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If history bothers to remember big-name fund managers, two will stand out from the latest generation. The first is Neil Woodford, who will mostly be remembered for losing an awful lot of people an awful lot of money. Anyone who invested in his Woodford Equity Income fund at launch will have lost just over 20% of their money. Anyone unlucky enough to invest at its peak in 2017, when the fund was managing more than £10bn, will be down over 40%. Miserable. The second is Baillie Gifford’s James Anderson, who will mostly be remembered for making an awful lot of people an awful lot of money. In 2000, he took over management of the Scottish Mortgage investment trust. Since then it has returned 1,530%. The MSCI World has barely managed…

Reports of scams where fraudsters hack into social media accounts and blackmail individuals and firms by threatening to expose personal material almost doubled in the last year, reports the City of London Police’s National Fraud Intelligence Bureau. More than £4m was lost by social media users, with some individuals paying more than £2,000 to regain access. Kylie Jenner (pictured) came under fire this week after asking fans to help her former makeup artist pay for surgery, says Natasha Jokic on Buzzfeed. Samuel Rauda’s family set up a donation page to cover costs after Rauda was in a serious car accident. Jenner – net worth around $700m – donated $5,000 and shared a link to the fundraising website. Fans were quick to point out she could have easily paid for it…

Brent crude oil prices rocketed by 85% between the end of October and mid-March but have since retreated. Trading above $62 a barrel as of the middle of this week, crude is 10% off its recent highs. Brent crude had its worst week since October last week, tumbling by 7%, say Emily Gosden and Tom Howard in The Times. Renewed virus restrictions in Europe are weighing on the short-term demand outlook. The fall shows “how premature” bullish talk of a return to $100 a barrel has been, says Bjornar Tonhaugen of Rystad Energy. Oil prices are still being “artificially” propped up by “Opec’s reduced supply” deal. The International Energy Agency recently cut its global crude-oil demand forecast for this year by 2.5 million barrels per day, reports Reuters. There are…

Gold prices are up by 12% since the end of 2019, but that gain has been eclipsed by the “staggering rally” in US equities, says goldmoney.com. The S&P 500 has soared by 75% over the past year. That has brought a spike in the “equities-to-gold price ratio” (higher means equities are more expensive relative to gold). The US stockmarket is “clearly in a bubble”. If the economy really does boom as markets are currently predicting then inflation is likely to follow, which would help gold. Alternatively, if stocks crash then the equity/gold ratio will come back down. In that scenario the Fed may well be inclined to intervene with more monetary support, which would also boost the yellow metal.…

The boom in retail investing has prompted Interactive Investor (II), the UK’s second-largest fund supermarket, to consider an initial public offering (IPO) in London later this year, say Daniel Thomas and Madison Darbyshire in the Financial Times. The surge in trading activity among younger retail investors following the GameStop frenzy has fuelled growth, with over £200bn now under management by retail brokerages. II accounts for around a fifth of the UK market, but it is the only big competitor not listed. Hargreaves Lansdown, its larger rival, is worth £7.4bn. The company has grown from £3.5bn in assets under management in 2016 to £50bn this month.…

Takeaway-delivery platform Deliveroo is set to be “the biggest London stockmarket debut since Glencore almost a decade ago”, say Mark Sweney and Sarah Butler in The Guardian. It has priced its initial public offering (IPO) “at between £3.90 and £4.60 a share”. This would value the company at up to £8.8bn, about £1bn more than initially expected. At the top end of the proposed price range, Deliveroo would be worth more than Premier Inn and Beefeater owner Whitbread (£6.6bn) and luxury goods group Burberry (£8.2bn). Deliveroo’s “lofty target” isn’t bad for a company valued at only £5bn as recently as January, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. But is a firm that has “wolfed down £1.3bn of private capital since 2013” without any sign of turning a profit –…

The House of Lords announced the candidates to be its next speaker this week, say Gabriel Pogrund and Tom Calver in The Sunday Times. “Change seems to be in the air.” With around 800 sitting members, the upper chamber is the second-biggest legislative body in the world after China’s National People’s Congress. Departing speaker Lord Fowler, 83, is an outspoken advocate for reform, which could see future by-elections in which hereditary peers are “elected”, abolished. That would, as Lib Dem peer Lord Alderdice put it, allow hereditary peers to “wither away”. In the past five years, hereditaries claimed £144,000 on average, compared with £134,000 for life peers, and typically made 50 speeches against 82. In the past 20 years hereditary peers have claimed £47m in expenses. Had some peers saved…

Learning to live with China Editorial The Economist The recent sell-off in Chinese shares revealed how interwoven with global finance China’s capital markets have become, says The Economist. The decline mirrored the Nasdaq’s fall, which was triggered by fears of inflation in the US. A resulting jump in American bond yields sparked global jitters, prompting foreign investors and big domestic fund managers to “pare their holdings” in China. However, the calm that returned to Chinese markets on 9 March was also areminder of “the idiosyncrasies of finance in a state-dominated economy”. Around 2016, China began to unwind its shadow-banking industry and pressed banks to launch formal wealth-management subsidiaries, rather like Western asset-management groups. Its capital markets also opened to foreign investors and, though concerns remain, thanks to attractive rates and…

When was the last time you heard about nuclear power and the demand for uranium? People used to debate the matter passionately, but it hasn’t been a hot topic in the developed world for some time now. The Germans have gone off nuclear power and the UK has so far proved poor at building new reactors. The real story, however, is outside Europe and America. China, India, Russia, Belarus, Korea, Slovakia and the United Arab Emirates are collectively adding over eight gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2021. (A GW is equal to one billion watts, while an incandescent lightbulb consumes around 60 to 100 watts.) There are 53 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide and over 300 have been proposed for this decade. Many countries in the developing world think…

■ “Tens of thousands of new homes will become ineligible for the Help to Buy scheme once new price caps take effect next month,” says Rachel Mortimer in The Daily Telegraph. From April the equity-loan element of Help to Buy will only be available to first-time buyers. It will also be restricted to new builds costing less than the average house price in that region. “Strong recent house price growth means 5,000 fewer new home sales will now be eligible under the scheme than previously thought.” ■ Several big banks are being slow to bring in new fraud protection, according to Rupert Jones in The Guardian. Last year confirmation of payee (CoP) was introduced by the banking industry. This means when you try to transfer money into an account your…

• Savers with final-salary pension schemes could soon be banned from transferring their benefits to another type of arrangement. While regulators warn against such transfers in most cases, since it is impossible to replicate the value of a guaranteed pension elsewhere, there are some circumstances in which switching makes sense. But MPs on the Department for Work and Pensions Select Committee are so concerned by the high number of people transferring inappropriately that they want to give pension-scheme trustees the power to turn requests down. • While state pensions can be a useful foundation on which to build your retirement finances, too few people know what they are actually owed, new research from consumers’ group Which warns. In particular, three in ten people overestimate the value of their state pension,…

Over the next few months, most – if not all – of the restrictions imposed to deal with Covid-19 are due to be lifted. However, this leaves the question of how we are going to repair the economic damage; GDP slumped by almost a tenth in 2020. Part of this recovery will take place naturally thanks than to pent-up economic demand and people spending the money saved during lockdown. But with the Office for National Statistics estimating that the unemployment rate will rise to 7.5%, there will be a need for additional measures, such as infrastructure spending, to stimulate the economy. Late last year Boris Johnson said the government planned to allocate £100bn to roads, bridges and other projects over the next five years. This is good news for FTSE-350…

It is 12 months since equity markets hit their Covid-19 lows. Few at the time would have predicted the scale of the subsequent market rally, or the speed with which the market’s focus has shifted from concern over companies surviving the pandemic to optimism about those positioned to benefit as economies emerge from lockdown. We believe that this shift in sentiment has led many more cyclical, industrial, and consumer stocks to trade at generous multiples of fully recovered profits as a rebound becomes priced in. However, there remain compelling but less obvious opportunities that should benefit from a “normalisation” post-lockdown. We have been looking for companies where, on top of a near-term recovery, we may see the virus benefit their end markets and where management can improve their businesses. Here…

I wrote about winemaker Craig Wessels’ extraordinary 2013 Restless River Chardonnay on this very page back in September 2016. In my eyes, it was the wine that turned this estate from a new kid on the block, like so many cool brands in the fast-moving South African wine scene, into an estate worth hunting down at all times on all restaurant menus and in all wine shops. The vineyards were planted back in 1999 and the vines are certainly finding their feet in this idyllic setting at 360-metre altitude, some three miles from the chilly South Atlantic Ocean. Famous for making stalwart cabernet and mind-blowing chardonnay, Craig planted his pinot noir vines in 2013 and this is his finest release to date. Having said this, and please bear in mind…

“The art dealer even turned his own grandmother into an NFT and sold her for a few grand” A fortnight ago, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, the first purely digital artwork to be sold by a major auction house, fetched $69.3m. That was a high price indeed for a non-fungible token (NFT) – a concept so fresh that Christie’s didn’t even try to put an estimate on it. Never mind that that figure wasn’t the $92.2m that a fusty old “masterwork” by Sandro Botticelli fetched in January. That painting had taken 500 years to get to that price, a new record for the Renaissance artist. Beeple’s artwork, the NFT, took 25 days from its completion (“minting”) to the moment the virtual hammer came down. Even Beeple, real name Mike Winkelmann,…

$93m How much bitcoin you would have to buy to move the cryptocurrency price higher by 1% in dollar terms, analysts at Bank of America estimate. The equivalent figure for gold is 20 times higher at around $2bn. €50m The cost of a proposed three-year experiment examining the feasibility of a four-day working week in Spain that has received government support. Under the scheme, 200 participating companies would receive partial reimbursements for any costs incurred in cutting hours. 188 The annual percentage increase in claims made to insurer Aviva relating to damaged and stolen hot tubs last year, when the garden accessories surged in popularity during lockdowns. Individual claims ranged from a “few hundred pounds” to around £9,000. €2m The cost of repairing the Bayeux Tapestry. Patrick Gomont, the mayor…

When Donald Trump stepped down as president he was about $700m worse off than when he took office, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, reports Charlie Mitchell in The Times. While in office, Trump transferred his “real estate and branding empire” to his sons, Donald Jr and Eric, and continued to put business their way by regularly visiting his properties with his security team. Even so, Trump’s net worth fell from $3bn to $2.3bn over his term. About 75% of his income comes from commercial property, where values have dropped as home working has surged, particularly in New York and San Francisco “where Trump has most of his stake”. His property portfolio is now worth 26% less than in 2016.…

President Biden’s mammoth $1.9trn relief bill has left Europe’s own stimulus efforts looking scrawny, says Johanna Treeck in Politico. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show that US pandemic stimulus measures amount to 13% of GDP, much higher than the 7% spent in the eurozone. That partly reflects America’s lack of a social safety-net, which forced Washington to step in with extra spending last year, Nicolas Goetzmann of asset manager Financière de la Cité told Aziliz Le Corre in Le Figaro. Nevertheless, there is now a “chasm” between US fiscal largesse and Europe’s more cautious approach. The recovery gap The result? The European Central Bank projects that the euro area won’t regain its pre-crisis GDP until the second quarter of 2022, a year behind the US. Europe’s…

Three to buy Team17 Investors’ Chronicle Video-game developer Team17 benefited from the “twin effects” of lockdown and major console launches in 2020. Profits surged by over a third to £30m. The company’s own game launches generated around a fifth of its sales, while it also bodes well that the group has now completed the £12m acquisition of one of its partners. With at least 11 new titles in the pipeline for this year, Team17 should be able to build on last year’s growth. 755p BBGI The Mail on Sunday The prime minister’s pledge to spend £100bn on infrastructure in the next five years, along with similar initiatives worldwide, bodes well for global infrastructure businesses such as BBGI. It specialises in “essential assets” such as roads, hospitals and fire stations. The…

• Elon Musk (pictured) has crowned himself “technoking of Tesla”, says Lex in the Financial Times. He seems to be amusing himself, but the joke might ultimately be on investors. A boss emboldened to embrace a “daft job description” may make “increasingly risky bets” such as Tesla’s decision to invest $1.5bn in the “notoriously volatile cryptocurrency bitcoin”. Musk may feel that the stock’s 660% surge last year has earned him the right to a “jokey name”, but he should remember that AOL’s shares fell 30% shortly after it appointed David Shing as a “digital prophet” in 2011. • Saudi Aramco, valued at $1.9trn, may sell “another chunk of shares” to “bolster” the country’s sovereign wealth fund, says George Hay on Breakingviews. The state-owned Saudi Arabian oil giant boasts the sector’s…

With most votes now counted in the latest Israeli election, the fourth in two years, it looks (at the time of writing) as though Israel is heading for another “protracted period of deal-making” before a new government is formed, say Felicia Schwartz and Dov Lieber in The Wall Street Journal. The bloc led by the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has a “slight edge” and projections as MoneyWeek went to press indicated there would be no clear winner. Netanyahu seemed likely to get around 53 seats in the 120-seat Parliament, leaving him “scrambling for support” from smaller parties. The situation is complicated by the fact that the two parties expected to hold the balance of power represent opposite political and demographic constituencies, say Oliver Holmes and Quique Kierszenbaum in The…

Its shares are soaring as it unveils a range of snazzy new electric vehicles. Tesla? Er, no, Volkswagen. The German car maker has unveiled plans for more than 30 electric vehicles across its VW, Audi, Porsche, Seat and Skoda brands. That is going to be quite a line-up for anyone in the market for a new battery-powered car, and investors are, quite rightly, starting to wonder if it won’t look a lot stronger than Tesla’s. Or how about the stock soaring as customers sign up to its streaming service in record numbers. Netflix? No, Disney. Its streaming service has been ahuge hit, signing up 100 million pay subscribers in a little over a year. It took Netflix a decade to reach that milestone. It can pay to come in second…

An increasing number of investors believe that cryptocurrency bitcoin has become an institutional-grade asset class – I agree. Some even believe that bitcoin replaces gold’s function in a portfolio. But with that, I disagree. Here’s why I believe that investors should own both – particularly in an inflationary environment. Bitcoin’s recent strength reflects an exciting new digital financial world which isn’t going away. By owning bitcoin, you are exposed to that growth, and own a digital “hard” asset. With ever-fewer bitcoins being created in the future (see the box below), bitcoin will become increasingly scarce. By the year 2032, a high bitcoin price will be nearly 90% cheaper to sustain than it would be today. The miners (the supercomputers that solve the very hard sums that both create new bitcoins…

“We took a gamble on that stupid house. We only bought it because the bank lent us a stupid amount of money.” TV presenter Mel Giedroyc (pictured), quoted in The Sunday Telegraph. Her work dried up after she took on a huge mortgage and she and her husband had to sell the house “I would rather weep in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.” Italian socialite Patrizia Reggiani, who used to spend €10,000 a month on orchids, quoted in The Times “Fame istrauma. It doesn’t matter if you wanted it. To dream of something is not having to deal with the reality. You’re enjoying the meal and the bill hasn’t come yet. The price of it ispretty high.” Sananda Maitreya, aka 1980s pop star Terence Trent D’Arby, quoted…

Saving can be a difficult habit to get into. But 2020 made it easy, says Rachel Rickard Straus in The Mail on Sunday. “For many who have kept hold of their incomes... surplus cash [has] been effortlessly piling up with fewer outlets for spending available.” Households have saved an extra £180bn in a year. But how do you keep saving as lockdown eases? “Everybody needs a budget” says Claer Barrett in the Financial Times. “Not budgeting puts us at risk of spending too much, while saving and investing too little.” Include the whole family when you create your budget. Children benefit from seeing good money habits in their parents. The UK’s Money and Pensions Service says most people’s attitudes to money are formed by the age of seven. Once you’ve…

Most people will have missed the news that the world is struggling with a major microchip shortage. Big deal, you might think, but with more of the devices we use daily needing them, problems start to mount. No chips means no products, with a slowdown in the manufacture of everything from mobile phones and games consoles to televisions and laptops. Even cars – increasingly smartphones on wheels – have seen production drop. Lockdowns have triggered the shortages. Sharp slowdowns in industries such as automobiles, for example, put the brakes on car-chip sales. As orders tanked, manufacturers switched to making more sophisticated chips, for which demand soared more than expected on the back of all that gadgetry for working and schooling at home, and they couldn’t keep up. In the meantime…

The past two weeks have been mixed for my four long positions, with two increasing but two falling. Media group ITV went up from 119p to 122p, while American homebuilder DR Horton rose from $80.51 to $84.49. The bad news, however, is that transport group National Express declined from 301p to 297p, while cruise-ship operator Norwegian Cruise Line slipped from $29.31 to $28.65. Overall, all of my long tips are making money, with total net profits of £4,531, up slightly from £4,368 a fortnight ago. Sadly, my short tips haven’t done that well, with four out of the five moving against me by appreciating. Online insurance broker eHealth went up from $51.03 to $68.09, electric-lorry manufacturer Nikola increased from $14.62 to $15.55 and online grocer Ocado climbed from 2,062p to…

Reach (LSE: RCH) is the UK’s largest regional news group. It has announced a dividend of 4.26p per share for 2020 despite falling profits and sales, “citing confidence in its online business”, says Patricia Nilsson in the Financial Times. Sales fell by almost 15% to £600m last year, but digital revenue grew by a fifth to £118m. The firm also expects online sales to double over the medium term. The dividend is up by 5.2% compared with the 2019 payout. As a result Reach’s share price has more than quadrupled since August, gaining 149% in the last 12 months.…

Paul Burks was born in 1947 and worked as a magician in nursing homes and as a country-music DJ in North Carolina in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2010 he set up the auction website zeekler.com. The idea was that people would pay to bid on the right to buy expensive goods such asiPads and desktop computers at huge discounts. The plan was that the knockdown prices would attract a huge number of bidders, so any losses on the sale of the items would be more than compensated for by the revenues from selling bids. What was the scam? Shortly after founding Zeekler, Burks set up a parallel investment scheme, ZeekRewards. In return for a cash investment of up to $10,000 (though many invested on behalf of their children and…

Hermès handbags were the best-performing collectables of 2020 for the second year in a row, according to the latest edition of Knight Frank’s The Wealth Report. The Hermès handbags sub-index of the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index (KFLII), which tracks the prices of the designer fashion accessories, rose by 17%. A regular feature of auction sales, Hermès handbags benefited from a heightened “appetite for relatively affordable luxury pick-me-ups during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in Asia where many bag collectors are based”, says Knight Frank’s Andrew Shirley. The record-setting sale of the year took place in Hong Kong in November, where a Hermès Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Retourné Kelly 2 handbag (pictured) sold for HK3.4m (£327,300) with Christie’s. Over the past ten years the subindex has gained 108%. Fine wine finished the…

• “In a bold break with its tainted Big Brother past, Channel 4 has just filled a building with a bunch of fog-horning egomaniacs who are attempting to win The Circle’s £100,000 cat-fishing contest,” says Ally Ross in The Sun. “Cat-fishing” means to create a fictitious identity for the sake of fooling people or defrauding them on social media, and this is pretty much the idea behind the reality TV show. The celebrity version ended recently with victory for singer Lady Leshurr, who was pretending to be chat-show host Big Narstie. The civilian line-up for the next series features someone who’s arguably more famous than either – James Crossley (pictured), aka Hunter from 1990s TV show Gladiators. His strategy is to pretend to be a 31-year-old nurse. The logic is…

Retired billionaire investor Bill Gross made around $10m for his charity earlier this year, betting that shares in games retailer and “meme” stock GameStop would fall, reports Bloomberg. Gross, who co-founded giant asset manager Pimco, initially lost heavily as GameStop surged by more than 1,700% in January, fuelled partly by users on social media site Reddit. But his bet paid off when the price slid in early February. Vinyl sales proved more profitable for British record labels than YouTube last year, despite the platform’s popularity, says Matthew Moore in The Times. Vinyl sales jumped by 30% to £86.5m in 2020, earning labels more money than at any point since 1989, “a remarkable achievement for a format once tipped for obsolesce”. The re-release of classics such as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Amy…

“Insider trading is going on in plain sight but... the company insiders involved are commended... That’s because [it] involves gifts of company shares to charity. These are the findings of a new study... analysing all [US] charitable gifts of stock from companies’ largest shareholders from 1986 to 2020, they found that the average gift was almost perfectly timed... [a] donated stock’s price reaches its highest point, compared with a broad market index... on the date of the gift... The odds that this result could be due to the insiders simply being lucky are vanishingly small... You might think that manipulative giving by insiders is not that big a deal. [But] some of these insiders appear to be using privileged information to time when their gifts occur, thereby maximising their tax…

Germany’s Jenoptik is one of the companies that facilitated Nasa’s mission to Mars, notes WirtschaftsWoche. It is a specialist in photonics, the science of generating light, and it helped assemble the lenses in the cameras used by the rover. Clients using Jenoptik’s optical technologies include semiconductor makers (ultraviolet light is required to make some components) and car makers, who need its laser systems. The public sector, meanwhile, has benefited from products that help monitor traffic. All this explains the company’s resilience last year and bodes well for the future. A recent acquisition, meanwhile, has bolstered the company’s presence in Asia.…

SoftBank Group is likely to sustain a “damaging loss” from the collapse of Greensill Capital, which provided supply-chain financing and related services, say Nabila Ahmed and Harry Brumpton on Bloomberg. The technology conglomerate and investor not only put $1.5bn into the doomed company, but also invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” into funds Greensill ran with Credit Suisse. However, while founder Lex Greensill claimed that his company was valued at “roughly $7bn” as late as October, Greensill declared bankruptcy earlier this month, which means that SoftBank’s stake is now “worthless”. The Greensill stumble is not only a “setback” for SoftBank and its founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, says The Wall Street Journal, but it also spoils what, until now, has been a “dramatic comeback” over the past year, . SoftBank’s…

The political survival of Scotland’s pro-independence first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, “could yet have long-term implications for the future of the UK”, says the Financial Times. This week, after an independent investigation cleared her of any breach of the Scottish ministerial code in her handling of sexual assault charges against her predecessor, Alex Salmond, “her job is safe” and the Scottish National Party (SNP) is “no longer in danger of a spectacular implosion” before the Holyrood election in six weeks’ time. Nevertheless, the “party and its central cause” have been “dented”. Sturgeon and her government have been “severely criticised” for their handling of the complaints against Salmond – which have cost taxpayers a lot of money – and for a flawed harassment policy. “The case for Scottish independence has long rested…

One of Europe’s biggest political survivors is Angela Merkel (pictured), who has been Germany’s chancellor since 2005. Until the start of this year, her initially strong handling of the Covid-19 epidemic won her plaudits and seemed to have secured her legacy. Now, with Germany’s vaccination strategy in tatters, she has gone from hero to pariah. This has had a knock-on effect on the polling figures of her Christian Democratic (CDU) party, as shown by its poor performance in recent regional elections. Still, punters remain confident that the CDU will remain in a strong position after the September elections, although not quite as confident as they once were. Indeed, with £5,139 matched on Betfair, the CDU and the CSU, its Bavarian sister party, are favourites to win the greatest number of…

• It’s been a good couple of years for video-games maker Activision Blizzard, says Metro. That’s allowed CEO Bobby Kotick (pictured) to collect his performance bonus of almost $200m after the company’s share price, aided by lockdowns, doubled from when Kotick’s incentive plan first went into effect. The scheme grants Kotick payouts for years, even if a particular annual target is missed. Advocacy group CtW advised shareholders to vote against the pay plan. • Thomas Rutledge, CEO and chairman of US cable and internet giant Charter Communications, received $38.8m in pay last year, “a big jump from $8.7m in 2019”, says The Hollywood Reporter. Stock options made up the bulk of the pay at $30m. Charter’s president, John Bickham, earned $36.5m in total, up from just over $5m in 2019,…

Bitcoin (BTC) mining cycles occur roughly every four years – or more specifically, every 210,000 “blocks” mined – after which a “halving” occurs. The purpose is to slow the rate at which new BTC are mined, with an eventual cap of 21 million on the total number that can exist. The first halving in 2012 came after the network had created 10.5 million BTC (210,000 blocks with 50 BTC per block). The 50 BTC per block reward has halved every four years since. It is now down to 6.25 BTC, and will be below one BTC by 2032 (bear in mind that although the reward has fallen in terms of BTC, the value of BTC in other currencies has soared during that period). After that, new BTC supply will become…

Car insurers continue “to punish loyal customers with price hikes despite a massive drop in the number of road accidents” in lockdown, says Will Kirkman in The Daily Telegraph. Four in ten customers who stuck with the same provider saw their annual bills rise by an average of £49 a year in the last three months of 2020, says comparison site Confused. The so-called “loyalty penalty” is expected to be banned from July but until then insurers can raise your premiums when you renew. So, what can you do to cut your bills? Shop around when it is time to renew. “We know from our research that insurers are still putting up renewal prices for some drivers,” Louise O’Shea from Confused told The Telegraph. “Even if the increase is small,…

With the end of the tax year on 5 April fast approaching, have you made maximum use of your private-pension contribution allowance? Given the generous tax reliefs available, it makes sense for most people to save as much as they can afford. Contributions to private pensions attract tax relief at your highest marginal rate of income tax. So, if you’re a basic-rate taxpayer, contributing £1,000 to a pension costs you £800. If you pay the higher rate, the cost of the same contribution falls to £600; this falls to £550 if you’re an additional-rate payer. Remember the annual limit However, the amount you may contribute each tax year is limited by your annual allowance. If you exceed this threshold you will have to pay a tax charge. For most people,…

Most traders use some form of stop-loss to limit their potential losses, especially if the share or asset they are trading is very volatile, or they are using leverage (punting with borrowed money). However, a more advanced technique is to adjust stop-losses if the position goes in your favour, giving you a so-called trailing stop-loss. If you buy a share at 100p with a stop-loss of 80p and it then rises to 150p, you might increase the stop-loss to 120p. The big advantage of a trailing stop-loss, compared with a regular stop-loss, is that it enables you to lock in profits while still keeping the position open. It also minimises potential losses if there is a nasty reversal of an uptrend. In essence, the technique is a compromise between taking…

Shares in oilfield-services provider Petrofac (LSE: PFC) began falling in 2013 as debt rose and revenue fell. But “the real problems” began in 2017 when the Serious Fraud Office announced an investigation into the firm, says The Motley Fool. In 2019 the former head of sales pleaded guilty to 11 counts of bribery and was found guilty of another three this January. The latest convictions prompted the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to bar Petrofac from competing for any new contracts, shutting off one of its key growth markets. That was the latest blow to the stock, which is down by 47.3% in a year.…

The Sandro Botticelli (see left) and the Beeple artwork (pictured below) may seem “worlds apart”, says Andrea Felsted on Bloomberg. “But their desirability is driven by similar factors… an undiminished appetite among wealthy collectors for prestige investments, as well as an influx of younger, tech-savvy buyers whom galleries and dealers have managed to reach online.” These buyers have, to an extent, saved the art market despite the closure of art fairs and galleries. At $50.1bn, global sales of art and antiques in 2020 managed to avoid the $39.5bn previous low set in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2009, according to a report for Art Basel and UBS Group. Global online sales rose to a record $12.4bn last year, double the value of 2019. Many collectors have seen their…

Your columnist does not often find himself at odds with his readers. But there are times. This does not bother us. After all, if our views were in sync with popular opinion, there would be no reason for us to write at all. Sometimes readers warn us that if we don’t moderate our views we will lose our readers. We remind them of the campaign slogan we came up with when we considered – briefly and mischievously – apolitical career: “Too rich to steal; too dumb to lie”. In all the years we have been writing, our dear readers have turned against us thrice – once when we warned that the dotcom bubble would pop; again when the US invaded Iraq and we foresaw disaster; and finally when we took…