Its Not Harry

Comment and opinion for retail investors in the UK

Monthly commentary

Deep Dive – November 2025

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The death on investment funds – long live ETFs!

Around 7 or 8 years ago, during the period when I was working for Headley Financial Services (HFS) after they bought my business ahead of my retirement, I was asked as the most technically qualified member of their investment committee to research and write a report for the committee on the then relatively new asset type of exchange traded funds (ETFs) and their cousins (rarer) ETCs and ETPs.

I don’t have a copy of the report now but I can more or less recall what I concluded, which was that although the likes of Vanguard had succeeded in creating cheap funds that tracked the main widely used stock market indices (by an automatic process – so passively) the market in ETFs had even by then expanded to track all sorts of other indices, including ones made to order, generally but not always at quite low cost. 

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Deep Dive – October 2025

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When a cult rules millions

For most of my working life, I have been able to tell those who asked me that politics made not much immediate difference to investment markets.  Of course, where politicians make significant changes to macro-economic conditions (say Reagan and Thatcher in the ‘80s under the influence of the monetarists and market liberalists), there will be impacts over the medium to long term. 

However, as a rule markets have always taken the view that in the democratic ‘free’ world, politicians come and go and policies oscillate from a bit leftish to a bit rightish with the odd major annoying upset, like Brexit.

It is also widely understood that the most important capitalist economy, the USA, is really under the control of two main groups – a loose collective of shadowy billionaire oligarchs and the lobbying firms employed by the mega corporations.  This was explained to me when I was a teenager attending college to study business and as a Brit, I struggled to believe it, but now there is some evidence (especially during the Boris Johnson period) that the same sort of democratic corrosion is occurring in the UK.

Are politics really relevant for investors?

The people with the real power in the USA welcomed Trump’s re-election and the US equity market performed accordingly early this year.  Here was a man who was not very bright, had only made money with the help of Russian property developers or by blatantly disreputable behaviour, when left to his own devices went bankrupt over and over again, had an ego that forever needed massaging, and was utterly free of the ethics that most people think define Christian societies. 

In essence, they thought that they knew, as the KGB had discovered much earlier, that this was a man whom you could easily manipulate with a little forethought.

That was however their mistake. 

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YAP – late post, sorry!

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With Donald Trump and his Republican loyalists continuing to swing a wrecking ball at the US economy, of course with implications for the rest of the world, the UK struggling with inflation and a public debt crisis, France being France when it comes to worker behaviour and very little good news elsewhere in Europe, unless you make military equipment, It is astonishing that global equity markets are riding high. The Far East maybe has no new problems but the medium term implications of Trump tariffs and some major repositioning of supply chain policy by really big industrial nations are not yet fully understood

Of course, the markets are not the economy and vice versa and it looks like bond markets are expecting interest rate cuts in the USA, plus Gold is valued very highly, suggesting that at least some market participants are exiting equities, or more generally, people with money are very nervous. Indeed, I read that there is evidence of retail investor selling at noticeably higher than usual levels. I have personally made my own microscopic contribution to that trend.

I’ve been here there and everywhere this week!

This market context is very hazardous with a systemic correction being very likely, as I have written before. It just needs a trigger that creates an instantaneous inflexion point and Trump and his team of economic half-wits seem to be trying hard to find that trigger.

Against this background, I planned to write useful checklist, cross-referencing selected guidance I have written previously, so that readers can make sure they are as prepared as possible for any eventually. I had even written some notes with the basic content.

However, on October 1st, I moved to new flat and ahead of that relocated my ‘office’ (really just the place my PC, printer and supporting tools live). The move has taken up all my time and also resulted in my, temporarily (I hope), misplacing a few things, including my October Deep Dive notes!

I must therefore apologise and ask you to wait a few days until I get properly organised again and can write and publish the full piece. Please email me if you have any burning questions!

September 2025 – Back to school!

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Introduction – Pick and Mix Revision

This month, I don’t have anything interesting to write about in the style of the Deep Dive longer articles that I usually start the month with, so I am allowing you a choice as to how much time you spend on your investment portfolio management education.  I thought it would be useful to offer what might be taken as a revision list or a prompt to put in place some processes that make sure you are continually and effectively on top of your portfolio. 

Because I have written and published on this web site a great deal of material and some very specific guidance on the various essential aspects of portfolio maintenance, much of what I would like you to review will be referenced by links to articles of various lengths.

You can decide exactly how much you want/need to take in as your personal refresher course and then reference the relevant articles, spreading the readings over a few sessions if you prefer.

Not everything that I currently think is important is already on record, so the second part of this month’s briefing does add some new suggestions.

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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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