magazine archive
magazine archive
Talking Point
Is intellectual capital the next big investment theme?
Thursday 16 May 2019When you think of thematic investing, words like risky, narrow and short-term fad could easily come to mind. After all, several coal mining, nuclear and even shipbuilding investment funds launched when commodities were all the rage 10 years ago, the majority of which no longer exist today. Popular...
The rise of market power and what it means for investors
Thursday 09 May 2019In November last year we examined the issue of ‘skew’ in markets and suggested one explanation for the outsized contribution of a few stocks to the market’s overall return might be their outsized returns on capital compared with the market average. We said at the time that a few firms – notably...
What the extinction rebellion could mean for investing
Thursday 02 May 2019Anyone who has picked up a newspaper or tuned into the news in the last fortnight will have noticed that climate change has managed to topple Brexit as the hot topic of discussion in the UK. Just a week ago, a group of environmental protesters glued themselves across the entrance to the London...
The rise of the regulators
Thursday 25 Apr 2019Led by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), anti-trust regulators around the world are having a bigger say than ever in corporate affairs. While this is good news for consumers, for investors the regulators represent another level of risk and complexity. There are many current examples...
Higher or lower: how to play the volatile pound
Thursday 18 Apr 2019‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,’ as they say. Variations of this quotation have previously been attributed to physicist Nils Bohr, writer Mark Twain, movie mogul Sam Goldwyn and baseball player Yogi Berra, yet the identity of the originator is less important that its...
Is cannabis the next investment bubble?
Thursday 11 Apr 2019At midnight on Wednesday 17 October 2018, Canada became only the second country in the world after Uruguay and the first country in the leading G7 group of nations to legalise the recreational use of cannabis for adults over 18. Canada’s ‘experiment’ is being closely watched by other governments...
Dual-class share structure – unfair or underused?
Thursday 04 Apr 2019One share, one vote remains one of the bedrocks of UK stock ownership yet the debate on so-called dual-class listings could heat up once again in the wake of the US stock market debut of ride-hailing company Lyft last week. San Francisco-based Lyft is a rival of Uber, the better known of the two...
Why aren’t challenger banks living up to their billing?
Thursday 28 Mar 2019Following the financial crisis more than a decade ago and the public bailout of Lloyds ( LLOY ) and Royal Bank of Scotland ( RBS ) , the UK banking market was opened up to a new wave of companies who it was hoped would genuinely challenge the established players. Without ‘legacy issues’ such as mis...
Are two heads ever better than one at the top of a PLC?
Thursday 21 Mar 2019Less than two years since Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management merged, the enlarged group is finally dispensing with its unpopular co-CEO structure as Martin Gilbert is relegated to a different role. The boss of Aberdeen Asset Management before the tie-up, Gilbert will remain with Standard...
The psychology of stock market bubbles
Thursday 07 Mar 2019The US investor John Templeton famously observed that bull markets ‘are born on pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria’. Indeed, by the final stages of a bull market many investors have come to believe that either they have some magic gift or that they are destined to...