I often have a look at the FT to see what’s good for a story. I can’t help noticing today that the number of negative stories far outweighs the positive ones. Top of the list today is Rolls Royce plc (RR.). Now I’ve written a few times about the profit warnings they’ve issued over recent…
Following a quiet summer period for initial public offerings (IPOs) the London new issue market has now come back to life. October saw seven new companies join the main market of the London Stock Exchange, raising a total of just under £1.65 billion. So far this year £6.1 billion of new money has been raised.…
Terry Smith’s Fundsmith Equity fund recently passed its fifth anniversary. Over the last five years it has returned 115.9%, which puts it in third place out of the 203 funds in the Investment Association’s Global Sector. This impressive performance has helped it to attract £4.1bn of assets under management. Smith is an outspoken critic of…
There’s a popular myth that you can’t read the right hand side of a chart. Of course there is no precognition, we know that from science, but it’s hardly a blank page! The first thing you know is that a trend is more likely to continue than change from one day to the next. That’s…
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.…
For Standard Chartered bank at 600p (last seen) the Sands of time run out as Winter arrives. Are things as bad as they look or is this really the bottom? This has been the fortnight of Asian bank reporting. We have just had the third quarter results from HSBC (HSBA) which were well received by…
As usual, the unintended consequences of legislation demanded by politicians, who have no scientific background, to appease a public ignorant of most things, but certainly compartmentalised in their thinking, come back to bite the government on the arse. The snag is they’re biting everyone else harder, especially the supermarkets, who are in the midst of…
Barely a week goes by in the USA, the UK and elsewhere, without news of job layoffs in the manufacturing sector. Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE:CAT), one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of construction and mining equipment, recently announced 5,000 job cuts by the end of 2016. In mid-October Tata Steel (BOM:500470) announced that it was axing…
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…
When Swen asked me to get down to Cyprus to cover the olive harvest I thought this would be a dull assignment. But since arriving on Aphrodite’s enchanted island, I now understand that this country is a living case study in Eurozone post-bailout recovery. Let me explain. Cyprus is the most Easterly country in Europe.…
