Some years ago I had a Polish friend called Ola who was living here in London. Her English was excellent so, being in cosmopolitan London, she decided to learn Spanish. The first thing you do when you start learning a language, if you’re serious about it, is to talk to native speakers, and this being…
Writing for Master Investor for over a year now has been an interesting experience for me, as it has forced me to lay out my analysis and hang my hat on predictions very publicly. And in many cases on stocks or markets that I wouldn’t trade in myself, as they wouldn’t suit my portfolio risk…
Elitism is making a comeback. Don’t worry, it won’t affect most of you. That’s really the state of play at the moment. There’s a huge amount of opportunity as currencies continue to be the playground for investors, and a nightmare for governments and multi-nationals. What has really happened since we’ve nearly almost definitely left the…
Fairly unsurprisingly I was in a pub the other day and I had a scrunched up piece of paper and there was a bin behind the bar in the semi-distance. I lined up the shot and launched the paper at the bin. It bounced on the side and landed on the floor next to the…
An Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Especially that bloke in Surrey who hid his under bales of hay for years. Nowadays you could sell a house here in the South East and buy a castle overseas, that’s for sure. People take pride in their houses but in spite of all the TV shows…
In the last two blog posts I wrote about various approaches to keeping your portfolio safe from Brexit volatility. Obviously the simplest is to Bed & Brexit – i.e. sell before the referendum and buy back afterwards. Each person will have a different cost base though, for instance shares cost more to buy and sell…
I wrote in my last post about the risks to your portfolio of volatility around the time of the EU referendum. This applies whatever the outcome. In this post I’m going to outline how to use spread bets (or CFDs) for hedging, assuming that, for whatever reason, you don’t wish to close and re-open your…
Financial institutions and think tanks are making sure they’ve issued a completely unhelpful and non-committal statement about Brexit. They should stay silent rather than publish superficial comments. This is like that ‘double dip recession’ rubbish many came out with. There is no double dip recession: it’s the same recession, but saying double dip is a…
The biggest change in the world is not the distribution of wealth (and don’t forget to those outside the First World we are all the 1%), but the distribution of leisure time and ‘unearned’ income. Governments and institutions are slow to recognise the need for change. Most people are not visionaries, and in politically stable…
The pen is mightier than the sword is something that people used to say all the time. So why don’t they say it now, you might ask? Well there is a simple reason: it was banned from the internet. When filters based on algorithms were introduced to find and eliminate expletives, and words that people…
