Electric cars and oil prices: should investors be concerned? June 5, 2017 | City Talk What is more likely to cause a long-term collapse in oil prices – the electric car or the humble combustion engine? If you were to judge solely by media coverage or perhaps even by gut instinct, you might well answer "the electric car". But you would be wrong. So at least argues a single, thought-provoking [...]
Is it still worth investing in bank shares? May 31, 2017 | City Talk Bank shares rose sharply toward the end of 2016 leaving many investors questioning whether the rally would continue. The global banking sector returned 13.7% in 2016 with dividends included, according to MSCI data. In comparison, the MSCI World index returned a more modest 8.2%. Among banks, the biggest gains were made by the US and [...]
How cheap are world stock markets? Five key tests May 30, 2017 | City Talk Valuation is key to making investment decisions. Invest when markets are expensive and future returns are likely to be poor over the medium to long term. Buy when markets are cheap and the odds are stacked much more in your favour. But a word of warning – valuations are useless at predicting stock market behaviour [...]
Can this chart really show what will happen next to the stock market? May 26, 2017 | City Talk Société Générale’s Albert Edwards, a market commentator that we on The Value Perspective blog respect very much, recently wrote his weekly strategy note on the dangers of stifling dissent and the comfortable ‘groupthink’ that can come about as a result. On the first page was the following graph and – in a show of dissent [...]
Sell in May: does the oldest stock market superstition apply to the FTSE 100? May 23, 2017 | City Talk “Sell in May and go away,” so the old stock market adage goes. The theory is that you should sell in summer months because they are usually the worst performing. So investors should sell in May and hold cash until early September – until the St Leger horse race. But data analysed by Schroders offers [...]
Top 20 most consistently performing investment companies over the last decade revealed May 22, 2017 The world's 20 most consistently performing investment companies over the past decade have been revealed, in a new study by the Association of Investment Companies (AIC). A quarter of the top 20 are in the global sector, with the Lindsell Train Investment Trust taking pole position and F&C Global Smaller Companies pulling in second. Despite [...]
Life expectancy remains as uncertain as any other part of our future May 22, 2017 Life expectancies are constantly being revised upwards as extrapolation take the most recent data into account. Kevin Murphy, author on The Value Perspective blog, highlights how dangerous making predictions from such a short amount of data can be. Along with taxes, death is famously supposed to be one of life’s two certainties – and yet [...]
Is LinkedIn the new Tinder? After several over-excited advances, I’m starting to wonder how anyone has time to do any work May 22, 2017 One evening two years ago, LinkedIn sent me this message: “Klaus viewed your profile 11 times today”. As Klaus’s LinkedIn viewing patterns merited a restraining order, I thought of calling the police. Then I opened his profile. Klaus, which is not his name, was head of equity capital markets at one of the largest investment [...]
Which UK stock market sectors have performed best over two decades? May 19, 2017 | City Talk When the stock market rises and falls the sectors within it can move very differently, especially in the short-term. Perhaps the best example was the dotcom boom and bust, when technology shares soared in 1999 and then spectacularly crashed in the three years that followed. A balanced and carefully managed portfolio can ease the impact [...]
Increasing numbers of us are ditching the office to work from home with the biggest rise among women employees May 19, 2017 More and more of us are working from home, according to new research by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The number of employees who usually work from home has risen by 152,000 over the last year, according to its analysis of ONS data. Fancy pyjama-wearing and your own company over a long commute wedged among [...]
