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Boom times for the global economy
BUT INVESTORS KNOW THAT. THEY HAVE BEEN BUYING THE RUMOUR OF STRONG GROWTH AND EARNINGS SO MAY SELL THE DELIVERY OF IT IN COMING WEEKS. WE NEED A NEW RUMOUR TO BUY. THAT RUMOUR COULD…
Active or passive – which are the best performing funds?
Will 2018 be the year of the active fund manager? Commentators love to claim that actively managed fund performance generally fails to justify the higher annual management fees the fund managers charge for their stock…
Why it’s vital to keep an eye on worldwide and UK inflation rates
Day by day, a plethora of official economic statistics is released, building into a vast data set. In just one month, from mid-October to mid-November, Bloomberg recorded 585 major data releases for G8 economies, with…
Investing in artificial intelligence companies
In investment terms, the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) stretches beyond laboratories of scientists trying to develop neural networks. It now includes machine learning (a field of computer science where computers learn without being programmed),…
New technology in the emerging markets
There are still some emerging markets that engage in mass export of commodities and cheap factories, but they are fewer than before. There are also enough large EM countries with a technological footprint to make…
Is it time for patient investors to increase commodity exposure?
Let’s start with a bullish thought to begin 2018. We, among others, have recently been pointing to the potential for higher inflation in 2018. To be clear, we are not calling for a massive shift…
Week in Review: global equities hit record highs
The new year began pretty much as the old year ended, with shares continuing to chart a seemingly inexorable upward path. Stock market indices touched record highs in the first three business days of 2018.…
2017 Portfolio Review
Investors should always be more interested in the future than the past - and that remains true, even when reviewing how our shares fared over the last year. So, while bearing in mind that the…
Investment Ideas for the Year Ahead
As 2017 draws to a close, investment experts have been looking into their crystal balls to assess economic prospects for the coming year and the funds and investment trusts that could benefit. While there seems…
Reasons to be cheerful
Alex Scott, Chief Strategist, Seven Investment Management At first glance, there’s a lot to like about the investment landscape as we look ahead. After a year of synchronised growth across the major global economies…
Investment company performance
The political uncertainty that was a consistent feature of 2016 has continued this year with countries across Europe and Japan going to the polls; Brexit negotiations, which led to the recent announcement of a Brexit…
Week in Review: hybrid vigour
With the Nasdaq gaining some 28% this year (and Bitcoin up a mere 1,624% against the dollar), technology’s been the talk of the town. But the lines between tech companies and other areas of the…
A touch of spice
Investment companies have a closed-ended structure which allows them to invest in a wider range of investments, including unquoted companies which are often referred to as private equity. These are the shares of private companies…
Week in review: bordering on the farcical
We got there in the end. After a week of diplomatic toing and froing and more than one trip back to the drawing board, the UK finally reached a historic deal on its EU divorce…
2018 Outlook: Guard against real-world inflation For Professional Investors Only
Summary The gradual reversal of expansionary monetary policies – at differing paces globally – will require some investors to adjust their approaches. Protecting purchasing power will remain a priority as official inflation understates real-world costs.…
An Equity Market Update
As we head towards the end of 2017, we all naturally begin to think about the year ahead and what it may hold. For us, the real surprise in 2017 was the continued re-rating of…
Week in review: a bit of a bubble?
Digital currencies were in choppy waters this week. The value of bitcoin surged above $11,000 for the first time, before dipping by around 16% on Thursday. Such volatility is not unusual in the world of…
Graphic Content – November; corporate bond risk premia are now the lowest ever For Professional Investors Only
Risk premia on a corporate bond can be broken down into two component parts. The first is the term premium, which relates to the risk premium on an underlying government bond, and is the extra…