Is Inflation Back Again? When I was 18, my father called a family meeting. It was 1989 and UK interest rates had been raised that day to 15%. He announced to us all that the house, the schools had to go and we would have to start again. Though the crisis was real, it is,
Chris Brown, CIO, 20th September 2021 Back in early 2020, when the Coronavirus first hit and equity markets lost -30% or more in a few short weeks we wrote several update notes to keep you informed on the (dramatic) market movements we saw. As markets and the economy have continued to recover this year we
Chris Brown Chief Investment Officer The psychology of money This quarterly update is often guilty of writing about numbers and data and mathematical returns and making it sound like markets are a giant machine where if X happens then, pull the handle, and Y will pop out as your portfolio return. This is probably true
Chris Brown Chief Investment Officer This time really has been different For this update we thought we would mix it up a little and take a (much) longer historical perspective on our current situation, including data on the Black Death and Napoleonic wars. None of us have (thankfully) lived through a global pandemic (and few
Market Commentary Let us begin our review with some humility. We will talk here about what happened last year and give our outlook for the year coming up. But, as Yogi Berra famously once said, forecasting is hard, especially about the future. To illustrate this we show the one year forecasts the best and brightest
Chris Brown, CIO, 5th November 2020 In our October client overview we wrote that we had taken risk up a little in our investment portfolios. This meant adding some high yield credit and equities (mainly in Europe) where we thought it was appropriate. We wrote our rationale in detail in our update but – broadly
Q3 Overview From a returns perspective, the third quarter may look at first glance pretty unremarkable. Our equity investments had a mixed quarter (global equities rose while the UK equity market fell), our “real” (inflation protected) assets did their job of beating inflation plus a bit and our (safety focussed) fixed income investments were broadly
Q2 Overview One of the sharpest falls in equity market history has been followed by one of the quickest recoveries. The US technology focused Nasdaq market is even up for the calendar year. This means the market thinks prospects for these companies are now better than they were six months ago. Meanwhile, in the real
Tiziana Maida, Head of Research, 26th May 2020 Responsibility has long been a fashionable by-word to most investment portfolios. Some date its start back to the 70s, with the Quakers’ movement prescribing exclusion of “sinful” companies (arms, oil and gas), others point to South Africa’s apartheid period as a pivotal moment, when investors began divesting
Chris Brown, CIO, 20th May 2020 Our previous updates this year have, inevitably, been focused on the virus and its impact on the global economy and markets. This time, though, we thought we would write about what we see happening closer to home in the UK. Though our portfolios remain international and diversified in nature