Topic: Uncategorised

What A Drag

Posted on November 18, 2022 by - Uncategorised

The announcements made yesterday by our fourth Chancellor in 5 months, Jeremy Hunt, will have come as little surprise to most. In a clear attempt to do the precise opposite of the ‘shock and awe’ tactics of the Liz Truss / Kwasi Kwarteng Government, most of the content of yesterday’s announcement had been rumoured or leaked to the press already.

First to the good news, if we can find any in there…

Well. The markets didn’t hate the announcements. Again, most of them were known beforehand and would have already been priced in – the FTSE 100 barely moved yesterday ending the day down just 4 or so points.

In addition, Jeremy Hunt renewed the Government’s commitment to tax-efficient (and growth-promoting) investments such as VCTs (Venture Capital Trusts) and EIS (Enterprise Investment Schemes). There had been some small rumours that these might have been on the chopping block so it is encouraging to see these additional tax-efficient vehicles retained.

Finally, there was nothing much was changed in terms of the actual structure of the tax system. The core way that tax operates and the rules and legislation surrounding it were broadly kept the same.

The Best Days

Posted on November 15, 2022 by - Uncategorised

I was not scheduled to write a new blog post today, but given yesterday’s monumental market events, I thought it would be a good idea to pen a brief note.

So often, I talk about the risk of missing the “best days” in the markets.

What I am referring to here is that missing out on just the best 5 or 10 days in the market within a multi-decade time period can have a huge impact on your overall investment returns (or losses as the case may be).

I have shared this document before, however if you would like an explanation of just how powerful this concept is, please click the button below to see a wonderful page by Fidelity:

When Doing Nothing Is Best – Read Here

Controlling The Inner Chimp

Posted on November 7, 2022 by - Uncategorised

You will have to excuse the somewhat more technical nature of today’s post, however, we seem to be at a bit of an inflection point in markets with a huge volume of change going on all at once.

During times like these, our ‘inner chimp’ has the capacity to take over and override our more rational human brains. Our ‘inner chimp’ refers to the emotional and instinctive reactions we have to things every day – the weather, an interaction with another person, the news headlines or the stock market for example.

During times like these, the media will do all that it can to grab the attention of our inner chimp. They will use scary headlines to describe what might otherwise be fairly mundane events to capture our imagination and get us clicking and reading their stories.

It is fairly common to see headlines such as:

“Stock markets in freefall”

“Carnage in bond markets”

“The death of the 60/40 portfolio” (I will come back to this in a moment)

We raised £3,215 for CALM!

Posted on October 19, 2022 by - Uncategorised

As many of you know, last month on the 10th of September, many members of the Buckingham Gate team took part in the Thames Bridges Trek Ultra Challenge; a 25k trek across London city, zig-zagging over 16 historic bridges, to raise money for The Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM).

We Live In Unusual Times (Or Do We?)

Posted on September 29, 2022 by - Uncategorised

Things are changing at breakneck speed in the economic world at the moment!

It seems almost unthinkable that we entered 2022, just 9 months or so ago, with stock markets at or near record highs, bond markets also near all-time highs, and interest rates at or close to zero around the world.

Fast forward to September and how things has changed. We have now experienced 7 back-to-back interest rate rises in the UK (and odds on there are more on the way) with a similar story playing out across most western economies. Stock markets, and especially bond markets have struggled in this environment and now it seems almost inevitable that consumers will begin to suffer too as the cost of living continues to surge and borrowing costs increase.

It seems we are living in unusual times… or are we?