Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 943 i MoneyWeek

“More than 80% of the companies listing in the US last year were making a loss” Next month sees the flotation of ride-sharing firm Uber (see page 7). It expects to be valued at around $100bn. It has never made a profit. It has little obvious prospect of ever making a profit. It has lost about $8bn since it launched. Should you buy shares in it? Sounds like a silly question, I know, but the truth is that it isn’t considered remotely risqué to buy into loss-making firms when they list. Snap, which lost $1.3bn last year, floated two years ago on a valuation of $24bn. Lyft, which lost $911m last year, listed in March at a valuation of $25bn. Pinterest was set to list this week with a possible…

Isra Vision is one of Germany’s best businesses, says Focus Money. It specialises in robotic vision (a key step towards industrial digitisation), measurement, and surface and quality inspection technologies. Its products are applied to areas including car manufacturing, semiconductors and glass for solar panels. Sales rose by 10% to €34m in the latest quarter, with pretax profits up 11% to€6.9m. Orders were up by 15.7%year-on-year, and there is no sign of demand slowing. The company is debt-free and plans to bolster growth further with acquisitions. The stock has risen strongly this year to €35 and looks set to reclaim last year’s record peak of €60.…

The year of gig-economy flotations continues, says Aarian Marshall in Wired Magazine. Ride-hailing app Uber has released the prospectus it filed with authorities ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) later this year. The papers reveal “a sprawling transportation business with operations in 63 countries and 700 cities, providing 5.2 billion rides in 2018 – roughly one for every person in Europe and Asia”. While the company is losing large sums of money, strong sales growth and current annual revenue of $11bn mean that it is likely to be valued at up to $100bn, slightly short of Facebook’s $104bn valuation in 2012. Investors may have to wait ages for the company to become profitable, say Shannon Bond, Nicole Bullock and Tim Bradshaw in the Financial Times. Despite trying to overcome…

It was a symbolic loss for his party, says The Economist, but now Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to have another try. On 31 March voters in Istanbul chose Ekrem Imamoglu of the opposition Republican People’s Party to be mayor and rejected the president’s Islamist allies, who have controlled the city since 1994. Erdogan’s AK party demanded a recount. When it became clear that that would not deliver the desired result, the party went further – calling for the election to be overturned and re-run. Erdogan has claimed without any compelling evidence that the opposition stole the ballot with the help of “organised crime”. The move threatens to destroy one of “the last remaining pillars of Turkey’s democracy” and has spooked markets, sending the lira down by more than…

Last week, Sundanese dictator Omar al-Bashir became “the second north African leader forced from office this month in the face of mass protests, following Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika”, report Okech Francis and Mohammed Alamin for Bloomberg. These departures “stirred echoes of the Arab Spring uprisings earlier this decade”. The protesters have since won further concessions from the military council that has taken over, including the removal of former defence minister Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf as head of the council. There are now demands for “a civilian handover”, as well as for political and media freedoms. There is “understandable euphoria” on the streets of Khartoum, says the FT, but “the experience of countries that went through the Arab Spring suggests that severe dangers lie ahead”. One problem is that over the…

“Deficits don’t matter.” That’s the rallying cry for those who support the idea of modern monetary theory (MMT). It’s a simple enough idea. The government can spend as much money as it wants – whether to fund the healthcare service; pay for policing, firemen and teachers; or to build aircraft carriers, roads and railways. The only time it needs to worry about the quantity of money it is spending is when inflation increases. Every consumer is familiar with inflation, but economists just don’t seem to see it. When we look at what we are spending on rent, cars, petrol, insurance, train tickets, Sky, Netflix, Microsoft, food and schooling, we can see prices rising. Most of those are inconveniently volatile and so are excluded from what economists consider to be inflation.…

• Tidjane Thiam (pictured), chief executive of Swiss bank Credit Suisse, received almost CHF12.7m (£9.7m) in total pay last year, including CHF4.9m (£3.8m) in short-term incentive awards, reports Reuters. That’s up from a total of CHF9.7m (£7.4m) in 2017. Proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis said this was “unjustified” in advance of next week’s shareholders’ AGM. • The president and CEO of San Francisco-based clothing chain Gap Inc, Arthur Peck, saw his pay packet grow by a third last year, despite Gap’s share price declining by around a quarter on the back of falling sales, says the Financial Times. Peck received around $20.8m in 2018, including a 9.3% rise in base salary to $1.5m, and stock awards of $15.1m. The total pay of Gap’s chief financial officer, Teri List-Stoll, more than…

“We were never taken seriously and if we kicked off about something, like a Gallagher – brothers Liam and Noel of 1990s group Oasis – might do, we were ‘difficult’. I often wonder if we were paid less than the male bands.” Sara Dallin (pictured) of 1980s girl band Bananarama, quoted in The Times “The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.” GK Chesterton (1874-1936), quoted in The Blah “I’m so…

Merian Global Investors, a leading investor in Barclays, has voted against Edward Bramson’s bid for a Barclay’s board seat as “tension between the activist investor and the bank reaches boiling point”, says Emma Dunkley in The Times. Bramson’s fund Sherborne Investors owns more than 5% of the bank. Yet Barclay’s doesn’t need “a hostile disruptor in its midst, arguing on false numbers against their execution of the existing strategy to improve returns, for his own short-term ends”, says Merian. Aviva Investors’ David Cumming, who has previously backed Bramson, has also said he would side with Barclays. The bank has accused Bramson of being “selective and misleading” in his description of the struggling investment banking arm.…

This Grade-II listed folly was built in 1769 by local landowner Sir John Vanhattem to house his fossil and ammonite collection. It has now been restored by the current owners, a project that took a year and was featured in Channel 4’s television series Grand Designs. The octagonal property has three floors with exposed oak timbers and brickwork, a custom-built wooden staircase, two en-suite bedrooms, and a roof terrace with 360-degree views over the surrounding countryside. But can you guess the asking price? Answer on the side of this box.…

The eyes may be the windows to our soul, but they are also a route to riches. Spectacles have been around since the late 13th century, and there are references to eye surgery in ancient texts. But we now spend more than ever before on seeing better. According to multinational opticians GrandVision, eyewear alone accounts for $130bn in spending, with further billions devoted to surgical devices, drugs and vision aids. With the overall market growing by 5% a year, any firm that can grab a slice of the action should flourish. The vision care market will keep growing There are three key factors powering the continued growth of the vision care industry. The first of these is demographics. People in the developed world are getting older, says Chris Elliott, a…

■ In March 2017 the Family Building Society launched a “Brexit bond”. You could open either an “Optimist Bond” or a “Pessimist Bond”, depending on how you thought the pound would cope with Britain leaving the European Union. If you expected it to strengthen, you opened an Optimist Bond. This would pay you a 2% bonus on your savings if the pound was higher on 29 March 2019 than it was in March 2017. A Pessimist Bond paid the bonus if the pound was weaker. We noted at the time that as the bond came with a minimum investment of £10,000 and the interest was only paid to the winners at the end of the two-year period, it wasn’t appealing compared with the best fixed-rate cash account. Brexit hasn’t happened,…

The last 15 months have been a disaster for shareholders in the fashion chain Superdry. After several profit warnings, the stock has fallen by 75% from its peak in January 2018. What’s more, the company has been buffeted by a very public fight between the original founder Julian Dunkerton and the management team that took over from him in 2014. Accusing chief executive Euan Sutherland of destroying the brand, Dunkerton tried to return to the board of directors. However, after he was narrowly elected in early April, the other directors, including Sutherland, quit en masse, so Dunkerton became the new chief executive. Superdry’s problems certainly make for entertaining reading, but the collapse in its share price seems overdone. Not only has it enjoyed strong growth over the past five years,…

Investment is often characterised as a trade-off between value and growth. However, this is not the case. Growth is a feature of a business, and value is a reflection of what you pay for shares in relation to their inherent qualities. It is possible for a low-growth company to be expensive, while growing companies can also be acquired cheaply. Investors are always on the hunt for a “bargain”: high-quality growth at an attractive valuation. When it comes to finding these, we consider key factors to be an ability to generate cash, management demonstrating alignment with shareholders’ interests by investing in the business, and the sustainability of growth and returns. Smaller businesses often display these characteristics, and because institutional investors tend to ignore them they can trade at big discounts to…

When Ben Silbermann founded Pinterest in 2010, the film The Social Network had just come out. “I was like ‘Geez that doesn’t look like our company’,” he told Forbes last year. “Everyone’s drinking all night.” At Pinterest, by contrast, there was no laddish tech culture. “A lot of our early folks had families.” That distinction has endured. The persona of the “aggressive and outgoing” start-up has never really fitted Pinterest, which was scheduled to list this week and is likely to be seen as “a barometer” for initial public offerings (IPOs) to come – including Uber, Slack and Postmates, says The New York Times. The “digital pinboard” conceived by Silbermann and his partner Evan Sharp is “a slightly different breed of unicorn”. True, Pinterest is still unprofitable. But it is…

With Easter Sunday coming up, you can find plenty of chocolate closer to home than the Caribbean (see above) – find being the operative word. Cadbury has teamed up with the National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland to run Easter egg hunts in more than 300 locations across the UK this weekend, says Rachel Dixon in The Guardian. Clues will be hidden around the various properties and landscapes to lead hunters to the chocolate treats. “Many sites also have newborn lambs, spring chicks and daffodil displays. Others have Easter crafts, such as making a ladybird house on Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire, or seed bombs at Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire, or activities such as archery at Bodiam Castle, Sussex.” (From £2 for standard admission, easter.cadbury.co.uk)…

Astronomers unveiled what was once thought to be almost impossible – an image of a black hole. “This image is going to be in all future astronomy textbooks… just wow,” the University of Surrey’s Jim Al-Khalili wrote on Twitter. The image is really of the black hole’s “shadow”. Because black holes trap light, they are, in fact, invisible. The reddish ring, the “event horizon” of super-accelerated particles, is “the boundary beyond which our understanding of physics breaks down”, says The Times. Capturing the image was no mean feat. Since the black hole in the galaxy M87 is so far away, a telescope the size of Earth would have been needed to view it. So astronomers combined eight radiotelescopes, combining the data using complex computer algorithms to produce the single image.…

While gold has been rallying over the last six months, silver’s performance has been underwhelming. But this could soon change. “As investors’ appetite for gold improves, silver might share in the yellow metal’s prosperity,” says Myra P Saefong on Barron’s. Silver, like gold, is a monetary metal, deemed a safe haven and store of value. It tends to mimic gold’s movements but is typically more volatile as the market is smaller. One “real risk” is inflation. says WIll Denyer of Gavekal Research. Investors are looking the other way thanks to the recent growth scare. But the outlook is improving and given the extremely tight labour market and rising wages, there is a danger that US “inflation and inflation expectations rebound to levels that are too high for comfort”. That would…

Sometimes “something you hadn’t been following... is highlighted to you and you stagger back in shock”, says Albert Edwards of Societe Generale. The yield on the five-year Greek government bond has slipped beneath its US counterpart. For a country that has borrowed too much since its foundation to be considered a better credit risk than Uncle Sam seems absurd. But it is a snapshot of how impressed investors are with Greece’s recovery from the debt crisis, says Matthew A Winkler on Bloomberg. Growth is outpacing the eurozone average and the budget deficit, 15% in 2009, has become a surplus. Investors have piled back into Greek bonds, sending yields to near-record lows. The ten-year yield reached 49% in 2012.…

The initial public offering (IPO) of ride-hailing app Lyft has proved a disappointment, with the shares slipping below their issue price; they now cost less than $60. The group “pushed too hard” and priced its stock at an expensive $72, notes Andrew Bary in Barron’s. Pinterest, the social-media site based on images and videos – the online equivalent of a bulletin board – is about to float and will reportedly offer its stock for $15-$17 a share, suggesting a valuation of $11bn, a tad less than the $12bn it was deemed worth in its last private funding round. Not only is it “[pricing] the deal to sell”, but unlike Lyft it is also close to making an annual profit. (See also page 32.)…

Disney is fighting back against the technology groups “that have upended Hollywood”, says Anna Nicolaou in the Financial Times. Chief executive Bob Iger (pictured) has laid out ambitious plans for a streaming service. Disney + will play shows and films from its popular franchises such as Marvel and cost $7 a month, compared with $13 for a Netflix subscription. The move “comes a few weeks after Apple made a splashy presentation for its own streaming service featuring Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg”. Disney’s shares may have soared “to a record high” in the wake of the news, “but it still isn’t clear how much share Disney can take from Netflix”, says Elizabeth Winkler in The Wall Street Journal. While it expects to have between 60 and 90 million users by…

Last week, I suggested that you bet on Labour getting between 20% and 40% of the vote in the forthcoming European elections (if they end up taking place). This week we’re going to look at who will win the most seats. At the moment, Paddy Power and Ladbrokes are both offering 4/6 (60%) on Labour coming out on top. While both bookies have Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party as second favourites, Ladbrokes is offering a slightly more generous 13/8 (38%). The best odds for those convinced that the Conservatives will do well is 14/1 (6.6%) with Paddy Power. On the betting markets, Betfair punters seem more convinced about a Labour victory, with Betfair putting it at 1.43 (70%), with the Brexit Party at 2.57 (38.6%). They put the Conservatives at 18…

Investors seem to be getting over their recent fear of recession, citing ongoing strength in the US labour market as a key reason to be cheerful. That’s a mistake, argues David Rosenberg, the frequently bearish chief economist at Canadian wealth manager Gluskin Sheff. “Everyone continues to say ‘I don’t see a recession’,” he says. But “like carbon monoxide, that odourless gas, it creeps up on you without your realising it”. He notes that employment is typically a lagging indicator (ie, it doesn’t start to fall until the point at which the economy is already in trouble). So using jobs statistics as any guide to the future “is a waste of time because they are not... forecasting tools”. There are many other signs that a recession is coming. Inflation is weakening,…

The Microsoft Bounty Program paid out more than $2m in 2018, says news website TechRadar. The so-called “bug bounties” are awarded to hackers who find and report bugs and security flaws to firms, who can then fix them. Each find can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Microsoft also announced it was extending its scheme to include more of its products, as well as reducing the amount of time it takes to reward those who report breaches. The tech giant has teamed up with HackerOne, an online platform for hackers, to make payments faster. In January, the reward for one bounty programme was increased from $15,000 to $50,000, while the rewards for reporting glitches on its Azure, Office 365 and other online services will increase from $15,000 to $20,000.…

■ The warm glow around alternative income funds that aim to rectify the shortage of affordable housing is starting to wear off, says Gavin Lumsden in Citywire’s Investment Trust Insider. Real-estate investment trusts Civitas Social Housing and Triple Point Social Housing in particular have caught the eye of investors, as they aim to increase the provision of specialised support housing. Yet the sector’s new watchdog, the Regulator for Social Housing, has issued a string of negative judgements against the governance and financial failings it found in some of the housing associations to whom the funds lease properties. Civitas shares have “slumped” 11% since the regulator’s report was published on 4 April, while Triple Point has fallen 10%. ■ Three of Neil Woodford’s (pictured) stakes in unquoted private companies were suspended…

People who use the government’s Help to Buy scheme to acquire their first home are paying 12% more than people who buy new-builds without the scheme, according to conveyancing comparison site Reallymoving. The company looked at 44,000 quote requests from users of its site, and found that in February people buying through Help to Buy paid an average of £303,000 this year, compared with £270,000 outside of the scheme. Last October, the gap was 8%. The government’s Help to Buy equity-loan scheme lends first-time buyers up to 20% of the value of a new-build home. The loan is then interest-free for five years. But “these figures suggest that buyers may be paying more than the property is worth in order to get the help they need to raise a deposit”,…

The dominant player in the vision care industry is EssilorLuxottica (Paris: ESLX), formed as the result of the merger between Essilor, the leader in lens technology, and Luxottica, the largest producer of eyewear. The company owns several fashion brands, notably Oakley and Ray-Ban, and is the sector’s lowest-cost producer. It also owns several chains of opticians and has joint ventures with others, which further enhances its pricing power. While the company currently trades at 20 times 2020 earnings, strong growth prospects mean that this multiple looks justified. Another company deeply involved in global eye care is Alcon (NYSE: ALC). Recently spun out of Swiss drug company Novartis, Alcon produces devices used in eye surgery, and is also one of the largest makers of contact lenses in the world. Its leading…

Pet owners are being ripped off by an insurance industry “ballooning out of control”, says Ben Wilkinson in the Daily Mail. It now costs more to insure the average cat than to cover a house and its contents. Many owners have to ditch their cover because their insurers are hiking costs to “staggering levels”. Those who do manage to pay their premiums then discover their policies will not pay out when their animal falls ill. The problem is that many policies have very restrictive limits on how much they will pay out per condition, tied to high excesses and a reduction on payouts for older animals. In one case, these three elements combined to see a claim for £342 result in an 80p payout. It may make more sense to…

Uber’s flotation next month is a huge event, with the ride-hailing service releasing its prospectus last week (see page 7). Investors who manage to buy into initial public offerings (IPOs) during the subscription phase tend to do well, at least initially. Research by Jay Ritter of the University of Florida has found that from 1980-2015 shares in 8,178 newly listed US firms would rise on average by 18% in the first day of trading. In 2001 and 2008, both dismal years for the US stockmarket, investors would have made money if they had blindly bought into IPOs at the subscription price and held for a day. The main reason for this is that, since investment banks agree to buy any unsubscribed shares, they have a clear incentive to keep prices…

Canadian pot stocks have risen as high as kites in the wake of the legalisation of recreational cannabis in 2018, and the performance of Village Farms (Toronto: VFF) has been among the most impressive: the shares have quintupled this year. Pure Sunfarms, its joint venture with Emerald Health, another pot company, has just been given permission by the government to expand its production area by a fifth to one million cubic feet. A deal with Canna Farms, meanwhile, will allow Village Farms to sell its pot on an online marketplace for medical marijuana.…

Albert Dunlap was born in New Jersey in 1937 and studied at West Point Military Academy, briefly serving in the army before moving into the paper industry. Despite being dismissed as president of paper-mill Nitec in 1976 for manipulating earnings, he ran several companies in the 1980s and 1990s, gaining a reputation for saving troubled firms with mass redundancies (hence his nickname, “Chainsaw Al”). In 1996 he was put in charge of Sunbeam, a struggling manufacturer of grills and garden furniture. The stock jumped by 50% after he was hired and then tripled as the company announced an increase in profits. What was the scam? Dunlap hired his friend, Russell Kersh, as Sunbeam’s new financial officer. Kersh deliberately started attributing costs incurred in 1997 to the previous year, helping exaggerate…

2018 Kottabos, Grenache/Syrah, Boschkloof, South Africa £22.50, Great Western Wine, 01225-322810, greatwesternwine.co.uk I have not come across the wines from Kottabos before and, at a massive tasting with hundreds of wines on the go, it was the striking labels that drew me to them. Was this red, along with its white sibling, 2018 Kottabos Chenin Blanc (£22.50), yet another suite of wines that favour design over substance? Not a bit of it. In a way, the red and the white are mirror images of each other. The red is earthy, savoury, balanced and crunchy. It is not a typical Cape red in that it is leaner, more fragrant and kindlier on the palate. It is a baby, but it is already drinking well. Shaped like a Beaujolais or a Loire…

• Good news at last from Brexit Land, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail – Esther McVey (pictured) is getting married. Fellow Tory MP and boyfriend Philip Davies finally popped the question. Both are arch-Brexiteers, but don’t see themselves as a Westminster power couple. “We’re not exactly Jay Z and Beyoncé, are we?” she says. Yet McVey “is the living embodiment of the social mobility she likes to champion”. When she moved to London in 1987 from Liverpool, she worked as a waitress and saved up to buy a flat in Shoreditch for £55,000, later purchasing the freehold for £500. But it was her “good looks and effervescent personality” that landed her on telly with Eammon Holmes on GMTV. That’s where she could have stayed, perhaps becoming the “Darling…

Stimulus Theory – the idea that cheap credit and easy money will make us richer – is a fraud. But that doesn’t make it unpopular. It is a classic federal programme: like the war on drugs, the more it fails, the more it succeeds. The more stimulus drags the economy down… the more people want the feds to “do something” to fix it. And what can they do? Stimulate. “Giving away money doesn’t inspire people to work harder” Stimulus hasn’t worked for President Trump. He cut taxes at a cost of $180bn last year alone. Result? He got a temporary boost in spending, which ended in the last quarter of 2018. Consumer spending, employment, GDP – all are turning down. And federal debt is soaring. The whole post-crisis period of…

Last year emerging market stocks fell by nearly a quarter. But in 2019 it has been a different story. The benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets Index has gained 13%. Chalk it up to “a new liquidity environment”, say Will Denyer and Udith Sikand of Gavekal Research. “Tighter US dollar liquidity made 2018 a terrible year for risk assets.” When US interest rates are rising and the dollar is strong, money tends to flow out of traditionally risky assets, such as emerging markets, and into US securities with rising yields. But for now, the market is expecting “abundant liquidity” for the rest of the year, given that the US Federal Reserve has paused interest-rate hikes and is set to pause its quantitative tightening (QT, the reversal of its money-printing programme). The European…

“Many... UK investors will have been blindsided by two key developments: one being the peak of the Japanese stock market back in 1989 and its subsequent collapse; the second being the inability of financial journalists to cover its more recent recovery objectively… A third development that won’t have helped will have been the widespread view that the Japanese are getting older by the second and pretty soon will have died off entirely…. But… things change. By dint of having entered a calamitous deflationary depression 20 years before the rest of the world, the Japanese had a head start. Japanese companies, and not least their banks, learned something… Investors and index compilers, not so much. So, labouring under the false belief that Japan was a basket case, investors have largely missed…

Three to buy Direct Line The Sunday Times Motor insurers face many long-term challenges, from the prospect of safer driverless cars disrupting the market to pressure from watchdogs to treat loyal customers better. The business has also been slow to adapt to the digital age, but Direct Line recently launched Darwin, a digital brand tailored to the price-comparison websites where most insurance is purchased nowadays. An 8% fall leaves the shares looking cheap on a dividend yield of 6%. Direct Line is “revving to go”. 338p easyHotel The Times This budget hotel operator keeps making progress, yet the stock has slumped as though it had issued a profit warning, down from highs of 128p last year. Political uncertainty has reduced both leisure and corporate demand for hotels, yet with an…

• Texas’s Permian Basin is “America’s most productive oilfield, despite a patchwork of plots with hundreds of owners”, says The Economist. Shale companies also look cheap, “with investors sceptical about firms’ ability to produce both oil and profits”. So it’s not surprising that Chevron has announced that it will pay $33bn for Anadarko, an independent outfit with a major Permian presence. The deal makes Chevron the industry’s second-biggest listed oil producer, behind only ExxonMobil. It is also “the latest sign of shale’s growing importance to the world’s biggest energy firms”. Expect further consolidation. Royal Dutch Shell is thought to be keen on Endeavor Energy, which produces in the heart of the Permian Basin. • What a turnaround, says Oliver Shah in The Sunday Times. Five years ago Tesco “was on…

Brexit has been delayed. Whether we end up actually leaving at the end of October, as recently agreed, is anyone’s guess. It is hard to see how any Withdrawal Agreement will ever be passed by Parliament, and the EU seems to be willing to delay the process indefinitely. Unless there is another referendum, or a change of government, there doesn’t seem to be a route out of the impasse. We may well be a half-in/half-out member for years to come. The economic consequences of Bremain Politically, that might well be chaotic. But for the economy, it means there is no disruption. And to most mainstream economists and forecasters that should mean the economy does a lot better. After all, if membership of the single market is so important for the…

Cheer up – our system isn’t broken Torsten Bell The Times As we set off for the Easter holidays, it’s “hard not to be despondent in the face of the Brexit rollercoaster”, says Torsten Bell. But before we succumb to despair over useless politicians, it’s worth highlighting two “policy triumphs” of recent weeks that show how the political establishment can get it right. One is low pay. For most of the past three decades, a fifth of the workforce has been “low paid”, but now the proportion of workers in that category is at its lowest level since the 1980s and our “ever more ambitious minimum wage” has given the lowest fifth of earners real pay rises of 40%. British politics and policy making have also “changed lives for the…

Investment bank Goldman Sachs is putting its money into prefabricated houses: dwellings that are put together in a warehouse and then delivered to their destinations fully formed. Goldman has decided the industry is worth a $75m investment. Modular housebuilding is not exactly new to the UK: we tried it in the aftermath of World War II in an attempt to meet the urgent demand for housing. Yet today’s prefabs are, thankfully, more stylish as well as more energy-efficient. The idea is that if production is ramped up, prefab housing could go some way towards meeting the 300,000 houses-per-year target the government thinks we must reach in order to keep up with demand. Unfortunately, the UK is far behind other countries in adopting the trend. In Sweden, around 84% of houses…

A tiny Danish town will soon have the tallest skyscraper in western Europe, says Annabel Fenwick Elliott in The Daily Telegraph. At 320 metres high, the Bestseller Tower – commissioned by Danish fast-fashion brand Bestseller as its headquarters – is ten metres taller than the Shard in London, and will loom above Brande, which has a population of 7,000. Because the surrounding land is so flat, it will be visible from 60km away. While it’s been likened to the Tower of Sauron, the lair of J R R Tolkien’s villain, by a Danish satirical magazine, the skyscraper has prompted surprisingly few objections from locals, says The Guardian.…

Home-insurance companies are making all of their profits from loyal customers, a new report from Citizens Advice has revealed. The charity network looked at the 2016 profit margins of a “broadly representative” sample of firms covering 40% of the market and found that 100% of their profits came from the higher amounts paid by customer who hadn’t switched for six years or more. People who stick with the same insurer for six years are paying an average annual premium of £325, almost double the average £172 new customers pay, according to Citizens Advice. Moreover, as many as 3.75 million homeowners have held their home insurance with the same provider for 11 years or more. Of these people, up to 71% are potentially “vulnerable”, a term the financial regulator uses for…

Almost one million people currently work while also claiming their state pension. Of those, some 520,000 have incomes in excess of their personal allowance and are therefore paying income tax on their pension, according to insurer Royal London. They could be better off deferring their benefits instead. The problem affects those who continue working beyond the age at which they are allowed to start taking their state-pension benefits. In many cases, the income they earn, together with their state pension, is enough to take them over their annual personal allowance. Income below this allowance, £12,500 in the current tax year, isn’t taxable. But above the threshold, all income, including state-pension benefits, is liable to income tax starting at the 20% basic rate. In many cases, these people would be better…

Over the last four weeks, most of my long tips have moved in the right direction, with six of them rising and only two falling. Cineworld has risen from 297p to 308p and John Laing Group from 391p to 399p. JD Sports has shot up from 495p to 520p, Hays has gone from 155p to 159p, Safestore from 593p to 627p, and Bellway has increased from 3,104p to 3,174p. The only stocks that declined were Greene King (to 664p from 673p) and Somero (from 391p to 360p). Collectively, then, my long tips are making a combined profit of £3,293. My recommended shorts turned in a more mixed performance. One the one hand, Just Eat fell from 739p to 735p, while Tesla’s share price declined from $269.49 to $267.70. But on…

Shares in Indivior (LSE: INDV) plummeted by 70% last week after the US Department of Justice charged the drugmaker with using an “illicit nationwide scheme” to boost sales of its blockbuster drug Suboxone Film, a key treatment for opioid addiction. It allegedly deceived healthcare providers by persuading them that the drug was safer and less prone to abuse than other opioid addiction treatments. The indictment is seeking $3bn of damages, an amount that could wipe the firm out; it has set aside just $438m to deal with the fallout of the six-year probe.…

Jimi Hendrix wasn’t overly concerned about living forever. “When I die, just keep playing the records,” the legendary guitarist once said. And we do just that, even though the way in which we choose to receive the music we want to listen to is evolving at a faster rate than ever. What would Thomas Edison, who invented the first phonograph in 1887, have made of the cassette or compact disc, let alone the notion that people’s music “collection” might not actually exist in physical form at all, but as a series of downloaded computer files, or be accessed by “streaming” the information invisibly from the internet? According to research and consulting service Futuresource, the global home-audio market was worth more than $13bn in 2017. So turntables, headphones and loudspeakers –…

Last month we looked at the burgeoning market in rare whisky, which soared by 40% in 2018, according to the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index. So Mortlach’s timing for the release of its 47-year-old single malt looks to be propitious. Since 1971, three casks have lain undisturbed at the Moray distillery. The first yielded 94 bottles, together making up the first of Mortlach’s new “Singing Stills” series. The 47-year-old is described as “polished copper” in colour, with “tropical fruits” on the nose, and “soft, ripe fruits” on the palate, leading to a “spicy…  touch of wood ash” on the finish. The bottles, sold by wine and spirits merchants Justerini & Brooks, come with a £10,000 price tag, although one bottle fetched S$50,000 (£28,000) in March at Bonhams in Singapore. You…

£139m The value of the estimated 720 million eggs that Britons throw away each year because they have gone beyond their best-before dates – a threefold rise since 2008, according to Too Good To Go. The food waste campaign group wants consumers to apply the bowl of water test – if the egg sits at the bottom, it’s still fresh enough to eat. £19,715 The price of a pair of Nike Air MAGs, the world’s most expensive trainers, according to online resale marketplace StockX. The shoes, with a rechargeable built-in battery, glowing LED panels and self-tying laces are based on the futuristic trainers worn by Marty McFly in the 1989 sci-fi film Back to the Future II. £10,000 The starting cost of hiring British military bands for private events, according…