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Its Not Harry

Comment and opinion for retail investors in the UK

Education

Deal or No Deal?

12th October 2019 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

As Noel Edmunds might have said, before his whole life was taken up suing Lloyds Banking Group (quite rightly in my view).

Readers will have noticed big jumps in stock markets and Sterling when the news broke that a possible Brexit deal is back on the cards.

This many strike you as odd, in that markets have not sold off that much relative to where they were when Mrs May was trying to get a deal through and I read the news as saying Boris will present something very similar to what was on offer previously but if course as a triumph. As one wittier commentator put it, the threat of No Deal, ‘do or die’ gave the UK the extra clout to make the concessions required.

Is it time to pile into UK shares?

The markets are certainly right to think that for investors Brexit with a deal is a better option than leaving without. But what this jump shows is that any sort of good news is now seen as wonderful, not that really great prospects await the UK economy in the immediate future. We may simply spend a year heading towards another cliff edge – the end of the transition period.

However, if markets go up, we as investors are bound to be happy. Unless you are really confident in placing trades and are confident enough to buy Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), then the ‘forward pricing’ of OEICS means that you can’t really buy into such a rapid intra day price jump because the higher price will be what you buy at, after the jump has been priced in.

In fact as relief rallies are at risk of collapsing like an unlucky participant’s soufflé in a TV cooking contest, attempting to time the market on one day’s news is not recommended!

Filed Under: Economics, Markets, Trading

Monday Mash Up 004

7th October 2019 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

If you read the ‘start the week’ data on the Bloomberg business news website today, you might conclude that nothing much was going on – everything is calm and nobody is worried about anything.

But if you happened to have looked at the same site yesterday, being a Sunday, you would have seen a more thoughtful set of bullet points. They highlighted the fact that Germany is going into recession, politicians in Europe think the UK is now just playing a blame game and does not want a Brexit deal, there are potential difficulties coming up with the US/China trade talks and that maybe the US economy has now joined the global slowdown.

The last possibility can hardly be a surprise, given that anyone who knows anything about economics from a GCSE student upwards would have predicted that as a likely outcome of US policy on global trade.

Some readers may have thought it odd that US stock markets seemed to react positively to weaker US employment growth, one of the data points underlying the suspicion that the US economy is now braking.

That is because the possibility of a slowdown should, in theory, lead to lower interest rates in the US and the basis of equity share valuations is, at a fundamental level, connected with interest rates, Broadly speaking, lower interest rate expectations are good for equities because they are good for bonds.

If you print too much money, you can’t juggle with it because it drowns you!

This however is a mechanical relationship, so may not always correctly predict the prospects for equities in the medium term. If there is too much inflation at the same time as a slowing or even shrinking economy, suggesting that horror or horrors – stagflation, then the prospects for shares are really rather poor. Furthermore, the use of monetary loosening to boost asset prices is rather taken for granted, It is questionable as to what outcomes might follow if interest rates can only go down further by becoming negative.

So we should not join in the markets excitement about lower interest rates and assume that, as I have suggested before, central banks, will always be able to bail out ill thought-out political policies, or fantasy financial constructions in the corporate banking sector.

One might think of quantative easing as a bit like paracetemol. It lowers the pain if used judiciously, but take too much and you will get some fairly horrible major organ damage.

Filed Under: Economics, Monthly commentary, Uncategorised

October 2019

1st October 2019 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

Pottering About

Having just moved on from a career in building society branch management, I was actually training for another job in October 1987 when the stock market crashed, as well as there being a memorable hurricane.  That probably explains why I always feel nervous about stock market prospects at the beginning of October.   I was already interested in investment markets at that time and looking forward to getting more hands on with the markets.

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Filed Under: Economics, Education, Markets, Monthly commentary, Portfolios

IT vs UT

17th September 2019 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: Education, Members Only, Portfolios

Monday Mash Up 002

17th September 2019 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

I am writing this on a Tuesday, having had the mildly optimistic feeling that arose from the changes listed below rather deflated by the oil refinery bombing in Saudi Arabia.

Those of us who were adults in the 1970’s are very aware that rapid and dramatic rises in oil prices will threaten a long recession. However, until now the problem for the oil industry was surplus supply, so the immediate spike in prices might be short lived. If not, the already fragile global economy might stumble into a deep recession.

Help from central bankers means they are worried!

More Help From The ECB

The European Central Bank has decided to open back up its bond buying programme (quantitative easing), a reversal of policy much as has already happened in the USA.

What this means is that interest rates in Europe are going to be effectively negative at an institutional level which is an economic stimulus.

It occurs to me that we are in a situation where the politicians are like hopeless learner drivers in the dual control cars of their national economies and central bankers are the instructors jumping on the brakes and hauling back on the steering wheel to protect the public from disaster!

We (might not) Work

The latest fantasy based IPO (offer of new shares to the public) of the US office space business WeWork has been pulled after investment banks at last baulked at the underlying highly questionable business model and dominating behaviour of the charismatic founder.

If this is the end of vast amounts of capital being diverted into chancy business ventures, to be burned up at astonishing rates by founders who manage to become personally super rich without ever making a cent of profit, then that is good news.

The money that would have been burned on hopeless enterprises might now get used to buy shares in boring profitable businesses that have been useful to humanity for decades.

Filed Under: Economics, Education, Markets, Uncategorised

September 2019

2nd September 2019 by Mark Potter Leave a Comment

Pottering About

As we get to the end of a stock market ‘season’ – the Summer quarter – I thought it would be useful to look back and see what has happened in the last year or so. 

I usually see no merit in reeling off a lot of numbers telling you how much each market moved last month, quarter or even year. 

What I think will be interesting is to see to what extent markets have ‘priced in’ the risks we have known about for most this year (Brexit, tariff wars and slowdown in Germany, for example) and to try and work out if markets, like the British public have got overly used to the never ending political uncertainties. 

If markets are just taking the risks as ‘baked in’ then we might have to worry about that.

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Filed Under: Portfolios, Trading, Uncategorised

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