Next week will mark the anniversary of the turning point of the 2020 COVID stock market crash. Investors looking at their one-year portfolio returns may well be astonished to find double-digit return figures, ranging from around 15% for lower risk strategies to close to 50% for pure global equity portfolios. Alas, don’t expect a repeat…
Economic growth, particularly over the long-term, is notoriously hard to predict. So, it makes the job a little easier when someone tells us outright what is going to happen. The Chinese Communist party fortunately revels in such tasks. Last week, the party released the People’s Republic’s 14th Five Year Plan, setting out growth and development…
Despite the harsh economic realities of the pandemic, capital markets have had a staggering amount of confidence over the last year, all things considered. Vaccine hopes have undoubtedly played a big part in this – as can be seen in the fact that investors have rewarded those nations with advanced vaccination programs and punishing those…
Stock markets around the world have had another choppy week, but this time there was more up than down across the board and bonds yields stopped their upwards trend – at least for a while. The general upward trend notwithstanding, there was a lot of rotation and counter rotation between different market segments. With the…
Rishi Sunak’s second Budget Statement was a hotly anticipated affair. After setting out the roadmap to navigate the COVID crisis, the Chancellor was able to mark down the route out of economic crisis. The pandemic has left a black hole in Britain’s public finances and, while vaccines and gently easing restrictions will help get things…
Another week of bond market price falls has pushed ten-year government bond yields upwards everywhere except Japan. The US ten-year yield experienced the biggest rise of the developed world, up almost 20 basis points (0.2%) since last Friday to a yield of 1.6%. Just as over the previous week, that fed through to US equity…
It would be some understatement to say that Rishi Sunak had an interesting start to life as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Less than a month into the job, Sunak delivered his first Budget as the UK economy was closing it shutters and a black hole in public finances was expanding. One year on, his second…
Not long ago, market commentators were debating why companies seemed to want to stay private. Back in 2015 and 2016, Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) fell substantially, with newer start-ups preferring to stay off the market. Now, that trend has reversed entirely. After opening back up in the second half of last year, the IPO market…
Last year, equity markets started to wobble around this time. For example, on 19 February 2020, the NASDAQ 100 closed at an all-time high of 9718.73 before sliding back as the far-reaching implications of the pandemic started taking their toll. This year, the pattern of moves has been similar, with the same index closing at…
In the midst of political and economic crises, the Italian president has asked an economist named Mario to form a technocratic government – a headline that works today as well as it did back in 2011. But despite the numerous parallels between Mario Draghi’s recent appointment to Italy’s top job and the appointment of Mario…