Tag: investing

April ’24: Juggling cash as new UK tax year begins

FIRE v London3 Comments

The temperature in the Middle East got even hotter in April, with Israel and Iran trading attacks on each other’s sovereign buildings/territory. Somehow World War III has never really seemed in danger of breaking out but it is a reminder that only change is constant.

Over in New York Donald Trump was falling asleep in court. You have to hand it to him he knows how to stay in the headlines.

The markets in April

Meanwhile the UK stock market continues to fill newspapers for the wrong reasons. Amidst all the doom and gloom – heightened at the end of the month by the takeover of Darktrace, a rare UK tech stock – you might have missed that the FTSE-100 is not only at a record level but in fact outperfomed other markets significantly in April.

All the markets seem to want to know now is when interest rates are coming down, and how fast. April saw expectations of cuts dampened / postponed, which appears to have dampened valuations of both equities and bonds. In the US this was heightened by an increasing sense that the AI-driven tech boom may have got a bit ahead of itself – there is still little to show for concrete extra revenue / cost savings (bar a few notables such as Klarna) but plenty of increased infrastructure spending.

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Mar ’24: A towering influence

FIRE v London3 Comments

I’ve enjoyed March.

I managed to enjoy a few days’ skiing, despite less snow than any of us would like, in the Austrian alps.

Back at home, the sun has been getting stronger, and the evenings have been getting lighter – and now with Summer Time we will enjoy lovely late evenings for six months.

And I’ve been reflecting recently on a key influence in my life – the author James Clavell.

I remember as a child in the early 1980s being astonished that my mother could take on a 1300+ page book. Shogun, Clavell’s third key novel, had just been televised into a TV miniseries – the first western production ever filmed in Japan, apparently – starring Richard Chamberlain. I enjoyed the miniseries enough that soon enough I was reading the book myself – and I was gutted when, after those 1300+ pages, it finished.

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Jan ’24: A giant tax bill lands

FIRE v London1 Comment

One of several highlights for me in January was visiting Salisbury cathedral, which I did on an impulse while travelling back from the Coastal Folly.

My main frame of reference to the cathedral being those notorious Russian nerve agent assassins citing it as their reason for visiting England, something which to a Londoner had as much plausibility as as Putin’s claims that Ukraine’s Nazis started the war. I hadn’t taken seriously the idea that the cathedral might actually be a reason to visit England. But I would say I was wrong – it is stunning, and surprisingly moving. Photos really don’t do it justice.

Elsewhere in the world, the focus has shifted from the Ukraine war to the Gaza crisis – which has escalated to the Houthi shipping attacks off the Yemen.

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