The epic experiment with negative rates continues to unfold, as central banks are unable to boost consumer inflation with the current level of asset purchases. The Swiss National Bank (SNB) is already all negative in terms of its key interest rates, but is preparing further action. Strong side effects may occur. It was almost one…
Wednesday’s headline in The Sun was a classic: SHOT DOWN…AND WORLD HOLDS BREATH. I love The Sun. For its honesty, its clarity, its steadfast solidarity with the old English working class; its directness and, very often, its sheer vulgarity. I had heard the BBC that morning and I’d read The Times. But the most detailed…
The debate about risk lies too much around CAPM, standard deviation, beta and a few other concepts that are rarely capable of reproducing the true odds of achieving a certain investment goal. Unlike the concept of odds in football betting, which reflects the probability of a certain outcome occurring (even if a little distorted by…
Since the Paris terror attacks of 13 November it is as if we have awoken from an all too peaceful sleep to find ourselves in the plot of a James Bond novel. Except that if this were offered by the James Bond franchise it would be dismissed as too improbable – and too violent. A…
The appalling attacks in Paris in the late evening of Friday, 13 November 2015 will linger in the annals of infamy for many years to come. About 130 innocent people lost their lives and many more were seriously injured. No doubt the number of fatalities will rise in the days to come. On 31 October…
The terrorist attacks that occurred last weekend in Paris will certainly be part of our memories for a long time; but the implications for our society and for the future of the European Union are manifold. While the attacks carry many regrettable implications and challenges, they also help shed some light on the unsolved puzzle…
The September edition of the Master Investor magazine was largely dedicated to an examination of how likely interest rates were to rise, and what would be the consequences of a rate hike for your portfolio. I argued in my contribution that waiting for interest rates to rise was like Waiting for Godot. We might wait…
The equivalent to cheap money is expensive “everything else”. When money is made abundant while the stock of assets is held constant, inflation must pick up. But the higher prices do not always come in the form central banks wish for… There are so many things money can buy. A watch, a pack of beer,…
By Dom Wolf, Co-founder of investUP – the crowdfunding supermarket Hot of the press research by the Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) suggests that around 405,000 ISA savers could choose to use crowdlending (P2P), as it becomes part of the ISA family in 2016. This marks a huge number of people entering into the crowdlending market.…
Some thought commodity prices were going to rise forever due to the mismatch between supposedly unlimited demand growth from industrialising nations and limited supply of much-needed and irreplaceable raw materials. Others even believed that a new world order was rising, where a homogeneous group of wannabe industrialised countries would support the growth of the rest…
