From midnight tonight, August 11th 2025, a short new podcast style video will go live. Here is the link:
New video – update on private equity access for retail investors
Asset Allocation
Deep Dive – August 2025
Introduction – European Focus
This month’s longer post is dedicated to the outlook for European (including the UK) markets for the rest of the year, based partly on the Morningstar webinar presented a couple of weeks back, from which I have extracted and in some cases further interpreted or extrapolated, my own selection of important pointers and data.
Note that the presentation was delivered just before Trump’s threat of 30% tariffs on the EU if a trade deal had not been struck by the end of July. As I wrote this piece, an outline deal had been announced, with a general tariff set at 15% but various significant issues still outstanding.
The main webinar presenter , Michael Field, Chief Equity Strategist at Morningstar Europe, did (in mid July) make the point that a ‘blow up’ in trade relations with the USA was a distinct possibility! I think the outline deal that we know about as I write this piece is being taken, or at least presented, differently in the various major European states, but perhaps the provisional outcome is not so much a ‘blow up’ as a potential set of hurdles that will impact trade in ways yet to be fully understood, possibly only temporarily.
The Main Points
Deep Dive – July 2025
Half time scores
We are now at the end of the first 6 months 0f 2025 and more significantly, a little under that much into Trump 2.0. What has been the actual impact of the orange one’s political and economic ‘policies’’ on markets? To what extent have our advance calls on the widely anticipated instability and general weirdness that followed the election of Donald J Trump protected our portfolios or better still, left us exposed to new opportunities?
YAP – Snippets
Here are a few curiosities that have come my way in the last few days, in a condensed form and the selection based on my assessment as to their significance. I think we will be talking more on all these points in the future:
Deep Dive – May 2025
Trump 2 – 100 days and a little more clarity
I would not normally expect to be writing this monthly piece as an ongoing running commentary on a single macro economic factor, but the impact of Trump’s presidency on the global economy and investment markets and therefore on our personal wealth is so dramatic and directly relevant that I expect that you would welcome a reasoned opinion on the implications of where we are now, just over 3 months into this global (insert expletive of your choice here).
After the first false dawn, when markets (especially in the USA) were assuming that reduced regulation and a more business climate friendly environment would allow already over valued equities to continue marching upwards, the reality of tariffs calculated by a methodology that was so primitive it was genuinely beyond belief, flip flopping on that and all the rest you know about, has all served to create a climate of uncertainty and what’s more, direct and immediate practical consequences including a supply shock for goods coming out of China. Trump’s 100 day speech, reported the day I publish this article, is said to be full of falsehoods and more of the same bombast.
YAP – Boomerang Economics?
The last few weeks have certainly been tumultuous in terms of utterances from the USA’s leadership and global reaction to that.
One thing that I have noticed is that the announcements from the Trump camp seem to have achieved something quite unexpected (although perhaps not so surprising with hindsight). There has been a complete rotation, still ongoing, in investors’ valuations of global stock markets by region. Look at this data: