Car Market

Auto-recovery: turnaround or short-term bounce?

Like most industries, the automotive sector has been hit hard by the pandemic. Carmakers were already struggling well before the first COVID case came in, with changes to emissions regulations, a global manufacturing downturn and structural shifts in demand providing fierce headwinds. A global economic shutdown then came at the worst time it could, as…

Apple vs Epic Games

Apple finds itself fighting an Epic battle

And Apple wept, seeing as it had no more worlds left to conquer. In 2018, Apple made history by becoming the first private company valued over $1 trillion. That milestone was 42 years in the making; but just two years later, Apple is worth double that. To make that feat even more incredible, the meteoric…

Coronavirus - the sequel?

COVID II the sequel – as scary as the original?

The pleasures, and then increasing discomfort, of the UK’s unusually broiling August weather offered a welcome distraction from the seemingly never ending COVID news flow of gloominess. As the heatwave came to an end with a thunderous bang, so too did many of the UK’s summer freedoms. The reintroduction of widespread lockdowns at local level,…

Property Market

Property funds not such hot property

Property can be an attractive investment. Like everything else, property prices have their ups and downs, but investing in ‘real’ assets can appear to hit a sweet spot, relative to financial assets like equities, bonds or cash. There is enough of a positive yield that holding it is preferable to holding cash, and not so…

Unemployed

Unemployment – a tricky economic variable

At the Bank of England’s (BoE) latest meeting this week, a more optimistic than expected short-term outlook for Britain’s economy emerged. One of the most notable forecasts was its call on employment. While furlough and other emergency government measures have allowed many to keep their jobs and paycheques, some fear these policies are just papering…

The New Normal

Living with COVID- settling into an interim ‘new normal’

Compared to the rest of 2020, July proved almost uneventful as global capital markets consolidated strong gains made during the previous quarter, with only emerging market equities and gold delivering notable advancements (see returns table further below). At the other end of the scale, poor returns from Japanese and UK equities confirms the trend of…