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Market complacency may be its undoing
Welcome to the Q1 reporting season. If you hadn’t noticed yet, Easter came early this year (good for retailers, airlines etc) and there is a minefield of shifting currencies and commodity prices to adjust for as well as some decidedly mixed macro data coming out from the major trading economies. If you’re selling out of […]
Continue readingNovember non-farm payrolls – Bah Humbug!
I can hardly contain myself with excitement. US non-farm payroll data for November is out and the headlines are that the +321k MoM additions (+314k for the more relevant Private sector jobs) “smashes forecasts†(Guardian) and that “The dollar has gone through the roof†(City AM). With another month of unemployment at only 5.8% (try […]
Continue readingAirlines and oil prices
With fuel costs representing 45-50% of an airline’s operating costs and 35% of its revenues, it would seem self-evident that a significant movement in oil, and therefore fuel prices, would have an equally dramatic effect on margins; in particular when the industry’s margins are often the wrong side of 5%. The oil price however is […]
Continue readingP&G swaps Duracell at 7x EBITDA for shares in itself at 13x. Buffet wins again!
When a company such as P&G can sell 10 year debt at little more than a 3% coupon, then we should not be surprised at some of the pricing decisions being taken. With regards its subsidiary Duracell, it has a business in slow structural decline, which provides a drag to its own organic growth figures, […]
Continue readingMarkets find it tough to break the BTFD conditioning
Was the Friday rebound in equity markets another BTFD opportunity, or a possible suckers rally? Certainly, the wall of central bank liquidity over the past five years have reduced the market’s pricing mechanism to little more than a pavlovian response to the next turn of the central tap and where bad news can be good […]
Continue readingCorrelation <> causation, but sometimes maybe!
When I was but a nipper, a wise old Chairman of a large and successful financial information business gave me a valuable piece of advice:Â That mediators extract better margins in poor information environments and when price discovery is obscured. As his business, amongst others, picked off and commoditised market after market with real-time pricing, […]
Continue readingCheap new cash = property boom. Nothing has changed in 2,000 years!
He “made money so plentiful, that interest fell and the price of land rose considerably, And afterwards, as often as large sums of money came into his possession by means of confiscations, he would lend it free of interest, for a fixed term, to such as could give security for the double of what was […]
Continue readingWelcome to the UK recovery!
Still faced with a structural deleveraging in personal and public debt, the policy response by those who ought to know better remains the same – juice the system and hope growth miraculously appears. That’s right, the same strategy as adopted for Greece, Portugal, Spain, France etc, etc, & etc. After the >+10% MoM rise in […]
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