Stocks take note of North Korea crisis – or do they? Over the week, the main global stock markets fell by between 2 and 3.5% and thereby finally appeared to acknowledge the heightened geopolitical risk levels emanating from the nuclear showdown of words between North Korea’s dynastic leader Kim Yung Un and US president Donald… Read more »

Consolidated base but momentum dwindling? It’s been another week where political dramas have dominated the headlines, whether it was Trump’s revolving doors for his senior staff in the White House, Germany’s car builder summit to save the diesel engine or never ending Brexit positioning. However, for the global investment community, a raft of data releases made… Read more »

Summer thoughts about the ‘longer term’ As I wrote last week, capital markets are currently not exactly quiet or boring as one might reasonably expect in the middle of summer. On the other hand, they are pretty much behaving as we had expected – choppy. Stock markets trended down slightly over the week, despite much… Read more »

Summer lull – delayed As the summer holiday season is getting into full swing, one would expect capital markets to be calm. The opposite was the case, as particularly European stock markets continued to grapple with the perspective of their central bank threatening to take away the (easy money) punch bowl, just when their regional… Read more »

Pre summer-holiday investment check As we head towards the summer holidays, it’s worth checking on some of the expectations we had at the start of the year. The road to Brexit Just over a year on from the referendum result, the UK’s future relationship with the EU is about as unclear as it was then…. Read more »