Is Consistency The Key
Put yourself in the shoes of a football manager. You have to choose between a player who is pretty decent all of the time and a player who is utterly brilliant some of the time, but, at best, very average the rest of the time. Which player do you choose and why? Actually, the answer to that question isn’t necessarily [...]
Investment Sums
If you read an advanced-level textbook on economic, the mathematics involved may make your eyes water. That’s OK because while many advanced economists are also successful investors, there are also many successful investors who only have a basic knowledge of economics and its associated maths. In fact, these days, as an investor, the only maths you really need to understand [...]
Avoiding Value Traps
Learning to read financial statements is an essential skill for any investor and, in all honesty, it’s a skill which can take a bit of time to acquire. It’s not just about reading headline figures like price-to-earnings ratio or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, it’s about “reading between the lines” and understanding the subtext behind the figures. With [...]
Investing Ethically
The concept of ethical investing has been around for many years now and, like a number of other “sustainable” movements, has gone from being regarded with a combination of suspicion and amusement to being not only mainstream but increasingly popular. With that in mind, here is a brief guide to what you need to know about it. There is no [...]
Asset-management positions in danger of being slashed
While the front-page headlines may be all about Brexit (and indeed Brexit is also making headlines in the financial section), for the asset-management industry, the current wave of mergers and acquisitions could be (almost) as much of a challenge. The year 2018 saw a massive upturn in mergers and acquisitions in asset management While “the merger of the year” in [...]
Women – business investment funds
Although other matters, most notably Brexit, have long since pushed it off the front pages, when it was first published the gender pay gap was extensively covered in the mainstream media and even now it is still referenced on a fairly regular basis. These statistics, however, only relate to people in employment and hence completely ignore the UK’s substantial population [...]
What “No Deal” Means for Finance
A few years ago “Deal or No Deal” was just a cheerful family gameshow. Now it’s a pressing question with all kinds of implications for just about every area of life in the UK. Here is what “no deal” could mean for finance. Bond yields The UK is in debt, according to the recent spring statement, debt is trending downwards [...]
Why active investing is good during volatile markets
A glance at the performance of the major stock indices in 2018 shows that volatility was a common theme. US equities followed an upward - although somewhat choppy - trajectory from early March, but they had a turbulent start to the year. Meanwhile, UK, European and Japanese equity markets experienced fluctuations of various magnitudes as they drifted sideways or downwards [...]
What the spring statement means for investors
Up until very recently, we had autumn statements and spring budgets. Thanks to Philip Hammond, it’s now the other way round and it’s tempting to wonder whether this may have been because he looked at the (proposed) Brexit date and decided that he didn’t want his main budget being overshadowed by the UK’s exit from the EU. It might also [...]
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