or you enjoyed seeing native peoples being subjugated. Now, of course, that’s all…
