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 […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
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’. […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
These are dangerous waters for investors. Not just from the visible reefs, such as the rising trade and military tensions, but to what remains hidden, as Trump positions himself ahead of what could prove to be the most important mid-term elections for a generation. This is a game however, where many of the key pieces […]
Continue reading