Its Not Harry

Comment and opinion for retail investors in the UK

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Deep Dive – August 2025

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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

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YAP – Trump and Europe (with 30% tariffs)

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Given my obvious relative enthusiasm for investing in Europe relative to the USA, readers may be wondering if I would now take a different view after Trump’s most recent announcement of a 30% tariff on what I think is meant to be the EU trading block.

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YAP – homely advice, AI rapper style

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With Nvidia becoming the world’s largest company on the back of enthusiasm for AI, I continue to test out the capabilities of the free AIs that are on offer to the public as apps for mobile devices (ie are usually cloud based). I have ChatGPT and Deepseek on my phone, for example. I also plan to see if CoPilot, which is inertia sold now with the Office 365 recent upgrade and reprice, will do some of my spreadsheet work.

It is clear to me, as I have already written, that people will soon find that AI ‘assistants’ (or ‘agents’ for more complex work – a new class of software tool in their own right), are easier to use and give more comprehensive and revisable results in a natural language format when compared to the old processes of ‘googling’.

It is also known that the main reason Apple’s share price is well down lately is that Apple have a lot of work to do in this area, being well behind even the previously lumbering Microsoft.

My latest test, inspired by thinking how much simple good sense, even simplified behavioral science, was in the now classic Kenny Rogers song ‘The Gambler’ that came up in a play list delivered to me by Google Music, was to ask my AI ‘helpers’ to write a song that would represent sound advice to UK retail investors. In other words, create the Not Harry anthem!

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YAP – the great American giveaway

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I recently saw a notable video posted by an American specialist in international relations whose analysis I have noted as insightful and accurate over recent years (he is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh). In essence he made the point that Russia’s next, possibly already under way, ‘invasion’ will not be of the Baltic States, Finland, Georgia or Moldova but will come (has started?) in the form of hybrid warfare attacks on countries in NATO and the EU. Russia is in fact an extremely capable enemy when it comes to cyber warfare (one of the key elements of hybrid warfare), likely much better equipped relatively than it is with tanks and fighter jets these days.

One of the reasons for this is not widely known, I suspect, and I only became fully aware of it recently. This is the theft of an entire library of the most advanced hacking tools in the world from the US National Security Agency’s special projects department, a few years back. In fact, no deliberate theft actually happened. It was I believe more a case of access being left open by misbehaving employees and the automatic operation of anti-hacking tools that had roots in Russia stumbling on an open door.

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Deep Dive – July 2025

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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?

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Snippets – ESG investing in the Asia Pacific region

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Having decided that I will be investing a lot less in US Dollar denominated assets as far back as November last year, for obvious reasons, I have raised cash by selling out of some global ESG focused funds, those with too much exposure to the Dollar in my view.

Most readers will know that I personally have believed in ethical investing for a very long time. I do not believe it is the way to make the most money, I should add, but equally those with specific conscientious objections to the grosser/less humane elements of global capitalism can still make good money. Naturally, I want to re-allocate my cash to the markets that I have already suggested in my blog posts are the ones that look more promising, being Europe (including the UK), especially smaller companies, and a return to the Asia Pacific region but keeping as light a weighting in China as possible.

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