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 […]
Introduction This market commentary has been produced for some time now but March 2021 was the first month when a ship made the headlines. Anyone who watched a news bulletin will have seen the mega-container ship the Ever Green firmly wedged across the Suez Canal. The ship, which is 400m long, was finally re-floated having […]
Overall Market Backdrop, March – Optimism was the order of the day for March, as comparatively successful vaccine rollouts in the UK and USA led to rising bond yields and a continuation of the rotation out of growth stocks and into value and small cap names. – Financials continue their resurgence, given their tight correlation […]
Introduction Welcome to the March Market Commentary: as you will see below, February was a good month for world stock markets with virtually all the major markets moving in the right direction. It was also the month which saw the rollouts of various vaccines accelerate in many countries. As we write on the morning of […]
Many of our clients will be familiar with property funds. Investing in commercial – rather than domestic – property, these funds have been part of many clients’ portfolios, typically providing a balance to higher risk equity funds. That, of course, was before Covid-19. When the UK went into lockdown in March last year many property […]
As you will no doubt know, the current tax year ends on Monday April 5th. ‘Make the most of your pension and ISA allowances before the end of the tax year’ is a familiar refrain. One that is heard slightly less often – but which is no less relevant for some investors – is ‘make […]
In February, the Daily Telegraph had a headline which must have alarmed savers up and down the land: ‘Savers face threat of negative interest rates.’ According to the story, the Bank of England had told the clearing banks that they ‘must be ready to introduce the policy in the next six months.’ What are negative […]
Overall Market Backdrop, February – Across the world, the impetus changed during the month from vaccine availability to vaccine rollout, as we saw multiple products hit the market to combat COVID-19, and the focus switched to how well nations were navigating the Herculean logistical challenge of a nationwide vaccine rollout program. – Developed market equities […]