The recent gyrations in the Thomas Cook share price (a +50% surge yesterday and -13% correction today), might have you reaching for your catastrophe models, but its volatility after its latest guidance cut ought not to be that surprising. Combine a volatile top line with low margins, substantial financial leverage and a low rate of […]
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If the price of continued US support after the Khashoggi murder was the lower oil price, then it must rank as one of the most expensive assassinations of journalist in history, with Saudi Arabia’s gross oil production revenues down almost $2bn per week. The attempt to resurrect his political reputation at the G20 meeting was […]
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War by other means? Forget the South China sea, Syria or Korea. If you haven’t noticed, the EU and China are locked in a high stakes game of chicken with the US over control of the World’s reserve currency, where the weapon of choice are interest rates. While much has been made of Trump’s attempts […]
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Confused? You certainly should be as the political game of betrayal over Brexit reaches its denouement. In the very short term, markets (both fx and equity) are unfazed by the ‘deal’ being foisted on them, as they have already been softened up by the project fear propaganda – ‘any deal is better than no deal’. […]
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Pearson was for a while the darling of the sector, with a recovering top line supported by substantial cost reductions and an fx tailwind from the appreciation in its principal trading currency, the US dollar. Beyond this however, there was only limited evidence that the ship is being turned about, in terms of what really […]
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After seeing its shares tumble 10% immediately following its Q2 results, I added a position in Omnicom across a couple of portfolios I manage. It wasn’t that I was won over to the structural growth story for these marketing services agencies, but more a function of two things. Firstly, there is a price for everything […]
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Tax reductions, tariff walls and a trillion dollar plus increase in Federal debt to fund the party and one might have thought that bond markets would be fretting about inflation. Perhaps surprisingly and despite the absence of Fed price distortions as a buyer of its own junk, the inflation rate implied from the TIPS-fixed Treasury […]
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The spike in US bond yields has implications for equities, but perhaps not as directly as one might imagine. Yes, long bond yields and particularly TIPS, provide an effective proxy for a risk-free return and therefore the essential anchor for valuing other asset classes, but only from a relative rather than absolute perspective. It may […]
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