As promised, I have recorded some 20 minutes of my observations on the ‘end of the world as we know it’, or more precisely, the implications of Trump’s tariffs.
Markets
Deep Dive – April 2025
Trump 2 – what we know so far and the implications for investors
My more diligent subscribers may have noticed a pause in my Your Attention Please (YAP) posts which was partly because I was on holiday (in England) for a week and partly because the current situation demands a more in-depth commentary.
I would not usually write this monthly longer missive as a commentary on recent market returns or the evolving ‘macro’ background, but my take on the current state of affairs is that the impact of the bizarre behaviour of the incumbent of the White House is so significant in terms of the ongoing assessment of the market valuation of investment assets, that a calm, logical, albeit personally biased review of what has happened so far could be very useful to my readers. I think readers pay me for an opinion and observations, not just to report data!
YAP – Reaping what they sow
Yesterday’s big market sell off was hardly a surprise. With an economic incompetent (to put it mildly) and his sycophants interfering big time in global trade and discharging the whole magazine of his revolver into the foot of the USA, it was eventually going to get through to investors, however MAGA they might be, that there coud well be a recession in the USA.
It has become fashionable to suggest that the markets are permanently propped up by the huge sums in index tracking ETFs and funds and also the personal wealth of the billionaire set. A further argument in favour of the market being a one way bet is that asset allocation decisions are more commonly made by algorithms than by humans these days. Those are valid arguments, in my opinion, but they have an extension: when entities (be they people or machines) are in control of very large amounts of money in the equity markets, if they are triggered to a negative inflection point, the sell off will be dramatic.
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:
Deep Dive – March 2025
Generative AI – Implications for Investors
A discussion with a subscriber recently prompted me to think that investors ought to be thinking now about the real long-term implications of the release into general use of what is loosely called generative AI – software like Chat GPT, Apple Intelligence, Gemini and DeepSeek.
Introduction
The shorthand AI is actually unhelpful because the word intelligence has always been the subject of controversy and debate and even Wikipedia’s opening lines under the heading of Intelligence point out that the definition is wide and has for over a century been a subject of professional debate amongst psychologists rather than philologists.