I’m always sceptical when I see headlines like the one on the Beeb website Business section today: “FTSE 100 Soars 2%”. It’s less than that now, as the market softened since that report went live. It’s more like 1.5% as I write. You can hardly say it’s soaring when the ATR (Average True Range) is…
FTSE 100 Stocks HSBC (HSBA): Exposure to “Submerging Markets” Having missed out on the worst of the effects of the Global Financial Crisis, HSBC has gone from being the exception that proves the rule as far as the UK banking sector is concerned, to being on the back foot almost as much as the worst…
BHP Billiton (BLT): possible wedge reversal to 700p zone While looking for a floor in shares of BHP Billiton has been neither a wise nor a fruitful exercise in the recent past, it may be that after the latest writedown and the fresh lows on the FTSE 100 we have a bona fide bargain hunting…
Whenever you say ‘short cable’ some joker will say “actually, Vince Cable is quite tall”. It may be time to follow the electorate, though, who shorted Cable in his Twickenham constituency in the General Election this year and short cable (£:$). Arbitrage is a big deal in trading and any sort of speculative endeavour. As…
RBS has issued a warning that the coming year is not about return on capital, but return of capital. Should you listen to a bank that so monumentally cocked up that they are now really Royal Bank of England, having been bailed out by the government? There were very serious errors of judgement as they…
About eight years ago I wrote an article about David Bowie, and how he’d been very astute in collateralising his future royalties. It was in response to claims in the gutter press that he’d been responsible, by doing so, for the credit crunch! For many of us, Bowie was the most influential artist of the…
You remember the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song Two Tribes, right? The one with the line “one is all that you can score”? Well war is big business now and many of you will have read my Final Word magazine article back in the August ’15 edition called “War! What Is It Good For? Absolutely…
I wrote last time on insurance companies and how our themed watchlist should now include them on the short side. My TA on the weather back in October has proved right in doubting a cold winter. Even if it gets cold now, it’s been so mild that energy companies must be hurting. 2015 has already…
Last October I started building a themed watchlist and I think we can now start to add more definitively to the list. The basis of the list is the Met Office report that expects the next two years to be the hottest on record. In my second piece on the subject I did some TA…
When the Soviet Union broke up Ukraine did a deal with Russia, France, the UK and USA, embodied in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. It gave up its nuclear arsenal in return for assurances from those nations that its borders would be respected. In an address I attended last year, Lord Robertson, former Labour Defence…
