Investment News and Views

For the first time in a while, we seem to have some degree of reasonable and synchronised growth in all geographic and sectors of the world economy. The US and Canada, continental Europe, Asia (including China, India and Japan) along with many emerging countries in Africa and Latin America are all seeing their economic activities growing at rates commensurate with what might be expected of them. This means above 6% in China, a little under this level in many emerging countries, and around 2% in many developed countries, apart from the UK. It appears that almost ten years after the...

Global stock and bond markets have had a good twelve months and many of them are at all time highs. From here, will they go higher or will there be falls or a correction? In stockmarket parlance, a correction is generally considered to be a pullback of 10% or more. A correction therefore on the FTSE 100 Index for example, would mean it losing about 740 points at the time of writing to put it back to about 6650 where it was last November. Various investors or stockmarkets practioners are obsessed with short term performance and such an obsession is...

Why have the US (and other) stock markets gone up since the election against all odds? Markets can be very fickle. The rise since the US election day has taken nearly all pundits by surprise. In the cold light of day investors woke up and first of all thought that Mr Trump couldn’t possibly enact all of the ideas that he had talked about in his campaign. The ideas most seized on by stock markets are a lowering of personal income and corporate taxes, a large increase in infrastructure and defence spending and much looser regulation in oil, gas and...

As I am sure you are aware, OPEC met at the end of November and, led by Saudi Arabia, has agreed to cuts in oil production. Certain non – OPEC countries such as Russia (which is up there with the US and Saudi Arabia, as the world’s largest producers) and Venezuela have also agreed to cuts. This is being led by Saudi Arabia, where the 31 year power behind the throne and modernizer, Sheik Muhammed bin Salman has seen the light and virtually admitted defeat in trying to drive US shale oil drillers out of business. In a market economy...

As I have said on previous occasions to clients, corrections happen from time to time. Particularly in the US, the market had gone up in virtually a straight line since August 2017, rising 16% in just over four months. When this sort of rise happens and investors have plenty of gains, they sometimes look for an excuse to take some profits and when the selling starts other people, sometimes “Johnnys come lately”, jump on the bandwagon. The trigger for the fall was the announcement on the 26th of January 2018 in the US of continued good employment numbers but more importantly...