I heard on the wireless that Mifid II contains 1.7 million paragraphs spread over 7,000 pages. HMRC has always proceeded on the basis that ignorance of the law is no excuse when in fact it is quite impossible for one man to know the law. Mifid II seems to be getting in on this act.…
Kenya is once again politically stable and is fast becoming the most mature emerging market in Africa. Jambo!* When you go through customs control on entering Kenya you are supposed to surrender all your plastic bags. Last year, plastic bags were banned in Kenya outright. This impressed me for two reasons. Firstly, it shows Kenya’s…
The defence sector has experienced a challenging period since the financial crisis. Cutbacks to military spending have become the norm across the developed world, as governments have sought to reduce budget deficits in an era of austerity. This has caused sales and profit growth to be lacking for many companies in the industry. However, the…
The novice investor or trader often obsesses about where to get into a trade or investment and may spend much time trying to refine this process. Indeed there is a whole industry around the perfect entry signal; buy now or miss out on massive gains, XYZ share cannot go any lower… Of course, we all…
Miton Global Opportunities (LON:MIGO) is a highly unusual fund that aims to profit from pricing inefficiencies by buying investment trusts that are trading on wide discounts where there is a clear catalyst for them to narrow. It had a fantastic 2017 by investing in four of the ten best performing trusts in the market and…
The chairman drew me into increasing my gold long position just before the weekend. I couldn’t follow it over the weekend since, curiously, there is no price feed from the Far East. Goodness only knows why. There must be hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Chinese – to name just two lots – who would…
There are times when certain decisions have an unusual impact on subsequent events. We reach, in other words, a ‘fork in the road’, and the choices taken – or not taken – have an incalculable impact on the future. The weekend of 13/14 September 2008 represented precisely one of those forks in the road. At…
I hesitate to call Heseltine an idiot but he is certainly deceitful. He keeps going on about Brexit being a disaster when he must know that many Brexiteers so voted simply to allow us to govern ourselves – Britain has developed our preferred democratic system over this last 1000 years. It might have been different…
For buy-to-let landlords, void periods – those gaps in between tenancies where you receive no rental income from your property – can be both inevitable, and a recurring problem. Research by Direct Line last year revealed that the average loss to a landlord due to void time is just under £550 every 18 months. Over…
There are mixed views about the peer-to-peer finance sector – where those with spare cash can make direct loans to those who want to borrow − with some investors believing that it is a bubble waiting to burst, while others see it as a viable alternative to the banks and an attractive source of returns.…
