Brexit friction should spark new ideas for retail exports January 23, 2021 Many retailers received a welcome boost during the Covid-19 crisis with a rise in online orders from international markets, but with exports to EU member states facing teething problems in the form of higher costs and processing delays, now’s the time for retailers to broaden their reach and tap into new markets further afield. Research [...]
Mayor of London pledges 999-year shared ownership lease to tackle unfair extension costs January 22, 2021 Sadiq Khan has stood up for leaseholders in the capital by pledging a 999-year shared ownership lease on homes until 2026. The mayor has delivered a new expectation that all shared ownership homes built under his new £4bn Affordable Homes Programme are sold on a long-lease basis. He wants London to lead by example and [...]
How finding the quality within value was crucial in 2020 January 20, 2021 There are two broad areas of value in the UK market, financials and commodities, that in aggregate make up around a third of the FTSE All Share index. Within this, however, there are vast differences in both quality and performance. (Please see the end of this article for a glossary of terms). 2020 was a [...]
Welcome to the world of decentralised finance January 19, 2021 Decentralised Finance or “DeFi” for short is an ecosystem of financial tools and services that are built on open-source networks and do not involve any centralised institutions. If you’re someone who takes an interest in the crypto space, you’ve probably heard about DeFi this year, as the space has rapidly grown from just over $600M [...]
Christmas sales hike drives strong revenue growth at Asos January 13, 2021 Sales at fashion retailer Asos surged in the four months ending in December as the online shopping boom continued amid the coronavirus pandemic. The firm said that the hike in sales had led to a better-than-expected growth in revenue over the period leading up to Christmas. As a result of the strong start to the [...]
Government’s communications failures can be remedied – if they’re fixed soon January 12, 2021 The Prime Minister’s lockdown announcement last week has left a collective sense of déjà vu and a frustration at seemingly being back to square one ten months into the pandemic. Whilst we are facing an evolved virus, a key component to our fight against the virus has not changed: human behaviour. Rallying behind an approach [...]
The case for investing in financials January 7, 2021 Entire tomes have been devoted to investing in the financial services sector – hardly surprising when you consider its size, and therefore its significance to the world’s capital markets. To say the financial sector is large doesn’t do it justice. Of the total market capitalisation of the S&P 500, the world’s largest stock market index, [...]
When will our lives begin? What I learned from 2020 — and from Disney’s Tangled December 31, 2020 Like so many people tasked with entertaining children over Christmas, I have spent the last week watching an inordinate amount of Disney. That is to be expected. What I did not expect was finding the ultimate lockdown song. I am talking of the opening number from Tangled, the 2010 version of Rapunzel, entitled “When will [...]
Bitcoin 2021 outlook and challenges in charts December 21, 2020 2020 has been crucial for Bitcoin, we see it as the year of legitimisation for the broader public and investors, accelerated by the COVID crisis and the consequent rapid escalation of QE. Our conversations with institutional clients have changed considerably over the course of 2020, what was typically a desire to speculatively invest has now [...]
Foreign aid isn’t charity, it’s an investment in our own prosperity December 15, 2020 When he announced his decision to cut UK foreign aid spending from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of GDP, chancellor Rishi Sunak, argued that the sum was hard to justify to the British people during a pandemic. In fact, it is not so hard. Aid is not charity, and its benefits are neither [...]