Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 967 i MoneyWeek

Tapestry has gone out of fashion, says Avi Salzman in Barron’s. Shares in the holding company for luxury fashion and accessory brands Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman have slipped by a quarter this year, with poor sales at Kate Spade unnerving investors. But the jitters look overdone. Coach, which accounts for 71% of sales, continues to grow solidly and is doing well in China. The other two brands are expanding all over Asia. With the stock on just 11 times forward earnings, investors are getting paid to wait for the offerings at Kate Spade to come back into fashion: the dividend yield is around 5% and Tapestry plans to buy back shares worth 4% of its market value this year.…

If you want to have a great career, then don’t “buy a house next door to your boss”, says Philippe Escande in Le Monde. A banal dispute between neighbours about trees has snowballed into an espionage scandal that has rocked the usually staid Swiss banking world. The trouble began when Iqbal Khan, head of wealth management at Credit Suisse, moved in next door to chief executive Tidjane Thiam (see page 34) in the upmarket village of Herrliberg on the shores of Lake Zurich. Thiam’s strategy has centred on growing the bank’s wealth-management arm. That initially made for warm relations with Khan, who increased profits at the division by roughly 80%, notes Stephen Morris in the Financial Times. Thiam dubbed Khan a “star” and repeatedly promoted him. Yet things changed after…

Austria’s 33-year-old Sebastian Kurz “cemented his status as the wunderkind of European conservative politics” on Sunday with a resounding electoral win, says the Financial Times. His Austrian People’s Party (OVP) took 38.3% of the vote, giving it the largest lead over any other party since 1945. Kurz also inflicted a “crushing defeat” on the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), with whom he shared power until the coalition “imploded” in May following revelations that its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, had offered lucrative government contracts in return for electoral support. The so-called Ibiza affair prompted this snap election. The “slump in support” for the FPO reflects a pattern across Europe, says Jon Henley in The Guardian. Italy’s Matteo Salvini is “out in the cold”, Spain’s Vox has failed to live up to expectations in…

It’s 70 years since the current regime took over in China – it celebrated this week with a huge military parade in Beijing – and it’s clear that the country is now “vastly different” from the “impoverished wreck” that emerged from civil war in 1949, says Pete Sweeney for Breakingviews. But this success is largely down to the fact that over the years the regime replaced dedicated communists with “pro-growth technocrats” who built infrastructure, schools and financial markets and “warmed to foreign trade and private property”. The movement away from communism since 1979 in favour of a system that grants a large role to the private sector has convinced foreigners to plough an accumulated $1.6trn into the People’s Republic, “helping propel domestic companies up the value chain”. Unfortunately, this economic…

Miton fund manager Gervais Williams is worried about recession. The recent inversion of the yield curve in the US (where long-term interest rates are lower than short-term ones) has historically predicted a downturn, and the problem is that central banks today don’t have much room to cut interest rates. As Williams tells Jennifer Hill of Citywire’s Investment Trust Insider: “We have recessions from time to time, but how do we get out of it this time?” As a result, he has been taking out “downside protection” in the form of put options, which will pay out if the FTSE 100 slides. “They cost money, but if things get really nasty it’s nice to have an asset that goes up.” Williams is, however, more relaxed about Brexit. “A chaotic Brexit isn’t…

Former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband is getting paid almost $1m as president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian charity based in New York, reports The Mail on Sunday. That’s a rise of more than $240,000 over the previous year. Miliband’s $911,796 income is made up of a basic salary of $861,209 (around £700,000) plus $50,587 in “other compensation”. The charity’s top 12 best-paid officials get more than £4m between them, says the Mail, which has increased by £1.1m in four years. It has received around £107m from the UK’s Department of International Development in the last two years to run refugee and poverty-relief projects around the world. “This salary is in the middle of the range of New York’s nonprofit CEO salaries,” said the IRC in…

The oldest man-made object in the world is made of copper. A tiny awl found in a grave in what is now Israel, it dates back some 7,000 years. Copper would become a key component of the bronze age. Price records don’t go that far back, but in modern times it has tended to move in very long cycles: 30 years of feast followed by 30 years of famine. Between 1885 and 1945 the price was pretty consistent around the 15 cents per pound (lb) mark. There’d be the odd period when it slipped below that level – notably in 1929 (when it went below five cents/ lb) – and the odd period when it surged to 20 cents and above – notably during World War I, when it got…

Thousands of Thomas Cook employees facing an uncertain future can take comfort in the knowledge that their pension savings are largely protected. The Pensions Protection Fund (PPF), the government-backed lifeboat fund, exists to ensure members of a defined benefit pension scheme do not suffer financial hardship if the scheme’s sponsoring employer goes bust and there aren’t enough assets in the fund to pay the pensions promised. Thomas Cook’s defined-benefit scheme has 13,500 members. With the company no longer around to stand behind this guarantee, the PPF is reviewing the scheme’s finances. Who gets what when In such cases, the PPF guarantees that scheme members already drawing their pension and over the scheme’s official retirement age will continue to receive their benefits in full. In some cases, however, the pension increases…

■ New figures have revealed that “record numbers of people are losing large sums to increasingly sophisticated investment scams,” says Marianna Hunt in The Sunday Telegraph. Almost 3,500 people were victims of scams in the first half of 2019, up 152% on the same period last year, according to UK Finance. Victims lost an average of £12,200 each and got very little of their stolen money back. Of the £43.4m stolen a mere 7% was returned. Criminal tactics have “come a long way since the days of dodgy-looking emails riddled with spelling mistakes”. Now scammers “successfully impersonate real investment firms using cloned websites and logos”. ■ Some of Britain’s biggest financial companies have called for the newest type of Isa to be abolished, notes Adam Williams in The Daily Telegraph.…

The last fortnight has produced mixed results for my six long tips, with half of them going up, but the other half declining. The ones that increased are JD Sports, which went up from 718p to 750p, Safestore, which rose from 644p to 671p, and Bellway – up from 3,268p to 3,354p. However, Superdry fell from 429p to 423p, Bausch Health Companies declined from $23.28 to $20.59 and Volkswagen went down from €162 to €153. Overall, my long tips are making a profit of £2,856, which is down slightly from a surplus of £3,184 two weeks ago. However, the performance of my short tips has been much better. Four out of five of them have depreciated. Bitcoin is now $8,331 (from $10,136), Netflix is $266 ($292), Uber is selling for…

In recent years Imperial Brands (LSE: IMB), formerly Imperial Tobacco, has diversified from cigarettes into e-cigarettes and “vaping” products. It has also invested in the legal cannabis market. However, the “next-generation market” has hit a roadblock after a crackdown on flavoured e-cigarettes in the US. Moreover, reports of apparent lung diseases related to vaping have dented demand. A consequent profit warning last month saw the shares dive by 10%. Tougher trading conditions in markets such as Africa and Asia have also depressed the stock.…

Around 40,000 UK expats in Spain are celebrating after winning a legal victory that confirms the legal status of 327,000 homes in the southern region of Andalucia. Many had bought their villas in good faith, but fell victim to unscrupulous estate agents, says Graham Keeley in The Times. The villas turned out to have been built on rural land without planning permission, which rendered the properties worthless, as owners were unable to sell. Many of the homes were even threatened with demolition. The law was changed after the regional Socialist government, which had been in power for 36 years, was replaced by a coalition of the centre-right Popular Party of Andalucia and the liberal Citizens’ Party, backed by the far-right Vox Party. Good week for: Youth workers Jamie Cutteridge and…

America’s “sluggish housing market” seems to be “regaining its footing”, says Lucia Mutikani for Reuters. Housing starts and building permits soared to a 12-year high in August. New-home sales were up 7.1% from the previous month. Interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, which feed through into lower mortgage rates, are boosting demand. A speculative bubble in US housing was at the heart of the 2007 sub-prime mortgage fiasco that preceded the global financial crisis. Zack Guzman on Yahoo Finance notes that between 1997 and 2005 the median US house price rocketed 75% in real terms, as measured by the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index. House prices then fell 33% and hit a nadir in the early 2010s. Yet as economist Robert Shiller notes, between 2012 and 2018 US house price have…

Onwards and upwards. Palladium hit another record high this week, with the spot price reaching $1,700 an ounce. It has gained a third in 2019 alone. The metal is used mainly in catalytic converters for petrol engines. Global car sales have dipped, but demand is climbing steadily owing to tougher emissions standards in China, while a shift from diesel to petrol cars in Europe following the furore over diesel emissions is also bullish. Meanwhile, supplies, which stem largely from South Africa and Russia, are not expected to increase this year, notes Henry Sanderson in the Financial Times. The rally looks set to endure, although concern over global growth and intensifying trade tension is likely to cause setbacks.…

”You say losses and cash burn; I say investments,” Peloton’s co-founder and CEO John Foley told the Financial Times. Investors clearly don’t think much of his spin, however: the shares in the American fitness-equipment provider slipped by 11% when they made their debut on the Nasdaq on 26 September. Peloton’s sales doubled to $915m in the year to July 2019, but losses quadrupled to $196m. Wall Street’s interest in companies ”without a clear path to profitability” is dwindling, notes the FT’s Richard Henderson. The shares began trading at $27, implying a valuation of $7.7bn. But they fell by 15% before regaining a little of the lost ground.…

“Investors’ hopes for a new lease of life for nicotine have vanished in a cloud of steam,” says Karen Kwok for Breakingviews. Growing concern in America that vaping could cause lung-related illnesses and is promoting a smoking “epidemic” among children is causing consumers to have second thoughts. Hence this week’s profit warning at Imperial Brands, which wiped 13% off the stock. The vaping revolution was supposed to be a way for “the deathstick business” to reinvent itself, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. But talk of unexplained illnesses and a regulatory clampdown mean that the “strategic fog” is thickening. A £100m cut to revenue forecasts this year doesn’t sound like much in the context of £7.5bn in overall group revenues, but it raises difficult questions about the future of the…

Punters had thought it a long shot, but now bettors have swung firmly behind the idea of Donald Trump being impeached by at least one House of Congress. With £578,000 matched on Betfair, the odds of Trump being impeached have shrunk to 1.53 (65.3%). Bookmaker Paddy Power is offering similar odds of 1/2 (66%), However, bettors still think that Trump will serve out his full term in office – you can get odds of 4.4 (22.7%) on him leaving before the end of the first term. Full impeachment still seems unlikely because it requires support from two-thirds of the Senate, which means getting Republican senators to support it. Many of them may be privately happy to see the back of Trump, but few will risk the wrath of Republican voters…

Neil Woodford’s woes have continued this week, with the latest grim half-year results from the investment trust he manages, Woodford Patient Capital Trust. For a full update, see the box below, but there are three key lessons investors should learn from this debacle. Watch what managers do, not what they say: in the half-year report, Woodford says he still believes the trust “will ultimately reward the patient investor”. Yet he sold £1m – roughly 60% of his holding – of shares in Patient Capital in July. Apparently it was to pay a tax bill, but given that Woodford is not short of a bob or two, it seems odd he couldn’t find another way to raise the funds. Anyone with an ounce of scepticism has to question whether he has…

There are signs that pressure is building for a radical monetary experiment in the eurozone. Over the past four years, the central bank has printed more than €2trn euros, flooded the banking system with money, bought up government bonds and slashed interest rates down below zero in an effort to boost its flagging economy. In 2017 and 2018, all that printed cash briefly fired life into the European economy. But now it is flagging again. Germany is close to an outright recession, growth is tepid in France, and Italy is no closer to a sustained recovery than it has been since it joined the euro 20 years ago. This is the problem facing Christine Lagarde when she takes over next month as president of the European Central Bank (ECB). It…

Labour’s boost for the super-rich Toby Young The Spectator Private schools could not have received better PR, says Toby Young. The Labour party has promised to abolish them because of the “huge advantages they confer”. In reality, the attainment gap between private schools and state schools is shrinking and their other advantages are “wildly overstated”. The very best state schools, such as the Michaela Community School, now outperform leading private schools. A 2018 study found that although private-school children get better GCSE results on average, this is almost entirely down to factors that have “nothing to do with the schools” (eg, IQ, parental socioeconomic status and genes). But Labour’s policy-makers (some of whom educate their own children privately) are influenced by anxious, middle-class parents who “overestimate” the effects of education…

I have always enjoyed investigating adventurous investment ideas. So, when I say that income-oriented investors seeking to build a diversified portfolio of funds should be searching worldwide for new ideas and sources of dividend income, I’m sure you’d expect me to highlight locations that are suitably exotic. Not Canada. As in boring Canada. Cold Canada. The colony that got away with all that mineral wealth and spare land. My father spent many prosperous years there in the 1950s, but never showed any great desire to go back – “bloody cold” was the only comment I recall him making. Teeming Toronto But on my last visit to downtown Toronto I think I can safely say that he wouldn’t remotely have recognised it. Toronto is now in the running to overtake London…

A well-balanced portfolio should always contain some exposure to industrial metals. My favourite play on both metals and energy in general is BHP Billiton (LSE: BHP). It’s like an all-in-one energy and metal exchange-traded fund (ETF). This £95bn market-cap company pays a yield, currently in the 5%-6% range. You can play the metals directly via ETFs that track the price: ETFS Copper (LSE: COPA) or ETFS Zinc (LSE: ZINC). The world’s largest copper-producing companies are Codelco, owned by the Chilean government, followed by Freeport McMoran (NYSE: FCX), and Glencore (LSE: GLEN). Other notable producers are Antofagasta (LSE: ANTO) and Rio Tinto (LSE: RIO). Both make the top ten. The world’s largest zinc producers include Glencore, BHP Billiton, Anglo-American (LSE: AAL) and KAZ Minerals (LSE: KAZ). If you want some spicy,…

You might carefully hand out money in line with the inheritance-tax gifting rules and fret about whether or not you should set up a trust to protect your wealth. But have you taken one of the simplest steps to avoid an inheritance-tax bill? A will is a powerful weapon against the taxman and yet the majority of us have never bothered to write one. If you die without a will your estate is subject to the laws of intestacy. If you are married this means jointly-held assets pass to your spouse, but the rest of your estate is divided up between your spouse and your children. Your spouse gets the first £250,000 plus half of the remainder, with the rest split between your children. The problem with this is that…

The last 15 months have been awful for shareholders in International Consolidated Airlines Group (LSE: IAG): the share price has fallen by a third. This is mainly to do with problems at British Airways, one of the airlines the group owns (along with Aer Lingus, Iberia and budget carrier Vueling). Not only was BA hit with a £183m fine in July for allowing its security system to be breached, but it also suffered its first pilots’ strike a few weeks ago. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, triggering widespread opprobrium. IAG has now been forced to issue a profit warning telling investors that they should expect this year’s earnings to be much lower than originally estimated. Most of this was due to the £121m cost of the BA industrial action, as…

While continental European equity markets performed well in the first half of 2019, volatility over the summer has shown that few of the issues previously troubling markets have been resolved. Trade threats rumble on and political uncertainty remains high with Brexit negotiations at an impasse. Investors have welcomed central banks’ shift towards monetary easing, but there is a risk that it could fail to kick-start global economic and corporate earnings growth. “Some customers have to wait years before they can get their hands on an item” Against this uncertain backdrop, Fidelity European Values PLC remains focused on investing in attractively-valued companies able to sustain consistent dividend growth and perform well irrespective of the economic backdrop. Over the long term these types of companies tend to outperform the broader market. My…

Shinta Mani Wild is a new social enterprise and “much-admired tented camp by designer Bill Bensley, set deep in the wilderness of Cambodia’s Southern Cardamom National Park”, says Mary Lussiana in The Daily Telegraph. Bensley’s “exuberant, colourful designs” are a far cry from the “prevalent Asian Zen decor”. He adds, instead, a “dusting of magic” to aid the “heady escapist vibe”. Fifteen custom-designed tents “perch alongside the thundering” river Tmor Rung, affording enough privacy to afford a bath tub on the open deck. “It provides an experience not to be missed,” says Lussiana. “Lying in it just after sunrise, I was wrapped in a cloak of jungle sights and sounds.” From $1,900, bensleycollection.com…

I steamed around a huge Aussie tasting the other day and loved revisiting a large number of my 100 Best Australian Wines from this year’s report in the same room at the same time. I kicked off my nationwide roadshow a few weekends ago at the Tate Britain with a huge tasting and dinner, celebrating wines from this year’s report and also pulling older 100 Best beauties out of the cellar. I am always on high alert for Australian wines that are of 100 Best quality and, by chance, Troy Jones from Payten & Jones flew over from Barcelona where he is working on a top-secret Priorat project, to just join us for dinner and have a yarn. This prompted me to remember his epic VV Chardonnay, which I had…

Going… A scrap of paper bearing the signatures of The Beatles dating from just before they became famous is to be sold with Hansons Auctioneers in Derbyshire on 22 October. The unnamed seller was 16 years old when she and a group of friends braved the “bitterly cold” weather to see the band play at the Town Hall Ballroom in Whitchurch, Shropshire, on 19 January 1963. The Beatles had just released their single Please Please Me, but few people attended the gig due to wintery weather. The seller was able to spend “about 15 minutes” chatting with the band. “I remember John Lennon plonking away on the piano after the gig,” she says. “At the time I didn’t even know Ringo Starr’s name. They were all really nice to us.”…

• It was never probable that Blue Ivy Carter, the seven-year-old daughter of singers Beyoncé (pictured) and Jay-Z, was going to lead a “normal” life, says Karren Brady in The Sun on Sunday. Put that down to her having had her own stylist since she could walk. Even so, it’s hard to fathom that at an age “when most children are still harbouring fantasies of being an astronaut, or a unicorn, little Blue Ivy, it turns out, wants to be recognised as a ‘cultural icon’. Well, I say Blue Ivy, but clearly it is her parents who are pushing this agenda”. They have been trying to trademark her name for years – a name she shares with a wedding-planning business. Beyoncé is “outraged” – but it makes you wonder, why…

The big question inquiring minds want answered is… who’s more corrupt? The Bidens or the president? Donald Trump wants the former vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter investigated for corruption in Ukraine. To get what he wants, Trump corruptly sought to misuse the power of his office to force the issue. This is what is at stake in the impeachment proceedings. Who is most corrupt? Surely “all of the above”. “We don’t condemn him. Presidents, like plumbers, are rarely unsullied” The Bidens appear to have taken advantage of an opportunity for financial gain engendered by a degenerate, full-spectrum empire. (The vice-president leaned on Ukraine’s president to fire the prosecutor in an anti-corruption drive. This was widely supported in both the US and Europe, but Biden did not mention that…

After a remarkable four decades of “headlong growth” China is approaching a crucial turning point, say Louis Kuijs and Gary Duncan in the South China Morning Post. The country this week marked 70 years since Mao Zedong’s communists took power with a military parade in Beijing. For all the fuss about the trade war, China’s CSI 300 index is up by 28% so far this year, with investors reassured by official promises of “selective stimulus”. Yet with the economy registering its slowest growth in 27 years in the second quarter and total debt topping 300% of GDP, can the leadership keep the good times rolling? From Cultural Revolution to capitalism China’s Communist Party has now held on to power for one year more than the Soviet Union’s Communist Party did,…

“Central bankers seem… flustered. Much like a long-haired Persian cat standing backwards to the wind…[it’s reminiscent] of 1927 when financial pressures where mounting following the late 1925 peak in the Florida real-estate boom, which was then devastated by the horrendous hurricane that arrived on 18 September 1926. With winds as high as 150mph, the property devastation if it hit today would be in the order of $250bn. This, with the brief recession that ran from October 1926 to November 1927, prompted the Fed… to be exceptionally easy. Indeed, in July 1927 Ben Strong, chairman of the Fed, quipped to a French central banker that he was going to provide “a coup de whiskey to the stockmarket.”… It was an example of the Fed’s ease for the wrong reasons during yet…

Three to buy Joules Investors Chronicle Clothing brand Joules operates a “total retail” strategy, combining 125 shops, a wholesale business and an “extensive online operation”. Management has made an “admirable job” of ensuring that the online and offline operations complement each other, taking full advantage of “all the selling channels at a modern retailer’s disposal”. Retail accounts for 73% of revenue; wholesale makes up the rest. Half of sales are made online and 20% of instore transactions stem from digital avenues such as click-and-collect. The stock offers an “eye-catching” 23% return on capital employed and trades on just 15 times earnings. 260p 4imprint The Times This marketing group provides promotional materials such as T-shirts, mugs and umbrellas to raise the profile of its customers’ brands. It is taking market share…

• It’s “game-on” for Nintendo, says Jacky Wong in The Wall Street Journal. The Japanese game giant has so far been slow to tap into the $68.5bn mobile-games market. Yet Mario Kart Tour, its latest smartphone offering, received an impressive 20 million downloads in its first 24 hours. A popular game – which is typically free to download and makes money from sales of in-game items – “can generate revenue of more than $1bn”. Games console sales will remain Nintendo’s “bread and butter”, but the new mobiles push suggests that it enjoys more expansive growth opportunities. With the shares up 38% this year investors seem to be taking note. • The name’s Bond, 12% bond, says Camilla Canocchi for The Daily Mail. Aston Martin has raised $150m (£121m) to help…

In June, Neil Woodford had to suspend his Woodford Equity Income fund. The open-ended fund held too many illiquid assets that he was unable to sell rapidly enough to fund a flood of people asking for their money back. The fund remains closed to withdrawals. Technically, as an investment trust, Woodford Patient Capital doesn’t have this problem – to get out, you just sell your shares on the stockmarket. But liquidity is still proving a headache in other ways. Firstly, the fact that the income fund and the trust share a lot of overlapping holdings – ones that the income fund is under pressure to sell – means the valuation of each of these companies (most of which are hard to value at the best of times) is under real…

• Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver paid himself £5.2m last year, reports The Guardian, down from £8.6m the year before. The payments were in the form of dividends from his company, Jamie Oliver Holdings, which includes restaurants, publishing, licensing and TV revenue. Sales increased to £43.5m, but profits almost halved to £7.8m. The UK restaurant business went bust this year with the loss of 1,000 jobs, despite the parent company pumping £4.8m of new money into it in an attempt to keep it afloat. • Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (pictured) has made €970,000 in the last three years from his books, speaking engagements and consultancy work, says The Times. Varoufakis made his name as the anti-austerity finance minister in the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras in 2015, as Greece…

“Musicians are often notoriously shambolic at taking care of business, which leaves the window wide open for the wolves to come loping in. We had terrible contracts and the people we paid to look after us were naturally more concerned with what was in it for them. It turned out that we had huge tax problems. Unbeknown to us, our accountant hadn’t paid our taxes for two years — the two years when we were making the most money. I suppose he just kept getting extensions, trying to look for loopholes and tax shelters, which might be one reason for the big townhouse on East 72nd Street.” Debbie Harry of Blondie (pictured) on the band’s financial problems in the 1980s, quoted in The Sunday Times “If socialists understood economics, they…

Shares in America’s Emerson Electric have risen on the news that D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund, has taken a stake in the firm and is agitating for change, says Al Root in Barron’s. “This looks like another situation where an activist [investor] tries to unlock value by breaking a large firm into smaller pieces.” Emerson is a 129-year-old industrial conglomerate with a market capitalisation of $40bn. Products range from compressors used in air-conditioning and refrigeration to power tools. Industrial conglomerates “have been getting smaller for years”; this is evidently “the era of managerial focus” for the industrial sector. United Technologies, DowDuPont and Honeywell are three recent examples of conglomerates breaking up. D.E. Shaw is also reportedly keen to push through a share buyback worth around $7bn funded by borrowing, adds…

If you can’t get an appointment to get your will written for free there are other options. You can pick up a do-it-yourself will-writing kit on the high street for around £20. But this is only suitable for people with very simple financial affairs and it is easy to make mistakes that could render it invalid. A better option may be a fixed fee will-writing service. Prices at Which and Co-op Legal Services start from £99. If you have a premium bank account, check if a will-writing service is included. Santander and NatWest both offer cut-price will-writing to premium customers. You could also be entitled to a free will through your home-or car-insurance policy if you chose to include legal cover, says Moneysaving expert.com. More Than’s legal service add-on for…

Many traders argue that certain stock-price patterns tend to repeat themselves more frequently than you’d expect from chance alone. By spotting these patterns traders can use them to anticipate future price movements. One of the most popular is the “head and shoulders” pattern, which indicates that a price trend may be reversing or about to reverse, either on the downside, in the case of a “head and shoulders top”, or the upside, with a “head and shoulders bottom”. In a head and shoulders top the price of the asset rises, peaks (the left shoulder), falls and then makes a new higher peak (the head), before falling again. However, the third time it peaks, it does so at a level than is significantly lower than the second peak (the right shoulder).…

Firstgroup (LSE: FGP) operates bus and rail services in the UK and US. In the US it owns the Greyhound intercity services, operates public bus contracts and has a fleet of over 47,000 yellow school buses, its most profitable division. It is also Britain’s biggest bus operator and runs three rail franchises. It has been battling with its biggest shareholder over the future of the group. As a result, Firstgroup is to restructure and concentrate on its US bus business, selling off the UK bus operation and Greyhound coaches. Shareholders seem to approve of the plans.…

Emanuel Pinez, an Israeli citizen born in 1939 in Palestine, founded a manufacturer of computer memory cards, Centennial Technologies, in 1987, floating it on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. On the back of strong financial statements and rumours that the company was in line for a big contract from AT&T (rumours allegedly started by Pinez), Centennial’s share price soared in value nearly tenfold from an initial price of $6 to a peak of $55.50 by late 1996, making it one of the best-performing stocks that year, and giving Pinez a paper fortune of $244m ($352m in today’s money). He took to the high life and had homes in Canada and Switzerland. What was the scam? Pinez, the chief executive of the company he founded, and James Murphy, the…

Frieze London got underway yesterday. The art fair runs until Sunday in London’s Regent’s Park. Frieze Masters forms part of the fair, dealing with, as you might have guessed, Old Masters – as well as works by artists up to the late 20th century. The talk of the show this year is the portrait of Michele Marullo Tarcaniota by Florentine Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. Marullo was a soldier, who was “known for his military prowess as well as for his poetry and literary translations”, says David Sanderson in The Times. After Marullo drowned in 1500, his widow, the poet Alessandra Scala, is thought to have commissioned the portrait (pictured). The couple were later used as the basis for the main characters in George Eliot’s novel Romola. A century ago the…

$600m The cost of a space-based telescope that will be built by Nasa to act as an early warning system against threats posed by asteroids. In July, an asteroid large enough to destroy a city was detected only the day before it missed Earth by just 45,000 miles. €137m How much the pilot strike that saw 2,325 flights cancelled last month cost British Airways in lost earnings, according to the airline’s owner, International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG). The group expects operating profits this year to be €215m lower than forecast. €3m The value of a giant 600lb bluefin tuna caught by three fisherman off Courtmacsherry, southern Ireland, had they landed it and sold it to the Japanese market. Instead, the anglers tagged and released it as part of a conservation…