Do you remember the paperless office? This was the dream that we were peddled in the early 1980s by people like Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) with the arrival of the PC. The idea was that all physical paper – the contents of our filing cabinets, lever arch files and bookshelves – would simply disappear, displaced…
As seen in this month’s issue of Master Investor Magazine. Emerging markets once lured investors with the promise of rich pickings. The BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) were once sure to make us wealthy, or so Jim O’Neil, formerly chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, assured us. When they went off the boil he…
On 23 July, those of us who love the Financial Times were shocked to learn that its owner, Pearson PLC (LON:PSON), had sold the pink pages to the Japanese media group Nikkei for £844 million. Pearson had owned the 127-year old newspaper since 1957. A Greek economist friend emailed me immediately: Another bastion of the…
The Credit Crunch of 2008, and its aftermath, changed the way we think and spend. From the time that the banks messed up, ordinary people’s wages in the UK barely rose for six years, while prices of staples like food and energy soared. The luxury sector continued to thrive because the modern rich (amongst whom,…
How will you spend your holidays, this summer? We all need them and we are prepared to pay good money for them. But the holiday sector has offered mixed rewards for investors of late. A few weeks ago I took a look at look at Thomas Cook Group PLC (TCG). It is a great business,…
On 08 July George Osborne delivered the first budget from a Conservative government since Ken Clark stood at the House of Commons despatch box in March 1997. Although many of Mr Osborne’s measures had been well trailed, the final coup de grâce – the introduction of a mandatory Living Wage – came as a surprise. This will have important implications on both government finances and corporate profitability in the UK which I would like to unpack here.
Microsoft changed our lives. I couldn’t have written this article without their technology, and you couldn’t read it. Some say that Apple is the technological touchstone. Then again, so many seem to be drawn to Facebook, like moths to a flame. Many others swear by Twitter. Personally, there is one technology titan whose services I…
The conventional wisdom, until recently, was that consumer services had been blown out of the water by the advent of the internet. Why would anyone go to a high street insurance broker to sort out his car insurance when he could log onto the internet and get a get a quote directly from Gocompare.com or…
Let’s talk about the vibrant industry whose customers we all are on a regular basis: budget, or low-cost, no-frills airlines. Thanks to these operations, we Brits are amongst the most peripatetic people on the planet. Two business models have emerged in the airline industry over the last 20 years. Firstly, there are airlines which specialise…
I recently received an email from a genealogy website called Ancestry.co.uk offering me a DNA test for just £79 (reduced from £99). “Our DNA matching combines ground-breaking science with traditional research to give you the most accurate family history results available. The technology pinpoints relatives you never knew existed; you can then work with your…
