What really caused the FTSE 100 “wobble” February 15, 2018 | City Talk Investment commentators clearly dusted off their thesauruses before they spoke to the media to describe the behaviour of financial markets over the last week. "Tumble", "pullback", "pause for breath"? "Shake-out", "setback", "wobble", "plunge"? "Breather", "sell-off", "rout", "correction"? Or perhaps you would prefer a good, old-fashioned "opportunity"? The explanations for the 'sell-off' have been equally as [...]
Shenzhen, San Jose, Tel Aviv: global cities to watch in 2018 February 12, 2018 | City Talk As investors in global cities we compile a biannual index using a number of factors to identify the most economically vibrant cities. With the publication of the latest version of the index, we’ve also taken the opportunity to highlight those cities that we believe have the greatest potential to move up the rankings in 2018. [...]
Charts of the month: Rising bond yields, dividends and Putin February 9, 2018 | City Talk Each month, dozens of charts cross our investment writing desk at Schroders, the asset manager. Here, the team pick out six that particularly caught their interest. Bond yields on the up US Treasury (UST) yields have risen 30 basis points (bps) since the start of 2018, across different maturity levels. We have to go back [...]
How interest rates might increase over the next two years February 9, 2018 | City Talk UK policymakers’ concerns about inflation have prompted Schroders’ economists to bring forward to November their expectations of a rise in interest rates. Schroders senior European economist and strategist Azad Zangana now predicts the base rate to rise in November 2018 by 25 basis points, up from 0.50% to 0.75%. This is before the two rate [...]
What has driven returns in different stock markets? February 8, 2018 | City Talk When we look back over the past three years, investors have earned remarkably similar returns in local currency terms in very different parts of the world. UK, eurozone, Japanese and emerging market equities have all returned close to 9.5 per cent a year [1]. The US, as is well known, has been the outlier and [...]
Ranked: Here are the 20 wealthiest people in cryptocurrency revealed by Forbes’ first ever Crypto Rich List February 7, 2018 Forbes has compiled its first ever Crypto Rich List to rank the 20 wealthiest people in crypto, saying billion-dollar fortunes have been created almost overnight. Top of the list is Ripple founder Chris Larsen, with Forbes saying his net worth came close to $20bn in early January, as a result of owning 5.2bn XRP – [...]
S&P 500’s 4% fall: How the US stock market has performed after big one day losses February 6, 2018 | City Talk The US stock market falls this week will have understandably unnerved investors the world over. The S&P 500 fell 4.1 per cent on Monday, the largest one day fall since August 2011, when markets feared contagion from the European sovereign debt crisis. Today, the concerns are less profound and actually stem from a bright economic [...]
Who killed Toys ‘R’ Us? February 5, 2018 | City Talk Toys ‘R’ Us, the $6.9bn (£5bn) toy-store chain, became one of US retail’s biggest-ever bankruptcies when it filed for so-called ‘Chapter 11 protection’ last September. Market watchers were quick to point the finger of suspicion at Amazon. But is that right? In the spirit of Agatha Christie, we ask: who killed Toys ‘R’ Us? In [...]
‘Supermarket giants doomed’ – no, just history repeating February 2, 2018 | City Talk Investors, analysts, journalists or other market commentators often become convinced some scenario or trend definitely will or will not play out. Check back a few years later, however – always anyone bothers – and that certainty may prove unwarranted. Three or four years ago, for example, many were arguing it was ‘game over’ for supermarket [...]
Europe lacks giant tech stocks – but it may lead with the ‘industrial internet’ February 1, 2018 | City Talk In the US, tech firms have been responsible for 42% of the rise in the value of the US stock market since 2014, according to a report in The Economist. Emerging markets too have their own tech giants in Alibaba and Tencent. But where are the tech companies here in Europe? And could emerging technologies [...]
