Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 979/980 i MoneyWeek

Happy New Decade! Here come the 2020s. What will they hold for investors? We try to go some way to answering that, or at least speculating on the topic, in this special double issue. But it might be more informative to review what investments did well and which did badly in the decade that’s about to come to an end. Any such snapshot is of course flawed. On a rational basis, there’s no reason to look back from the end of the year rather than from the middle, or to choose ten years rather than 12 and ahalf. But as we all know, markets aren’t purely rational, humans have a habit of attaching significance to things like dates and if the end of the year isn’t a good time to…

Ex-footballer turned TV pundit Danny Murphy has lost his court case against Coutts private bank over atax-avoidance scheme that was ruled illegal by HMRC, reports The Sun. Murphy had borrowed £1m from Coutts to invest in a film scheme run by Ingenious, which promised tax breaks. He argued that Ingenious recruited investors on behalf of Coutts and that the bank was liable for their losses. The court disagreed. Eric Gilmore, co-founder and chief executive of a Silicon Valley start-up, was fired after he racked up expenses of $76,120 at strip clubs over athree-year period, says Bloomberg. Gilmore did not deny the accusations, but sued the company anyway, saying the board hadn’t followed the proper procedures. The two parties have since reached a settlement.…

Boeing is to suspend production of its grounded 737 Max planes next month, report Leslie Josephs and Phil LeBeau for CNBC. The aerospace giant had raised expectations that the jet would be back in the air by the end of the year, but America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is still not satisfied that the plane is safe. Boeing’s response to the 737 Max crisis has been an “ugly mixture of remorse, evasion and swagger”, says The Economist. Now its strategy of asserting that everything will be back to normal soon has “run out of runway”. The consequences will be significant. At least one million people work for Boeing and its suppliers. Airlines have built their strategies for the coming decade around orders for the 737 Max. Passenger plane-making is a…

It’s that most wonderful time of the year for analysts: the time when they put out their forecasts for what markets will do over the next 12 months and get treated as if these are a valuable insight into what we can expect. The reality is that even a minute spent studying these reports is a minute wasted. Annual forecasts are not just unreliable – they are even more useless than you might expect. Over the past 22 years, the average forecast gain for the US stockmarket has been 9% (for the annual panel of analysts compiled by Barron’s). The average actual return over the following year has been 7%. That sounds pretty close, but this is a fine example of the average being entirely misleading. The correlation between each…

What was the greatest company of the past decade? You could make a case for Amazon, of course, as the internet retailing powerhouse moved into devices, media, cloud computing and dozens of other businesses and made itself briefly the largest company in the world. Or Microsoft, as the company of the 1990s made a stunning comeback, reinventing itself as a services giant. Or perhaps Apple, Facebook, Uber. Maybe Alibaba or Tencent. There are perfectly compelling cases to be made for all of them. But the winner? It has to be Netflix. Let’s see a clip of it in action. The shares soar… Unless something dramatic happens in the last couple of trading days before New Year, then the best-performing company on the S&P 500 over the last ten years will…

Why the gloomsters are wrong Matt Ridley The Spectator Let nobody tell you we are living in hard times, says Matt Ridley. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10% of the global population; it was 60% when I was born. Global inequality is “plunging” due to economic growth in Africa and Asia. Child mortality is at record lows and famine is almost unheard of. Despite what Extinction Rebellion is telling us, humans are also living more sustainably. Economic growth can mean using less. In Britain, almost unnoticed, our consumption of “stuff” probably peaked around 2000. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain fell by a third between 2000 and 2017. How? Take your mobile phone. It does the job of a camera, radio, torch, compass, map, calendar, watch,…

Property funds are back in the spotlight following the ructions at M&G, which will prompt many investors to switch out of open-ended funds into real estate investment trusts (Reits). The fuss over the liquidity problems and structural flaws of open-ended funds has, however, slightly obscured the bigger picture: what is the outlook for commercial property? The market is widely considered to be in the later stages of a long upswing, with valuations looking a bit overextended for key niches such as high-quality London offices. There’s also a structural debate about areas such as retail parks, which are under strain from the e-commerce assault; the M&G fund was reportedly close to 50% invested in retail assets, many of which are increasingly difficult to sell. A boost from Boris That said, yields…

The number of scams aimed at separating you from your money continues to rise relentlessly. “With 3.9 million cases reported last year, you are much more likely to experience fraud than a violent crime,” says Kenza Bryan in The Times. So, it’s time to brush up your security skills in order to stop yourself falling victim to a con. Stop scammers from accessing your accounts by strengthening your passwords. We all have to remember several different complicated codes and passwords. “To make them easier to remember, opt for a theme rather than just a memorable bit of information about you,” says Bryan. You could take the first line of your favourite novel and use the first letter of each word. Then swap some letters for numbers and symbols. So, fans…

More than 600,000 Britons started their own business in each of the past three years. And January is a key month for entrepreneurs returning from a Christmas break determined to turn their ambitions into reality. But you’ll need funding to do so: enough to cover the costs of launching and to ensure you can get by while you’re working to turn your first profit. “Crowdfunders pitch your idea to a big group of investors” Bank lending to small businesses has dwindled over the past decade as banks have sought to reduce risk following the financial crisis. Even before the crisis, banks were reluctant to offer significant amounts of credit to brand new ventures; they want to see at least some history of a business trading successfully before they consider lending…

Finding a fund manager who can outperform the market on a consistent basis over the long run is not easy. Indeed, one of the main arguments for passively tracking the market over active investing is that it’s so hard to find good active managers. That said, there are ways to boost your odds. Here are some key traits to look for if you’re trying to find acontrarian manager. A transparent, clearly communicated strategy Look for managers with defined strategies that they can easily articulate. Successful investment is tricky, but the principles are not hard, so it should be more than possible for a knowledgeable fund manager with any degree of enthusiasm and conviction to explain their process to a reasonably intelligent adult. Understanding how a fund is “meant” to work…

The global market backdrop appears challenging, but we are keen on European smaller companies owing to a positive outlook for earnings growth combined with market valuations close to long-term averages. The JPMorgan European Smaller Companies Trust seeks out dynamic companies with strong growth prospects that are independent of the economic cycle. Many of these tap into exciting structural growth themes such as environmentalism, ageing populations, wellness and digitalisation. High importance is placed on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Well governed companies that respect the environment and nurture their employees as well as wider society are more likely to generate sustainable earnings in an ever more competitive global environment. Here are three stocks that tick these boxes: The future of energy “Bravida makes intelligent plumbing systems that reduce water wastage”…

Fallen stock-picker Neil Woodford is “seeking a new start” following the spectacular collapse of his investment empire this year, says The Daily Telegraph. The former star manager was reportedly in China just before Christmas meeting investors “to scope out interest” in a possible comeback there. The opening of a Chinese-backed fund “could give a new lease of life” to Woodford, 59, who was sacked from his £3.1bn flagship fund, Woodford Equity Income, in October and forced “to shut down his company” after a string of risky bets left hundreds of thousands of small investors facing massive losses. He is also understood to be sounding out investors in the Middle East. Woodford, who’d continued charging his gated investors fees, didn’t want to quit – arguing that he couldn’t believe it was…

A motivational soundtrack for the morning run The Apple AirPods Pro, the latest version of Apple’s wireless headphones, have received accolade upon accolade from the tech reviewers, so they shouldn’t disappoint. The new model has “Active Noise Cancellation” technology for immersive sound so the user can concentrate entirely on how many laps they have left to run. They connect to a phone via bluetooth, so there are no wires getting in the way, and they promise more than 24 hours of listening time with multiple charges in the rechargeable case and up to 4.5 hours of listening time on one charge. You can even have them engraved with your name. £249, apple.com/uk A sophisticated athletic performance tracker The Garmin Fenix 6 is the best sports watch money can buy, says…

What do yacht sales tell us about the global economy? How would a wealth tax affect growth? These and other fascinating topics are taken on in half-hour programmes by Stephanomics, a podcast helmed by economist Stephanie Flanders, now at Bloomberg. Her mix of short segments and interviews are ideal fodder for the commute. The Slate Money Podcast, hosted by Felix Salmon, along with Emily Peck and Anna Szymanski, provides a similar mix of economic commentary and interviews, as well as a weekly roundup of the biggest financial stories and a more general discussion of investment strategies, such as whether wine is a good asset to have in your portfolio. The podcast also updates you on the latest goings-on in the HBO television drama Succession. Episodes vary in length from 30…

Cats, the film based on the West-End musical based on the book of poems by T. S. Eliot, is rumoured to have cost £230m to make, says The Guardian. That’s probably an exaggeration – The Sun reckons it cost £72m. But with a cast of big stars including Taylor Swift (pictured), Idris Elba and Judi Dench covered in CGI fur, it probably wasn’t cheap – and whatever it cost, it wasn’t money well spent. The first trailer hit the internet in July. People thought it was creepy. So the studio redid all the effects. Presumably happy with the re-styling, the film opened in cinemas last week – to a near-universal panning. The BBC gave it two stars; The Guardian, which called it a “dreadful hairball of woe”, gave it one…

Stocks soared beyond expectations this year, writes Akane Otani in The Wall Street Journal, and few analysts “believe the longest-ever bull market is on its last legs”. American equities have been in an upswing since March 2009, rising more than 370% over the past decade. Wall Street sets the tone for global markets, with both the S&P 500 and MSCI All-World indices hitting all-time highs this month. Yet after a year of outsize returns, most expect a “far more modest” showing next year. The US earnings cycle turns down The year is ending on a “bullish note”, but closer analysis threatens to “deflate the bubble of optimism”, says John Authers on Bloomberg. US earnings-per-share growth has declined this year. All of the share-price gains have been driven by higher price/earnings…

“The Financial Times [reports] that ‘The Federal Reserve is considering [letting] inflation run above its 2% target, a potentially significant shift in its interest rate policy.’ That’s right. A body whose primary mandate is to maintain low inflation may be on the brink of throwing in the towel in addressing that objective. Be careful what you wish for. If the Fed is successful in letting the US economy ‘run a little hot’ – so far there is no evidence that the Fed is even capable of leaving the house without having to wear a helmet – we doubt whether the inflationary genie can so easily be coaxed back into the bottle. Add the… drift towards the wholesale adoption of MMT (‘modern money tree theory’) by the world’s central bankers –…

• John Fallon, the boss of education publisher Pearson, has survived so many profit warnings that we dubbed him “Teflon John”, says Lex in the Financial Times. Yet now he has announced his departure. Since Fallon started in 2013, shareholders’ returns have been “a negative 29%”. Fallon focused on cutting costs, but lacked a bigger vision. “Education is a valuable commodity” and Pearson’s exams and training businesses could yet contain the “seeds of greatness”. Hopefully his replacement is equal to the challenge. • A report that lifts the lid on a culture of shoddy practices at housebuilder Persimmon “makes for grim reading”, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. It finds the builder guilty of “systemic nationwide” fire-safety failures, while the cost of correcting structural problems unearthed in thousands of…

We use mental shortcuts (known as heuristics) to make decisions rapidly. These work in many circumstances, but they can also be a disadvantage when they lead to cognitive biases – systematic errors in thinking that lead to irrational judgements. There are a number of biases that can affect our investment decisions. Some of these may be obvious, such as the tendency for members of a group to end up coming to similar conclusions (groupthink) or for us to give more weight to information that supports our existing views (confirmation bias). But others affect our thinking in ways that are harder to detect. ”Anchoring” is the tendency to rely heavily on apiece of data we are exposed to while making a decision, regardless of its relevance. In a1974 study, psychologists Daniel…

• Denise Coates, co-founder of online gambling firm Bet365, cemented her position as the country’s highest-paid boss by paying herself £323m last year, £57m up on the previous year, says the BBC. Coates (pictured) took £277m in salary and the rest in dividends. Her pay works out at around £1.3m a day. Coates founded the company in 2000 and owns half the shares, the rest being held by her brother and father. The company’s revenue rose by 7% to £3bn in the year to the end of March, and operating profits rose by 15% to £758.3m. • Retail magnate Mike Ashley, owner of Sports Direct and House of Fraser, says he wants to introduce a new bonus scheme, worth £100m, that would “create 50 millionaires” and hand “hundreds more” employees…

“There are some actors out there who are all, ‘Hey, I live in a cardboard box and I’ll perform on that cardboard box if I have to.’ That’s pretty much bulls**t. Acting pays well. And anyone who says they don’t like money is being ridiculous. Money is lovely. Nice things are lovely. Pay me the money. I’m not doing it for charity. I’m not a non-profit organisation.” Actor Henry Cavill (pictured), quoted in Debonair “The ATM has been the only useful innovation in banking for the past 20 years.” Former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker’s 2009 assessment of Wall Street, quoted in the Financial Times “Dad, can I have my own room?” The eldest son of lottery winner Steve Thomson after his £105m win, quoted in the Daily Mail.…

Dutch activist fund Follow This has filed shareholder resolutions at Exxon, Chevron, and Shell’s annual meetings for the first time, says Laura Hurst on Bloomberg. The motions ask the companies to align their plans with the Paris climate accord. The fund has previously done the same in Europe, pressuring major oil companies to take action on climate change. Follow This’s resolutions have so far been defeated, but the group believes change comes from “a small number of progressive investors, not the majority”, says head of the company Mark van Baal. They have already been joined by Dutch insurer Aegon and M&G Investments. Chevron says it has already set up emission reduction goals for various forms of fuel.…

Interest rates may be at historic lows, but that doesn’t mean you have to settle for some of the absolutely pitiful rates some banks are paying. Research by the Daily Mail has found that Halifax’s Instant Isa Saver and Santander’s Easy Isa accounts both pay just 0.2% interest. The 20 worst cash Isas pay between 0.15% and 0.4% interest. That’s less than £5 in interest on £1,000. The good news is that there is no reason to accept such pitiful interest rates. “No one should accept earning less than the price of a cup of tea over a year on £1,000 on their hard-earned savings,” says Anna Bowes from Savings Champion. “While things still look bleak for the savings market, there are providers offering better rates of interest for those…

• What does your business do? Spoon Guru helps people find the perfect foods for their dietary needs and health objectives. Using a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning with nutritional expertise, we’ve built a food search and discovery platform that determines every product or recipe’s suitability for each individual. We started the company because we observed the frustration that people with specific dietary requirements encounter on a daily basis. • What is your greatest achievement? Our three greatest successes have been getting investment from people who believed in our mission; building a hardworking team of young people keen to make their mark in the industry through innovation; and licensing our technology to major retailers. • What has been your biggest challenge? The highs and lows are much more…

The panel Dylan Grice Co-founder Calderwood Capital Max King Non-executive director Lucy Macdonald CIO Allianz Global Jim Mellon Chairman Burnbrae Alastair Mundy Fund manager Temple Bar Tim Price Director Price Value Partners Steve Russell Investment director Ruffer Capital John Stepek: How do we feel about UK stocks now that the election is over? Lucy Macdonald: There were two reasons why nobody wanted to go near the UK in recent years. One was Jeremy Corbyn, the other was Brexit. Corbyn is now off the table – and on Brexit, we still don’t know what the trade deal’s going to look like, but it’s clearer. So the UK is now more investable than it was. John: Might we get a big influx of capital now? Lucy: I think we’ve actually had that.…

Buying an empty property may seem like a straightforward way of buying a house on the cheap. There are certainly plenty to choose from: in England alone, there are over 200,000 that have been empty for at least six months, the legal definition of a long-term vacancy. Owners struggle to sell or derive an income from them so they may be keen to offload them for a reasonable price. But be sure the sums add up. Finding a vacant property can be as easy as going for adrive around the area you’re interested in and spotting one. Otherwise, it might be worth contacting estate agents keen to make a commission, or local councils as they will be keen to get the property back into use, says Chris Menon in Moneywise.…

Dart Group (LSE: DTG) began life ferrying flowers by air between Guernsey and the British mainland. It has grown into a holding company that owns the Jet2 airline and holiday business along with Fowler-Welch, a chilled food distributor based in Lincolnshire. The first half of the year was “satisfactory”, says the board, with revenue up by 16% to £2.6bn and profits up 3% to £365m. And with customer numbers up in the wake of Thomas Cook’s demise, Dart has raised its profit forecast for the full year. Investors have piled in and the share price has risen by 123% in 12 months.…

“While some of us might cringe and despair looking at old photos of ourselves in a blue and yellow shellsuit jacket, there are shoppers out there who yearn for such retro clothing,” says Joanna Bourke in the Evening Standard. Entrepreneur Rory Westbrook, 25, is one of the latter, and he was quick to note the potential for a successful business venture. He started selling 1980s and 1990s clothes through his online retail startup True Vintage in 2014. The company looks for rare and discontinued items at charity shops, eBay, and international suppliers to sell on at a premium. One of Westbrook’s “memorable deals” was getting £150 for an Adidas Lake Placid Olympic sweatshirt that he bought for £5. Revenues have been growing steadily and the company is on track to…

Discounting various “multi-asset” funds with holdings in Woodford vehicles, there were three main funds that suffered in the wake of the fund manager’s downfall. Here’s the latest news on each of the three funds in question. Woodford Equity Income Woodford’s main vehicle, the somewhat poorly named Woodford Equity Income, was the most troubled of his funds – its significant holdings in unlisted, hard-to-value firms were what triggered the suspension in the first place. The fund is in the process of being prepared for winding up. BlackRock is managing the more liquid side of the portfolio and has already sold shares worth more than half of the value of the fund. Meanwhile, specialist broker Park Hill is working on the illiquid assets. As of mid-December it had yet to sell any…

2013 Ayala, Le Blanc de Blancs, Champagne, France £52.95 from thewhiskyexchange.com; £57.99, Latitude Wine & Liquor Merchant, 0113-245 3393; £55, Cambridge Wine Merchants, 01223-568989; £55, Dulwich Vintners, 020-8299 1051 This article is exquisitely timely and also rather annoyingly ahead of the game. This amazing wine works perfectly as a stunning New Year’s Eve Champagne recommendation, but I am rather itchy about the fact that only a handful of stockists have listed it and only one of them, The Whisky Exchange, is showing it on their website. That is because this wine is fresh off the boat. So please bear with me and forgive me that this truly mesmerising wine is not yet more widely distributed. I have known the Ayala brand for a long time – they even made a…

The best business books The most interesting business book this year was Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius,  Betrayal and Redemption (Little, Brown, £20) by Ben Mezrich. It details how the Winklevoss twins, famous for being outwitted by Mark Zuckerberg over the creation of Facebook, “regained” their lost fortune by becoming bitcoin moguls. Like Mezrich’s other books (such as The Accidental Billionaires), this one attempts to tell a factual story by imagining what the main characters were thinking, an approach known as “faction”. This approach has its critics, but it results in an entertaining, pulpy read that can be consumed in a single sitting. The book recounts how the twins, blackballed by a tech community that didn’t want to jeopardise any chances of a buyout by Facebook, plunged into…

We attended our son’s wedding in New York on the Upper East Side this week, which left us with no time to puzzle out what is going on in the world of money. But it turns out weddings impart their own important lessons. “Marriage today is like buying a car: we stick with it only if it’s working” Weddings are emotionally intense. And they should be. The father of the bride “gives her away”. In ancient Rome, she left her father’s house and moved to her father-in-law’s house. She left her family behind and her family’s gods. Traditionally, the bride marries not just a man, but a way of life – for better or for worse. If the groom is a farmer, she becomes a farmer’s wife. If he is…

Dame Vera Lynn has emerged victorious in her legal battle against a gin company that wanted to trademark her name for its product, reports the BBC. Halewood International argued that the name is more commonly known as rhyming slang for the drink than as the name of the 102-year-old “Forces’ Sweetheart”. The court ordered it to pay £1,800 in legal costs. Darts player Fallon Sherrock (pictured) became the first woman to beat a man in a PDC World Championship darts match. Sherrock beat Ted Evetts 3-2 in her first round match at London’s Alexandra Palace, guaranteeing her prize money of at least £15,000 for reaching the last 64. The eventual winner will receive £500,000.…

The current annual rate of consumer price inflation (CPI) in America is just below the US Federal Reserve’s target of 2%, but to most people it feels much higher, says John Mauldin in Thoughts from the Frontline. Even at 2% a year prices jump by an overall 50% in 20 years, and in any case CPI “doesn’t reflect real-life spending”. For some of life’s necessities, prices have risen “dramatically”. Over the past two decades medical care, housing and education (the cost of going to university) have jumped by far more than CPI. The Fed also uses an accountancy technique called Hedonic Quality Adjustment, the upshot of which is that if an item has improved in quality, it is deemed not to have become more expensive. “Does that match your experience?“…

This week saw a deal that will “reshape the car industry as it undergoes a period of transformation”, says Michael Pooler in the Financial Times. Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA, the owner of Peugeot, have agreed to create “the world’s fourth-largest carmaker by output”. PSA’s and FCA’s shareholders will each take a half-stake in the new company, which will boast combined sales of €170bn and be valued at €41.4bn. It will have a 400,000-strong workforce and total vehicle sales of 8.7 million. The merged entity will sell a portfolio of brands “covering the luxury, premium and mainstream passenger car segments” and is expected to get around 90% of its revenue from Europe and North America. While the deal is being called a “merger of equals”, the way it is structured…

The House of Representatives’ impeachment of President Trump on Wednesday was “proper and necessary”, says The Washington Post. Trump withheld a White House meeting and US military aid in a bid to force Ukraine’s president to help his 2020 re-election campaign. Congress could not allow this to “go unpunished”, nor could it “acquiesce” in his refusal to cooperate with the inquiry. Trump is the third president in US history to be impeached and to face trial in the Senate – a trial that will decide whether he is removed from office. Eleven hours of “fierce argument” in the House between Democrats and Republicans, who voted “almost entirely” along party lines, “vividly illustrated the extent to which leaders of the two parties now believe entirely different accounts”. Democrats characterised Trump as…

Extravagant insurance claims in Ireland are putting responsible people out of business, says The Economist. “Compo culture” has given rise to an “epidemic” of dubious compensation claims, which have caused the country’s insurance premiums to rocket. A notable example is MP Maria Bailey (pictured), who in July 2015 ran a 10km race in under 54 minutes. This “came back to haunt her” soon after, when it was revealed that she was seeking up to €60,000 in compensation for minor injuries from a fall she suffered during a night out in Dublin, three weeks before the race, which she claimed had left her unable to run for three months. This was a “particularly galling” example of the phenomenon that is “blighting small businesses, forcing drivers off roads, and stifling public activities”.…

The years from 1997 to 2000 were “unimaginably bad” for value investors such as GMO, says Ben Inker in a recent letter to investors. Not only did value stocks underperform drastically and emerging markets suffer a crisis, but not holding the hottest tech stocks could be hugely costly: leaving America Online (now AOL) out of GMO’s US equity portfolio in 1999 by itself lowered returns for that year by more than one percentage point. But the “extreme pain” of that time – which sent many clients running for the exits –went on to create “the greatest opportunity set for valuation-driven investors since the Great Depression”. The parallels with today are striking. Recent market bubbles have not been as abrupt as the dotcom boom, but the cycle has gone on for…

In just over two years, the country’s MPs have earned £8.4m between them – an average of £12,900 per MP, or £5,330 a year, in addition to their parliamentary salaries of £79,468, says The New European. The figures come from data-crunching website Data Lobo, which examined the period between June 2017 and October 2109. The money is not evenly spread, however –over half that amount was earned by just 15 MPs, all of them men. Topping the list is Boris Johnson, with almost £800,000, mostly earned from giving speeches. The average earned by male MPs was £17,360, more than five times the amount earned by women at just £3,350. Men spent longer earning outside income – 89 hours each compared with 25 hours for the women. Tory MPs were the…

■ Survivors of two World Wars, ”the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the dotcom bubble, and the tech boom”, these trusts seem a reliable investment, says Mike Atherton in The Times. The Foreign & Colonial investment trust has been running since 1868 when it began putting money into government bonds. Now, over half its money is invested in the US, with holdings in Apple, Alphabet and Facebook. Scottish American was formed in 1873 to invest in US railroad bonds after the Civil War gave the economy a boost. It has stakes in Procter & Gamble and Deutsche Börse. The BlackRock Smaller Companies trust was set up in 1906. It focuses on small and mid-cap companies and “has an impressive record of strong dividend growth”. City of London started as a…

■ New figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed that we’ve been getting wealthier in recent years, but at the same time we have also taken on more debt, says Marianna Hunt in The Daily Telegraph. Between 2012 and 2014 the households with the median amount of wealth owed £4,150, but that has “risen by almost 40% to £5,800 today.” Middle-income earners are getting into debt more than any other wealth level. This could be because they are juggling lots of balls. “There’s every chance each month they have a mortgage plus a credit card, loan or overdraft to address,” Sarah Coles from Hargreaves Lansdown told the paper. ■ Married couples are being urged to check if they are eligible for a tax rebate. The Marriage Allowance lets…

One of the attractions of investment trusts is their board structure and the way it should mean that the funds are run in the interests of shareholders rather than fund managers. (I’m on the board of three investment trusts by the way – see moneyweek.com for details). Not all boards are up to much.That of the Woodford Patient CapitalTrust did a lousy job of reining in Neil Woodford and Alan points to questionable governance at Jupiter US Smaller Companies (where the chair has spent 26 years on the board and isn’t planning to resign any time soon) as an example of how things can go wrong. But the recent change of manager at the Edinburgh InvestmentTrust is a good example of a board acting as it (probably) should.The trust’s £1.3bn…

In recent years there have been plenty of breathless articles in the financial press highlighting the scope for house-price rises in certain areas owing to the arrival of Crossrail, or the Elizabeth Line. But it is always hard to gauge how much a local price rise owes to a specific project and how much to a wider market upswing. In any case, a Savills study suggests that house-price growth has faltered close to two-thirds of the Crossrail stations, as Anna White points out in the Evening Standard. How much this has to do with the delay to Crossrail and how much with the wider London slowdown is a moot point, but those in the market for a new home with good transport links should consider some of these areas. In…

Fresnillo (LSE: FRES) is Mexico’s second-biggest gold miner and the world’s biggest producer of silver. It has not been a happy year, with “continued challenges” at its mines involving increased costs and missed production targets reducing profits by more than 50% in the first half of the year. Shareholders have had a wild ride in the last 12 months, but the general direction is down: the stock has fallen by almost 30% in 2019 and in the latest stockmarket reshuffle was booted out of the blue-chip FTSE 100 index into the FTSE 250 mid-cap segment.…

Julian Metcalfe transformed the way the country eats lunch, says Sabah Meddings in The Sunday Times. He founded Pret A Manger in 1986 with friend Sinclair Beecham. They bought their first shop in London while Metcalfe was working in real estate, and used a £5,000 inheritance from his grandmother to buy an oven. He handed his notice in when the shop began to break even. Since then, Pret has become a “ubiquitous presence” on Britain’s high streets. Metcalfe now has a £215m fortune – he sold Pret in 2008 to private-equity firm Bridgepoint for £364m and gave up his seat in the board. Last year, Pret sold to Germany’s JAB Holding for £1.5bn. Metcalfe (pictured) is now trying to replicate that success with Itsu, the Asian-inspired chain where he is…

Mario Draghi The European Central Bank boss, who bowed out this year, is widely viewed as the man who ended the eurozone panic in 2012 with the magic words “whatever it takes”. The question now, says Hamish McRae in The Independent, is whether Draghi can hang onto his “Super Mario” status. When central bankers retire reputations often slip, “sometimes disastrously” –that, sadly is Draghi’s likely fate. Many now blame the “ultra-easy” policies he championed for the eurozone’s faltering growth. Indeed, Deutsche Bank recently claimed that negative rates, afavoured Draghi strategy, have “ruined” Europe’s financial system. When Italian-born Draghi got the ECB job, some said he was “more German than the Germans”, says the Financial Times. How wrong they were. Still, even Bundesbank officials “speak warmly of him personally”. As well…

1. “Today’s big tech companies have too much power – too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy.” 2. “I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news.” 3. ”We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” 4. “On the pitch I am doing my hardest so my team win.That’s my job and you want to do as well as you can in the job you’re paid to do. So all I wanted to do was get back to work.”…

•“Squillionaire” Tamara Ecclestone lives in a £70m mansion in Kensington with £50m worth of jewellery in asafe, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. Yet not even her “round-the-clock security” could stop a break-in which saw her jewellery stolen while she was “off in Lapland, via private jet”. Not even the Queen keeps that much bling at home, and why would anyone need that amount of jewellery? Before the robbery, Ecclestone (pictured) posted a snap of her five-year-old boarding a plane to Lapland. “Why not just erect a big sign on the front of the house saying ‘all-you-can-nick priceless jewel buffet this way’?” Tamara could take a page out of Steve Thomson’s book. The builder who recently won £105m on the lottery. He has promised to finish his customers’ jobs…

£92m How much drivers paid in fines for driving in bus lanes last year, up from £39m the year before. It earned councils £59.2m after costs. £4bn The gross takings for Cats, the hit musical, since it launched in 1981. It was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and isbased on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot. £1.5m The amount prices for houses on Britain’s most expensive street have increased. The average cost of a property in Ilchester Place near Holland Park in west London swelled from £15.6m to £17.1m. $15m The price of the most expensive Christmas tree in the world. It is at the Kempinski Hotel Bahia, a beachfront luxury hotel near Marbella in the south of Spain. Decorations include pink, red,…