In a decision that promises huge ramifications for investors, on 8 November the US electorate will cast ballot votes to decide who will become the next President of the United States. On one side is Hillary Clinton, who aims to extend the Democrats’ term in office to twelve years, while at the same time becoming…
Twitter may be worth a lot more than many believe. While Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and SnapChat delight investors with their lunar reach, Twitter remains a forgotten power that no one is willing to buy. But that could be about to change. “If it happens in the world, it happens on Twitter.” That’s probably the most…
The IMF has just accepted it was wrong about the post-Brexit Armageddon predictions. After all, since the Brexit-vote the FTSE 100 is up 11%, the services sector has expanded at a faster rate, and the ONS ended up revising its estimates for GDP growth higher in the second quarter, to 0.7% from 0.6% previously. In…
As readers are no doubt aware, OPEC recently agreed a production cut from its August output of 33.2 mb/d (million barrels per day) to a new target of between 32.5 mb/d to 33.0 mb/d. With OECD oil inventories expected at 3,090 million barrels by the end of this year, the agreed production cut is unlikely…
The world of central banking continues to delight. This particular niche has delivered the greatest advances in economic knowledge, outputting refined new tools to improve the way our economy works. They redefined the zero lower bound, making it possible for borrowers to get a return on their debts; they turned the time preference upside down;…
With volatility at its lowest in two years during August, it may be the right time for investors to make a play on a volatility spike, either by entering the options market or by playing with the VIX index. After a scary 24 June, asset prices entered a long period of tranquility, during which equity…
At a time when investors need to pay European corporations for the privilege of lending them money, the degree of financial madness should have reached level 100. Governments around the world excused themselves from leading their own sluggish economies towards healthier states and central banks surpassed all known boundaries in replacing them on such a…
After a quiet August, we are back to business as usual, which is 90% about following central banks and 10% about following everybody else. Almost one decade after the peak of the financial crisis, global markets still rely heavily on central banks, with short-term volatility being fuelled by all kinds of speculation about expected central…
“Monetary policy has done as much as it really can and it needs to be complemented by fiscal policy and structural reforms,” – Catherine Mann, chief economist at OECD A new investment paradigm? We’re living in a year of extremes. Record high equity prices, record low oil prices, record low inflation levels, and even record…
One recent addiction to the already huge portfolio of investment possibilities is factor investing, which aims at revolutionising the way we invest. Until today, investors have been allocating the money in their portfolios into several asset classes: bonds, equities, foreign equities, real assets, commodities, currencies, and so on. But what if instead they could allocate…
