magazine archive


magazine archive

Russ Mould

Lessons to learn from the Archegos drama

Thursday 01 Apr 2021

An American former colleague from my investment banking days was always tickled when he quoted a sketch from the comedy show Saturday Night Live , where the punchline was: ‘And today on the New York Stock Exchange, no shares changed hands. Everyone finally has what they want.’ As a well as a smile...

Small caps can tell us a lot about the market mood

Thursday 25 Mar 2021

Small cap stocks are perceived to be riskier than their large cap counterparts and with good reason. As such, they can be used to judge wider market risk appetite – if small caps are rolling higher, we are likely to be in a bull market. If they are falling, we could be shifting to a bear market. In...

Lessons one year on from the low

Thursday 18 Mar 2021

It was Warren Buffett’s mentor, Benjamin Graham, who once wrote: ‘The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.’ Such plain-speaking, common sense has yet again proved its worth over the past 12 months to offer a timely lesson to us all. It is almost a year...

The questions facing UK gilts

Thursday 11 Mar 2021

In some ways, markets had little to digest in the immediate wake of the Budget, as so much of the chancellor of the exchequer’s speech had made its way into the newspapers the previous weekend. Rishi Sunak did come up with a couple of surprises all the same, in the form of the superdeduction for...

Which chancellors of the exchequer have been best for the UK stock market?

Thursday 04 Mar 2021

The Conservative Party’s Benjamin Disraeli, twice prime minister and thrice chancellor of the exchequer, once said of his bitterest political rival, who held each post on four occasions: ‘Well, if Mr Gladstone fell into the Thames that would be a misfortune; and if anybody pulled him out, that...

An emerging trend to note in bond markets

Thursday 25 Feb 2021

Zambia, Venezuela, Tajikistan and Armenia do not make a habit of featuring in this column, not least as they are a bit off the beaten track, even for the most intrepid investor. But they catch the eye because each member of this quartet has seen an increase in interest rates this year, to take the...

Blame game won’t stop the next Gamestop

Thursday 18 Feb 2021

Today’s (18 February) Congressional hearing in Washington into what happened with shares in Gamestop should make for fascinating listening. A host of luminaries – including Vlad Tenev from Robinhood, Ken Griffin from Citadel, Steve Huffmann from Reddit, high-profile retail trader Keith Gill (‘...

Why the inflation debate is more than just hot air

Thursday 11 Feb 2021

There is a general rule that the most vituperative arguments are those that take place between academics, because the stakes (and the implications for the real world) are so small. Usually, such debates can be watched with detached amusement, but there is one current spat which does command...

What the GameStop games really mean

Thursday 04 Feb 2021

One of the most intriguing things about the surge in shares in loss-making American video games and consoles retailer GameStop is how they gained so much in a week when the broader US indices had their worst five-day spell since October. Such gyrations do not normally breed confidence. The spike in...

US stocks as expensive as before the 1929 and dot-com crashes

Thursday 28 Jan 2021

We all know that financial markets are discounting mechanisms that look to ‘price in’ future events (and therefore trade off their perception of events rather than necessarily the reality of them). However, it did look more than a little odd that the US stock market hit new all-time highs just as...

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