Sixty years ago, Marshall Nirenberg and Henrich Matthaei began the process of cracking the genetic code. Thanks to their persistence and resilience, today’s scientists developed effective mRNA-based vaccines in record time – saving millions of lives from COVID-19. With the darkest days of the pandemic behind us, investors can also appreciate the resilience of the economy and financial markets and the hopeful prospect of brighter days ahead.
Suez Canal, Major Football Transfers and the Oil Market
When I first saw the images of the recent Suez Canal incident, I thought it was photoshopped. To put the size of the ship into context, it is longer than the Eiffel Tower and weights 220,000 tons. The salvage teams shovelled 30,000 cubic meters of sand to free the ship, which has now cleared the canal for business as usual.Continue reading
Calling all Business Owners – Pension Planning
The Chancellor’s Budget has been designed to guide us out of the Covid crisis.
It’s no secret that we will all end up paying for the Covid relief spendingContinue reading
Financial Fitness Test
Do you have a strong financial why and a measurable deadline?
Whatever your motivation, you have until the 5th April to make use of available personal tax allowances. Continue reading
It is less than a year since Rishi Sunak presented his first Budget, after having been in the role of Chancellor for less than a month. His despatch box première featured an allocation of £12bn towards mitigating the impact of the Covid-19. Ironically, on the same day as Mr Sunak revealed that boost to spending, the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak a pandemic. Total expenditure in the U.K. on dealing with the pandemic is now estimated to be around £300bn.
The valuation of everything
Page 1 of the investing textbook states one should only take risk when one is being rewarded for doing so. This means that the valuation of everything is based off the expected return of the lowest risk asset. It is widely accepted that the lowest risk investment asset available is long dated government bonds. The proxy for this is the 10 year UK government bond in the UK and the 10 year treasury in the USA.Continue reading
Budget winners and losers
Yesterday Rishi Sunak delivered a budget to guide us out of the Covid crisis. We all knew that the extraordinary schemes to prop up an economy that had the ‘pause’ button pressed on it would carry a large long term cost.Continue reading
From a northern hemisphere perspective, Spring 2021 formally begins on Saturday 20 March however – for both recent weather and economic watchers – February showed some real progress that boosted signs of optimism for the rest of the year.
The first month of a new year ended as a disappointment for the average U.K. investor, especially as a contrast to the widespread excitable returns seen in the last two months of 2020. However, the month of January alone rarely gives us every answer and the unique nature of both the U.K. market alone and collectively the entire world has a wide range of potential outcomes.
2020 was undoubtedly the year of the SPAC. SPAC stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company. The purpose of these companies is for private companies to gain a stock market listing via a shell company rather than the rigours of the normal Initial Public Offering (IPO) process.
There has been a huge boom in IPOs of SPACs. In 2020 there was over $80bn raised for these ‘blank cheque’ vehicles. Investors in the IPO often have no idea what if any actual deals the SPAC will be able to close once the listing is complete. The 2020 issuance number was over a 5 fold increase from the 2019 SPAC IPO total raised. So far in 2021, even Jay-Z has got on board the SPAC express which has done nearly $20bn of issuance in less than a month!
Source: spacinisder.com
SPAC target companies have been focussed in a small number of potential high growth yet largely unestablished sectors but the most popular by far has been Automotive tech. The list of famous SPAC companies includes DraftKings, Virgin Galactic and Nikola.
Huge issuance, limited regulation and transparency combined with high costs mean it is an area that should be addressed with extreme caution!