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!
We wish you a safe, healthy, and prosperous New Year! These words are even more meaningful given the most deadly and economically crippling ‘Black Swan’ event that we have experienced in the last century—COVID-19. After unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, the record-setting development of multiple effective vaccines has elevated optimism that we will experience the ‘thrill of victory’ over this nemesis in the upcoming year.
On Monday 4th January 2021 in Hong Kong, a bitcoin trader was ambushed by robbers who stole cash and bitcoin before pushing him out of their car.
They stole 15 BTC equating to approximately $520,000 at the time…
Having recently hit a record high price of $41,000 per bitcoin (BTC), there seems to be more and more hype surrounding the cryptocurrency. However, given the volatility of this asset, who knows where the price will be at the end of the week.
Launched in 2009, bitcoin is the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap and unlike pounds, dollars or euros, bitcoin is created, distributed, traded, and stored with the use of a decentralised ledger system, known as a blockchain.
As the earliest cryptocurrency and by far the most popular and successful, bitcoin has inspired a host of other digital tokens such as Ethereum and Ripple.
Corporate interest from banks such as JPMorgan, arguably one of the biggest banking names in the world, projects a price target of $146,000, which would match the total private sector investment in gold via exchange-traded funds, or bars and coins. JPMorgan did state that this price target is a long-term target and unsustainable for this year – but given the recent rally, who knows?
PayPal Holdings have also allowed cryptocurrencies on its platform, which is another reason for the recent rally. If bigger corporations are taking it seriously, then the appetite in retail investors grow, which in turn creates a speculative bubble. It is rumoured that Apple is considering it for Apple Pay.
As a scarce resource, gold has traditionally been a hedge against inflation. Miners can’t flood markets with gold, whereas a government can debase their currencies by starting up their printing machines. Part of bitcoin’s appeal lies in the fact that it isn’t controlled by governments or their monetary policies, and that its supply is limited even more strictly than gold’s. ‘Halvenings’ (a bitcoin halving event is when the reward for mining bitcoin transactions is cut in half) help slow down the mining of new coins and production will cease entirely at 21 million coins (at the end of 2020, the tally was more than 18.5 million). With the vast spending by governments and central banks in response to the pandemic raising fears of inflation after economies recover, more attention than ever is being paid to bitcoin as “digital gold,” even as inflation remains muted.
Perhaps the scariest thought behind all this is there is no regulation in bitcoin. This makes it a nightmare for central banks and regulators, let alone traders in Hong Kong. However, as bitcoin becomes a more common asset class, we would expect there to be increased regulation – how exactly, is a completely different story as who exactly is responsible for the regulation?!
Mt.Gox’s (a bitcoin exchange) case serves as a vivid example of why bitcoin traders should be cautious. A popular exchange collapsed and almost $460 million of users’ bitcoins went missing.
We find clients are frequently asking us about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and our answer is more or less the same every time – at the moment we wouldn’t invest our own money, let alone our client’s money, into something we don’t fully understand, which isn’t regulated. Watch this space as I don’t think this will be the last ramble about bitcoin, however, for the time being, the term ‘Fugazi’ comes to mind…
Yesterday evening we got the results of the Georgia runoff elections. The Democrats won both of the seats which means the Senate will have a 50-50 partisan split with incoming vice-president Kamala Harris having the tiebreaking vote. We would expect her to vote Democrat!
It means that Joe Biden and the Democrats have a much better chance of getting through legislation and making changes to both corporate America and Main Street. Some popular Democrat policies include higher tax rates to fund more government spending, climate-friendly initiatives and increased regulation of the technology titans and pharmaceutical sectors.
A big rally across global equity markets. The UK market hit its highest level since March. The biggest winners were those sectors which have been largely out of favour such as banks, oil and gas and mining. In general, any sectors that will benefit from increased inflation and higher interest rates led the market higher. This is the so-called ‘reflation trade’. These are also areas where investor positioning is generally underweight so as we have experienced before rotations often have a large magnitude and are swift. Previously these rotations have not had much-staying power.
The margins are still very thin in terms of majorities in both House and the Senate so whilst the Democrats will have more scope to shape policy and get its chosen nominees confirmed, the usual checks and balances should mean now is not the time to completely rip up the playbook and start over!
The curtain is slowly coming down on 2020. Not before time! After what has been a tumultuous period for most, and a tragedy for many, the time to turn the page and move on is slowly arriving. Centre stage, the principal actors are going through their closing lines. Following the US elections, the leading actor refuses to go quietly into the night. Legal actions lie strewn about like discarded party poppers…