Overall Market Backdrop, May While recent performance has been in direct correlation with vaccine rollouts and supportive economic data, equities have been more muted in May due to inflation fears looming over global equity markets. Among the developed markets, Europe is noteworthy for its performance in May, driven by its vaccine rollout success which has […]
‘Fail to plan, plan to fail.’ It’s an expression that anybody who has worked in management or the military must have heard a thousand times. Like all oft-repeated clichés, it carries a kernel of truth – and in no aspect of human life is the phrase more apt than in financial planning. Unless you have […]
Introduction Some of the numbers in this month’s Bulletin are simply staggering. Whether it’s Amazon’s profits or the ‘investment’ (which could alternatively be considered ‘spending’, depending on your political viewpoint) announced by President Biden. There was a time where the ‘standard unit’ of currency we talked about was a million. Company profits and valuations were […]
At a seminar in March, Haruhiko Kuroda, Governor of the Bank of Japan, suggested that the central bank should immediately start “preparing thoroughly” for a future with its own cryptocurrency. While there were no immediate plans to introduce a cryptocurrency Kuroda stressed the importance of being ‘thoroughly prepared’ should the need arise. In April it […]
For the last seven years the title of the city with the most billionaires has been held by New York, but this year a new name has taken over and that city is Beijing. According to the latest Forbes annual rich list, the Chinese capital added 33 billionaires last year, taking its total to 100 […]
At time of writing, the UK’s FTSE 100 index of leading shares is at 6,882 – up 7% on where it ended 2020. In the US the Dow Jones index is up 11% for the year at 33,821 with other major markets around the world also making significant gains in the first four months of […]
Overall Market Backdrop, April – The optimism that spearheaded equities in Q1 has continued to run through in April; vaccine rollouts in the UK and USA has sustained the momentum gathered in Q1. – Successful vaccine rollouts have created an atmosphere of optimism for global growth and this is shown by the rise in bond […]
While Rishi Sunak’s spring budget introduced a variety of new initiatives and updates to multiple taxes, one suspected change was missing from the big red book. Analysts had posited that a capital gains tax hike would be a likely inclusion in Sunak’s budget, expecting it to be brought more in line with income tax and […]
In February, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and boss of carmaker Tesla, announced that his firm had bought $1.5bn (£1.1bn) of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and expects to start accepting it as payment in the future. The announcement caused the price of Bitcoin to jump to $44,220 (£32,072) – a rise of 17% and a […]
The last twelve months have been notable for many things: one of them, sadly, has been the rapid increase in cybercrime as criminals look to prey on the lonely and vulnerable. To take one very simple example, the BBC reported last month that romance fraud – cheating someone out of money by pretending to want […]