In general, taxpayers try to minimise their contributions to the government budget, either by optimising their tax rate or through trying to delay payments wherever they can. But something strange seems to be happening in Sweden. The country seems to have been gripped by some form of mania that has led the taxpayer to overpay…
In his final days as ruthless EU dictator, the Leader made a series of cataclysmic blunders, based largely on a misreading of the strategic situation. These led to his inevitable downfall[i]. “Mein Führer. The Russian delicatessen chain, Azbuka Vkusa, has breached the gates of Berlin. They are bearing down on our Aldi and Lidl divisions.…
The future of politics This week I want to talk politics without getting (party) political. Like many others, as an analyst and investor, post-Brexit and Trump, and with Marine Le Pen likely to win the first round in the French presidential election on 23 April, I have been trying to figure out what it all…
Well, I’m on the road again. This time, I’m travelling around the US, in part researching for the new book, which I hope will be out in early May, but will definitely be featured in my talk at Master Investor 2017 on March 25th. The other part of the trip is to observe the US…
One of the worst enemies of a serious long-term investor is a high level of correlation. The main reason for this is that high correlations make all of us the same: you are equal to me and I am equal to Benjamin Graham. We all look fantastically clever or terribly stupid at the same time,…
James Faulkner interviews Chris Darbyshire, Chief Investment Officer at Seven Investment Management. James Faulkner: Hi Chris. Thanks for taking the time to speak with Master Investor today. Could you kick off by giving our readers a brief summary of 7IM and its offering to clients, as well as an overview of your role at the…
A vertebra in the spinal column of the world economy is causing pain. As I write the price of Brent Crude is at US$59.99. According to the Knoema[i] website, the break-even oil price ranges from US$149.90 in Venezuela to US$60.50 in Qatar. So, on that basis, almost no one is making money in oil right…
While acknowledging the ‘Trump pump’ to the oil industry, I have always been sceptical about the long-term prospects for the industry because I believe prices are capped at a much lower level than they were ten years ago. Any excessive enthusiasm is doomed to revert to an even more extreme pessimism in ever shorter periods,…
The Illuminati are plotting… One of the themes I have returned to again and again over the last eighteen months has been how the priestly caste of the world’s central bankers, disproportionately drawn from the upper echelons of Goldman Sachs – a kind of mysterious, self-perpetuating, secretive elite which I (only half-jokingly) call the “Illuminati”…
While an investor tries to maximise the expected returns of his portfolio, he always faces a formidable enemy – risk. In theory, if leverage has no limits, any level of expected return can be achieved. But risk is also expected to rise with it and make the burden of failure too great for an investor…
