When I read that the Italian government ‘backtracks on windfall tax after bank shares slide’ (FT), or watch a video explaining how the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is embarking on a propaganda campaign to boost the perception of Chinese companies and push share prices up, I add that to my collection of evidence that there is no longer such a thing as real democracy. Not that anyone ever said there was in China anyway!
Watching Brief – August 2023
Pottering About
Past the worst?
Looking at my 3 personal portfolios (UK Sterling SIPP, UK Sterling collectives and Euro collectives) I note a noticeable flattening out of what had been a longish mostly downwards line on the valuation over time graph.
In fact, July was a month of modest gains overall, with the best results in the Euro portfolio, suggesting that over the month Sterling may have appreciated a tad against the currencies underlying the largest holdings I have in my UK pots.
I cannot of course guarantee it, but my feeling is that early Summer 2023 may be the inflection point when the bear market that started some time in late Autumn 2021 and which has had stuttering false recoveries comes to an end.
There are plenty of predictions of better economic growth and ‘soft landings’ and unsurprisingly (at least to me), corporate profits are in the main on the up, thanks to the consumer being suckered with price increases, quietly approved of by governments and central banks whether justified or not!
Midweek Musings – some more quiz answers
I could not think of anything connected with markets and investing in the current climate to write about this week. I have plenty of ideas, but I have not go very far in developing them so that they would be useful to investors and worth giving up your time to reading!
I will confine this week’s post to answering two more linked questions in my June quiz.
Midweek Musings – Lazy days of summer
Long siesta?
With parts of the world experiencing record high temperatures, working probably seems like something best avoided unless you are in a pleasant air-conditioned location. Probably most of the people looking after our money do enjoy that luxury, so the markets won’t be grinding to a halt. I suppose some power outages may be reported in some places and forest fires may threaten some large cities, but I don’t see the weather as a direct threat to the daily operation of investment markets.
Midweek Musings – time is your friend
To adapt the words from Sergeant Pepper – ‘it was 46 years ago today’ – that your then naive but optimistic scribe started work for the Halifax Building Society. Over the subsequent nearly half a century in what might loosely be called a career I progessed from cashier clerk/managment trainee through quite a few iterations of finance industry jobs to end up as your semi-retired keyboard warrior writing a blog on the internet on a warm sunny day in Lithuania, a country I suspect all of us know more about than we did in 1976!
Don’t panic – I am not going to write thousands of words about nostalgic but to you boring biographical stuff. I would only say that I have made mistakes, learned a lot and had a few successes, and that all applies to my adventures as an investor myself!
I refer to this quite large block of time so as to remind readers that when getting all stressed about your investment portfolio performance, if you ever do, you need to remember that most of us are now invested for life and hopefully that means we are going to be in the market for at least a decade or more.
That being the case, we need to always remember that markets are cyclical and we should not get overly focused on the short term. I can now say that with absolute confidence after all that water under the bridge!
Watching Brief – July 2023
Pottering About
Half time scores
I find it useful to have a look at market returns around the globe halfway through the year and so present below some approximate data (Source: Yahoo Finance).
| INDEX | Year to Date Change (local currency) |
| FTSE 100 | No change |
| FTSE250 | (-5%) |
| S&P500 | +1% |
| Bitcoin | +73% |
| Nikkei225 | +28% |
| Hang Seng | (-10%) |
| DAX/CAC (averaged) | +13% |
| Gold futures | +10% |
| £/USD | +5% |
| £/JPY | +16% |
Of course, all data taken over a short discrete time period must be viewed with caution, especially noting the significance to percentage returns of where the starting point happened to be – Bitcoin was not exactly flourishing in late 2022, just to pick one example.