MoneyWeek

Taylor Swift was named the biggest celebrity CO2 polluter of the year in 2022 by a marketing firm, says Ben Wright in The Telegraph. Swift’s team pointed out she had bought double the carbon credits needed to offset her tour travel aboard her private

“Liz Truss [may be] a spectacularly failed 44-day prime minister with a book to sell [but] she has a point when she criticises Bank of England governor Andrew] Bailey… Long before the mini-Budget fiasco, I described Bailey as a… competent middle mana

World War Three? The Magnificent Seven? So last week. An extraordinary amount of fanfare greeted the FTSE 100’s ascent to a new record closing high this week considering it almost happened a fortnight ago and was discussed to death then. Markets ofte

The FTSE 100 has eclipsed 8,000 points for a new record close. The rally comes amid confidence that UK interest-rate cuts will begin this summer, while strong oil prices are boosting London’s blue-chip commodity giants. Up by 4% in 2024, the FTSE sti

Shares in Hipgnosis Songs Fund have soared after private-equity group Blackstone announced that it would seek to derail Concord Chorus’s proposed $1.4bn takeover of the UK-listed music-rights investment trust, says Daniel Thomas in the Financial Time

Cooling tensions in the Middle East saw Brent crude ease back below $90 a barrel this week. Still, oil has climbed 16% this year. Traders have returned to focusing on fundamentals, says Erwin Seba for Reuters. “Geopolitical risk premiums” – the extra

In what would be “yet another major blow to the capital’s beleaguered bourse”, Ocado has reportedly discussed with investors the option of moving its listing to New York, says Lars Mucklejohn in City AM. At least one top fund manager had told Ocado t

Netflix has announced another three months of “blockbuster” growth in subscribers, says Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. It gained 9.3 million in the first quarter of 2024, nearly double the figure expected. This means that more than 31 mill

Interactive Investor Gold miners are a volatile, geared play on gold prices. That mining “roller coaster” is currently in steep ascent, with shares in this Egypt-focused miner up by 25% this year. The fruits of a three-year investment programme to ra

“Timken literally helps the world go round,” says Barron’s. It makes ball bearings and other components crucial to machinery used in sectors ranging from agriculture to aerospace. The stock has dipped owing to weak demand from China, but the outlook

Chinese bubble-tea chain Sichuan Baicha Baidao, known as ChaPanda, made a disappointing debut on Hong Kong’s bourse last Tuesday, says Nikkei Asia. ChaPanda’s shares opened at HK$15.74, 10% below the initial public offering (IPO) price of HK$17.50. T

Rishi Sunak has pledged to boost defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030 and put Britain’s defence industry on a “war footing”, with £10bn for ramping up domestic weapons production. His promise, made in Poland, which borders Ukraine, would steadily

Following “a political logjam that had lasted for months”, the US Senate has finally approved a $95bn bill to deliver security aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific region, with “overwhelming bipartisan support”, says James Politi in the Financ

Indians have begun voting in a general election that “will last six weeks and zigzag across the country”, say Tripti Lahiri and Vibhuti Agarwal in The Wall Street Journal. Polls suggest the result will be a third national victory for prime minister N

With less than a week to go before the local elections in England, bookmakers and betting exchanges are finally starting to put up some more markets on the results. Betfair now has markets on the elections in the West Midlands and Tees Valley. With £

Politicians keep talking about how we need to give growth a boost. Liz Truss made it the central mission of her short-lived government. The Labour leader Keir Starmer, as he prepares for government, has promised, somewhat implausibly, to make the UK

● The moral of Dr. Martens’ five profit warnings in three years is “never trust a private equity-backed company that comes to market with a pitch that years of easy expansion lie ahead”, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “If it were that easy, the b

Factor investing is one of the most interesting ways to look at what’s going on in stockmarkets and what kind of environment we are in. While groups of stocks with certain characteristics have tended to beat the wider market over the long term, there

Richard Bernstein, CEO and CIO, Richard Bernstein Advisors There’s nothing really magnificent about the Magnificent Seven, says Richard Bernstein, the former Merrill Lynch strategist who now oversees $15bn at his own macro-focused investment firm. Wh

The Magnificent Seven is a nickname for the group of companies that has been responsible for much of the gains in the US stockmarket over the past year or so. The term became popular after Bank of America analyst Michael Hartnett used it in a researc

UK stocks are the cheapest they have ever been compared with global ones (as measured by the MSCI World index). Meanwhile, investment trusts are on some of the largest discounts to net asset value (NAV) in history. So if you’re looking for value inve

Activist shareholder Sparta Capital Management is urging engineering-services firm John Wood Group to move its listing to the US or put itself up for sale, says Reuters. The call comes a year after US-based Apollo Global Management’s £1.7bn takeover

■ Investors withdrew more than £6bn from Liontrust Asset Management in the year to 31 March 2024. This is more than the £4.8bn of outflows recorded the year earlier. The group lost £1.2bn in funds in the last quarter. Liontrust now manages £27.6bn, w

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard The Telegraph In the debate around green energy and decarbonisation, misconceptions inflate perceived challenges and costs, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The single huge and “silent fallacy that subverts all else” is the noti

“I started scheming. If I got somebody to knock me off, death by misadventure, [my children] would get the insurance… I wanted them to have a life. It was a hard moment… I literally thought of self-annihilation so they could survive. That’s how low I

nixons.substack.com When I was last in Greece in 2018, the country was three years into its third bailout programme, growth was weak, unemployment “sky-high”, and the left-wing government “at loggerheads with its creditors”, says Simon Nixon. “What

bloomberg.com Dune: Part Two, the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic, is “superb”, says Adrian Wooldridge. It also has “something to tell us about the direction history is heading in”. That

cityam.com The variety of food on display in any modern supermarket would have “stunned” our forefathers, says Matthew Lesh. “The spice section alone has more flavours than would have been available to kings and queens in previous eras.” Yet many do

The world is becoming a more dangerous place due to the activities of China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, with fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East. Western countries realise that they must increase defence spending to deter aggressors and this i

Chemring is a FTSE-250 company with a market value of £943m. Its results for the year to 31 October 2023 were released last December. They revealed the largest order book for over a decade, revenue of £473m (up by 19%), underlying operating profit of

Car-insurance premiums have risen across the board in recent years. The rising cost of everything from spare parts to labour means payouts have gone up. But older drivers are seeing the biggest rise in their car insurance bills. Compare the Market ha

Are you paying interest on your credit-card debt? You really shouldn’t be. With plenty of balance-transfer deals available there is no excuse not to be taking advantage of a 0% balance-transfer credit card. Balancetransfer credit cards allow you to m

● “Every year from the beginning of March to the end of May is the period where people will make most decisions about their tax-free savings. Rates tend to get competitive,” Andrew Hagger from consumer site Moneycomms told The Sunday Times. The avera

Most savers reaching retirement believe they have a binary choice to make about how they start taking income from their pension funds. But while most people opt either to buy a lifetime annuity – paying a guaranteed income until death – or to draw do

Does your employer offer a salary-sacrifice option as a way of making pension savings? If so, it’s very likely to make sense for you to take them up on the offer. With these schemes you agree to sacrifice some of your salary, with your employer payin

● More than 40,000 savers have made claims for compensation of almost £2bn from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) since 2019 following the collapse of their pension provider or financial adviser. The FSCS is urging people to check whe

The Guinness Global Innovators Fund focuses on firms able to grow profitably and boasting sustainable competitive advantages that lead to high returns on capital both today and in the future. We like companies with high levels of recurring revenues,

Frank Field, the Labour MP and backbencher known for his campaigning on poverty, died of cancer this week at the age of 81, says The Times. A devout Anglican and the MP for Birkenhead for 40 years, Field was one of the longest-serving members of the

Rosé season has well and truly kicked off, and here is a selection of the very finest so far this year. The 2023 L’Exuberance Rosé du Clos Cantenac (£19.75, privatecellar.co.uk) is a delicate flower with an enchanting cranberry, rose petal and sour-c

How America Runs Britain Angus HantonSwift Press, £25 During World War II, Britons grumbled (in the words of comedian Tommy Trinder) that the Americans were “overpaid, oversexed and over here”. The GIs responded that the British were “underpaid, unde

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