Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 1022 i MoneyWeek

“UK stocks are now trading at their biggest discount to global equities in 40 years” Everyone wants the same thing out of an equity investment: the kind of longterm sustainable earnings growth that eventually turns into long-term income (see page 28 for one fund manager’s ideas on this). The problem is that if everyone wants the same thing, that thing is rarely cheap. But every now and then the markets chuck us a bone in the form of a group of perfectly good stocks going cheap. Right now the UK might be such a bone. UK stocks are trading at their biggest discount to global equities in 40 years (see page 5). This is partly to do with the composition of the market (lots of banks) but possibly more to…

James Dyson is selling his Singapore penthouse at a loss only one year after buying it, says the BBC. Dyson accepted an offer of S$62m (£35m) from US-based billionaire Leo Koguan, lower than the reported S$73.8m purchase price. Said to be Singapore’s largest flat, Dyson bought it last year after announcing he was moving his company’s headquarters to the country. An increase in requests by peer-to-peer lenders to withdraw their funds from the platforms has led to a huge backlog, with one saver being told her request is 19,050th in the queue, says Rupert Jones in The Guardian. “Billions of pounds” are tied up in the sector as investors rush to withdraw their cash from the illiquid investments.…

New York’s commercial property is in trouble, say Julia-Ambra Verlaine and Sebastian Pellejero in The Wall Street Journal. Last month only 10% of office workers in Manhattan had returned to their desks. The pain could spread beyond New York. Wall Street “slices” property loans and packages them as commercial mortgage-backed securities. Pension funds and asset managers worldwide participate in this “half-trillion-dollar” debt market, but prices are falling. Some lower-rated US commercial mortgage bonds are trading on between “70 cents to 50 cents on the dollar”. London property is also in crisis, but these “comatose days” for offices “will not last forever”, says Jim Armitage in the Evening Standard. Post-pandemic, people will probably still head go to the office at least a few days a week. “Canny private-equity groups” such as…

Six to buy Britvic The Sunday Telegraph A new wave of lockdowns once again puts the focus on shares offering a strong market position, famous brands and solid balance sheets. Britvic, the maker of J2O and Fruit Shoot, fits the bill. It is also Pepsi’s long-term UK bottling partner. Around 40% of sales come from pubs and restaurants, so revenue is down this year, but consumers have been buying more drinks in supermarkets, which has helped it dodge the worst. On 14 times forecast earnings there is scope for the shares to fizz higher in the long term. Buy. 746p Cake Box Holdings Interactive Investor This franchiser of cream-cake shops is likely to see strong demand as a “Covid winter” drives us all towards comfort foods. Recent trading updates…

• Tim Martin (pictured), the founder and chairman of JD Wetherspoon, is “angry”, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. And he has every right to be. Firstly, the first wave of lockdowns and social distancing led to a “thumping” £100m loss for the year to the end of June. Even worse, just when it looked as though pub sales were bouncing back as people “burst out of their front doors desperate for a pint with friends”, the government has ruined things by imposing new restrictions, including the rule of six and closures in some areas. This also means that the £13m that Martin’s company spent to “Covid-proof” their premises, has now been wasted. Martin now thinks that the outlook for the rest of the year “is even more unpredictable”,…

With “little sign” of the opinion polls narrowing, President Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks on Joe Biden during campaign rallies, accusing him of being part of an “organised crime family”, says David Charter in The Times. In particular, Trump accuses his rival of corruption in connection with his son Hunter’s “tangled” business dealings in China and Ukraine, where Hunter was on the board of Burisma, a gas company. Trump points to emails, first published in The New York Post, that suggest Hunter arranged a meeting between Burisma executives and the then vice-president. Most of the media has treated the allegations as“dud” and attacked the messenger or raised eyebrows about the fact that the story came from Trump partisans, says Freddy Gray in The Spectator. But all Biden and…

The first issue of MoneyWeek came out on 4 November 2000. Back then, the iPhone didn’t exist. No one had heard of shale oil – the biggest energy story looming on the horizon was the threat of “peak oil”. As for bitcoin – we were all still struggling to wrap our heads around the idea of paying for purely digital goods, let alone using a purely digital currency. Britain was thinking of joining the euro, which wasn’t yet in circulation. The Bank of England interest rate was 6% – imagine trying to pay your mortgage at that rate today. Chancellor Gordon Brown was in the process of selling off half of Britain’s gold reserves at an average price of about $275 an ounce – a bargain (for the buyers). Amazon’s…

Investors shouldn’t blame all of their dividend income problems on this “very challenging year”, veteran fund manager Robin Geffen tells Morningstar. “The seeds of this whole issue of dividend cuts and cancellations” were sowed many years ago, as exposure to individual “dividend risk” became too extreme. More and more funds were “clustered in a very small group of high-yielding stocks that were basically paying dividends they couldn’t afford”. This included the big FTSE 100 dividend stalwarts such as the banks (Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds, HSBC) and others such as Vodafone and BP that paid “unsustainably high dividends” and “weren’t reinvesting in their own future”, says Geffen. When they “hit the buffers”, payouts were slashed. The crisis shows that investors need to pay more attention to dividend cover, leverage and cash, and…

mises.org When the world was following the example of China and putting its populations under house arrest, Sweden stood alone and went its own way, says Ryan McMaken. Despite warnings of a “bloodbath”, Sweden has now experienced better outcomes than numerous countries that imposed draconian lockdowns, including Britain. The leaders of large states and international organisations are not terribly fond of this show of defiance, and hence are calling for stronger global governance. It would, after all, be much easier for global health bureaucrats to manufacture a narrative favourable to their preferences if Sweden hadn’t provided a natural experiment to test their claims. Pandemics provide the perfect rationale for demanding an end to sovereignty at the level of nation states. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson, among others,…

All of the companies I tipped in my Ecuadorian mining story in October 2019 have risen by between 50% and 100%. I will now focus on just two. The first is Canada-listed Lundin Gold (Toronto: LUG), which since I wrote my piece has put its flagship Ecuadorian gold deposit into production – the country’s first large-scale gold mine. Now that Lundin has an operating mine it is a less risky prospect. One remaining risk is community protests, but here the firm has gone out of its way to keep neighbours onside. It even shut down its mine during the crisis – despite the government imploring it to remain open – out of respect for local concerns that its trucks would bring the virus to their remote communities. Up by 84%…

“Half of the UK’s workforce is likely to work primarily from home over the coming months,” says Jillian Ambrose in The Guardian. This “may see their winter energy bills rise by a fifth as radiators and boilers are kept running through the day”. The Energy Helpline says the average household energy bill will rise by £107 this winter as a result of people working from home five days a week. That is an overall extra £1.9bn between October and March. “Price-comparison sites won’t necessarily show you the best energy deals” That means it is more important than ever to make sure you are paying the lowest price possible for your gas and electricity. Unfortunately, simply tapping your details into a price-comparison website and opting for the cheapest energy supplier is…

• Half the people who think they are taking financial advice on their pension planning aren’t actually getting expert support from a regulated financial adviser. A survey conducted by the pension provider Just found that of 1,000 people who said they had received advice in the run-up to cashing in their pensions, only 49% had consulted an independent professional. Most of the rest had received support from their pension provider, or from Pension Wise, the government-backed service that provides information on people’s options, but no advice on their individual situation. The survey suggests that many people continue to make complicated pension-planning decisions without expert advice tailored to their personal circumstances. To make matters worse, many people appear to think they are acting on the basis of such support, even though…

Shares in the multinational oil and gas group BP (LSE: BP) plunged to a 25-year low of 210p this week, down from £5 at the start of the year, says Bronte Carvalho in UK Investor. It has been a tumultuous year for oil, with prices plunging to multi-decade lows during lockdown as demand slumped. Investors are also concerned about BP’s “potentially expensive and financially risky” switch to low-carbon energy. A new round of lockdowns spells trouble for the oil price. The shares are down by 57.5% from this time last year. But this could be abuying opportunity (see page 21).…

2014 Tim Adams, Schaefer Shiraz, Clare Valley, South Australia £20, timadamswines.co.uk Tim Adams and his wife Pam set up their eponymous winery in the idyllic Clare Valley in 1987. This is the year I started working in the wine business and I remember selling (and loving) an Adams & Wray shiraz, from Tim’s previous wine venture. I have known “Bonecrusher Adams” (he has a mighty handshake) and his amazing wines for every day of my life in the wine trade. You might have come across Tim and Pam’s iconic and affordable wines in Tesco – they have been a mainstay on its shelves. Adams’s wine has been championed in the UK by mercurial wine agent Craig Smith, who has masterminded the fortunes of a good few Aussie wine heroes over the…

The boost Netflix saw from “lockdown life” has come to an end, says Anna Nicolaou in the Financial Times. The television streaming group added 2.2 million subscribers from July to the end of September, “well below the 16 million and ten million subscribers it added in the first and second quarters, respectively”. Netflix warned that the global economic recovery in 2021 would likely have an impact on new subscriber numbers, which the company expect to be lower in the first half of next year compared to 2020. Netflix shares slipped by more than 6% after the “tepid results”. To be fair, the company has repeatedly warned that its “coronavirus bump” was temporary, but its “rip-roaring results” had quietened sceptics. Another concern which will no doubt now re-emerge is that the…

China was the first country into the Covid-19 crisis and is now the “first out”, writes Larry Elliott in The Guardian. The world’s second-biggest economy contracted by an annual 6.8% in the first three months of the year, but has since staged a V-shaped comeback. Official statistics show that GDP increased by 4.9% on the year in the third quarter. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) thinks China will grow by 1.9% in 2020, making it the only major economy set to expand. The debt question Industry continues to lead the recovery, says Bloomberg. Consumption for the first three quarters is still 7% down on the same period last year and “tourism, education and travel” lag behind other sectors. Yet the latest data shows that shoppers are starting to close that…

Japan’s Shimano, the world leader in bicycle components, is about to celebrate its 100th birthday, says Wirtschaftswoche. And its future looks bright. The group supplies every second bike in the world with gears, chains and brakes; this division accounts for 80% of sales, while fishing equipment makes up the rest. Cycling is a structural growth market asgovernments are encouraging people to go green and improve their health, while Covid-19 will accelerate the trend because people will be increasingly reluctant to take public transport and expose themselves to germs. The same family has been running the show for a century, and the balance sheet is as solid as the management.…

This week Andy Bird took over as CEO of education-publishing firm Pearson with shareholders “close to open revolt”, says Christopher Williams in The Sunday Telegraph. One big bone of contention is his pay, with Bird in line for up to $9.4m over the next three years. Other shareholders are “angry” with his plans to run the FTSE 100 firm remotely, splitting his time between his home in Malibu and New York, thousands of miles away from Pearson’s London headquarters. As a result, Bird is under “extreme pressure” to overturn “years of disappointment” that included a run of “seven profit warnings in seven years”. Bird has a lot of work to do, with the latest figures showing that the pandemic has hit Pearson’s revenue, says Simon Duke in The Times. Last…

EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier extended an “olive branch” to Boris Johnson in the European Parliament on Wednesday, saying that a trade deal was “within reach” and acknowledging that compromises were needed by both sides to salvage the talks, says Jack Maidment in the Daily Mail. Last Friday, Johnson said that he was prepared to “embrace” no deal and that a trade deal would not be forthcoming without a “fundamental change” of approach from the EU. The two sides remain deadlocked over a number of key issues, including fishing, the so-called “level playing field” guarantees on regulations, and the governance of the agreement. The EU has set an end of October deadline for talks in order to provide enough time for the agreement to be ratified in the remaining…

With £151.9m already matched on the winner of the US presidential election, Betfair looks set to break the £200m that was matched on the outcome of the 2016 election (£75m of which was matched after the polls closed). However, while Biden remains the strong favourite at 1.57 (63%), the odds have shifted slightly in Trump’s favour, with the incumbent now at 2.76 (36.2%). Similarly, the spreads on Biden’s expected number of Electoral College votes have fallen slightly to 306-312 on Sporting Index and 309-317 on Spreadex. Having made a large number of US-related tips, I’m going instead to focus on Australian politics. After getting a high approval rating for her performance in relation to Covid-19, Gladys Berejiklian (pictured), the state premier of New South  Wales, is facing intense scrutiny after…

“As foreign minister and later defence minister, Taro Kono shouldered Japan’s biggest global challenges,” says Alastair Gale in The Wall Street journal. China’s military rise and an “unpredictable” US president were among them. But now the 57-year-old must “vanquish the ink stamp, the printer and the fax machine”. These old technologies are slowing down growth, according to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, 71, who took office in September and gave Kono his latest “assignment” as minister of administrative reform. Some 25 years of email has “yet to dent” Japanese bureaucrats’ penchant for paper: they ask for routine communications to take place by fax and government forms must be submitted on paper stamped with a hanko, an ink seal. If the Japanese can “put a stop” to hanko culture, the need for…

The dividend drought is easing. Companies that suspended dividends at the peak of the crisis are slowly resuming payouts. Housebuilder Bellway was the latest to do so this week, when it reported strong results showing a solid recovery in sales. Real estate investment trust British Land announced a fortnight ago that rent collection rates had risen to 69% and that it plans to restore a semi-annual dividend (previously it paid quarterly). Others, such as drinks firm Diageo, which was seen as a possible cutter, will keep payments unchanged, while defence group BAE Systems last month paid the final dividend it skipped in June as a special interim dividend. “Link’s best-case scenario is a 15% rise in 2021 ” In the short term, the cuts remain painful. Third-quarter dividends from UK…

Grab a slice of China’s hot stocks Editorial The Economist “Chinese firms get a frosty reception in America these days,” says The Economist. Donald Trump’s administration has tried to “crush” Huawei, TikTok and WeChat, and expel Chinese firms listed on the US stock exchange. As a result, some, including Ant Group, have chosen to list closer to home. Between January and September, new listings in Hong Kong raised $28bn, up two-thirds on the same period last year, while the cash raised by newcomers to the biggest mainland exchanges is 2.5 times the 2019 figure. Nonetheless, Chinese start-ups still “covet” American listings, raising nearly $9bn in US initial public offerings since January. Listing in the US is often easier than in China, with its more restrictive regulatory regime. It also allows…

iea.org.uk Chancellor Rishi Sunak is reportedly considering introducing a UK-wide carbon tax, says Len Shackleton. That is economists’ favourite idea for mitigating climate change, but would it work? It is a version of so-called Pigouvian taxes, which are designed to put a price on the negative effects of a trade that are not reflected in prices paid. The principle is straightforward. But in practice, governments have no idea what that price should be. They are in no position to set a tax at the right level. A “plausible” figure can certainly be plucked from the air: the Treasury seems to favour a level of £75 per tonne of carbon-dioxide emissions. But this is a“blunderbuss” approach. That level already exceeds the duty on petrol and diesel, for example – would…

Now that the market has recovered from last spring’s panic attack, some interesting new investment trusts and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have emerged. Starting with the former category, there are two welcome recent additions. The first is the Triple Point Energy Efficiency Infrastructure Company (LSE: TEEC) trust, which has raised £100m and will invest in a diversified portfolio of energy-efficiency assets focusing on low carbon heat distribution, social housing retrofitting, industrial energy-efficiency and distributed generation (denoting technologies that generate electricity where it will be used, such as solar panels). The fund is targeting a total return of 7%- 8% per annum with a target yearly dividend yield of 5.5%. Building on infrastructure The energy-efficiency market is essentially an extension of the existing infrastructure market, which includes the SDCL Energy Efficiency Trust…

Pension savers could be paying tens of thousands of pounds in unnecessary charges over the course of a lifetime. New research suggests that life insurers, which have traditionally dominated the market for private pension plans, charge over the odds. The study from Interactive Investor, the online investment platform, says pensions offered by online providers offer a better deal: a 38-year-old saver with a £100,000 pension plan today and investing £10,000 a year for the next 30 years could lose almost £100,000 owing to excess charges. Check the type of fee The data is based on the charges levied by pension providers for access to the same funds. Traditional life insurers fare very badly in such comparisons as they tend to have percentage-based administration fees; as the savers’ funds appreciate, these…

The best way to invest is with a portfolio of the highest-quality growth businesses that can deliver sustainable, above-average earnings growth over the long term. Such exceptional companies not only have the potential to contribute outsized returns, but are also inherently less risky, as their greater earnings stability and financial strength offer a “margin of safety” that typically results in less volatility during turbulent market environments. Europe’s software powerhouse SAP (Frankfurt: SAP) is one of the world’s leading enterprise-software providers and a trusted partner for over two-thirds of Forbes Global 2000 companies. Its systems underpin 77% of the world’s transactions. The pandemic has demonstrated the resilience of the business as customers have seen how valuable SAP’s products are. SAP has a powerful combination of a fast-growing cloud business and a…

Too Much and Never Enough How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man Mary L. Trump Simon & Schuster, £20 In the last year, several of President Trump’s former aides and staff have written tell-all books about their time working for him in the White House. Most were strongly negative and painted a picture of a capricious man not on speaking terms with loyalty or integrity. Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece, takes a similarly negative view of the man who is now president in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Rather than yet another look at his time in office, however, this is an attempt to tell the story of his upbringing. Trump was the second son of the property developer…

•“I’ve heard many stories over the years that have endeared me to Ed Sheeran, but the fact that he has spent tens of thousands of pounds to build his own forest on his £3.7m Suffolk estate makes me think even more of him,” says Karren Brady in The Sun on Sunday. The point of the tree-planting is to make the shaggy-haired British singer’s estate more sustainable. But it also makes sense in this lockdown world we now find ourselves in: imagine “having your own pub, swimming pool, hot tub, orchard, walled kitchen garden, greenhouses, an underground cinema, a gym, a recording studio, a wildlife pond and an area for goats, sheep and chickens on the estate”, it “sounds… perfect”. All Sheeran (pictured) needs now is a hairdresser, and he need…

€134,000 The for-sale price of a tiny 6.51 sq m studio at the top of ablock of flats in the sought-after fourth arrondissement in Paris, with a view over the city. The estate agent, Century 21, drew criticism in France for marketing it as an “ideal pied-à-terre or office”. €500m The value of the benefit Italy receives every year from immigrants, the Leone Moressa Foundation research institute has found. It calculated that in 2018, immigrants paid a total of €26.6bn in taxes, and received €26.1bn in state benefits. $383m How much Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden raised last month in campaign funding, breaking the $364.5m monthly record he set in August. His campaign team says it currently has a $432m war chest at its disposal. C$7,500 How much (£4,400) the…

Kim Kardashian (pictured) settled a $6.1m lawsuit with her former bodyguard this week, whom she accused of failing to protect her during a robbery in 2016, says Jack Newman on MailOnline. Kardashian, 39, sued Pascal Duvier and his companies, Protect Security and Balali Investments Inc, for negligence after she was held at gunpoint in a Paris luxury rental apartment while robbers stole her jewellery. A pensioner, identified only as Mr S by the Financial Ombudsman Service, won back his £106,000 pension after losing it to “an infamous high-risk property scheme” ten years ago, says Jessica Beard in The Daily Telegraph. The 68-year-old lost the money after investing in Harlequin Property, a failed scheme to build villas in the Caribbean. His financial adviser was ordered to reimburse him after the ombudsman…

”If the UK were a middle-aged man he’d have just got divorced, lost his job and received bad news from the doctor,” Fidelity’s Tom Stevenson told The Sunday Times. Nevertheless, “the time to get interested in a market is when everyone is familiar with the bad news”. This could prove the best buying opportunity in 40 years. Jitters over a no-deal Brexit, the economic downturn and the shambolic response to Covid-19 have been key reasons why British stocks –tracked by the MSCI UK index – are trading at their biggest valuation discount to their global counterparts on record. The valuation gauge blends the price/earnings ratio (p/e), the price/book ratio (p/b) and the dividend yield (dy). The discount to the MSCI World index’s valuation has reached around 42%,while the historical average…

Big Hit Entertainment, the management company behind the popular South Korean boy band BTS, lived up to its name when it made its stockmarket debut in Seoul last week. The stock rocketed by 160% from the initial public offering (IPO) price to 351,000 won (£238) at the start of trading on 15 October, propelling the firm’s market value to 9.6trn won ($6.5bn), says Song Jung-a in the Financial Times. Investors are hoping that the South Korean government will allow K-pop stars and other celebrities to defer their military service. The seven band members are now all multimillionaires: they were each given over 68,000 shares in the company in August.…

Twitter and Facebook’s “unprecedented” decision last week to restrict the spread of a controversial New York Post story about Joe Biden has sparked “outrage” among Republicans, says Kari Paul in The Guardian. The move marks the first time Twitter has directly limited the spread of information from a news website. President Trump immediately responded by repeating a pledge to repeal section 230, a measure that keeps website hosts from being held responsible for content either posted or removed. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the decision, both Twitter and Facebook, as well as other tech companies, should “fear what comes next”, says James Titcomb in The Daily Telegraph. At present disagreements between Republicans and Democrats, with Democrats wanting more content moderation and Republicans wanting less, mean that there has been…

We’ve got used to the idea that Big Tech has done well out of the Covid-19 crisis, with the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google soaring in value. It turns out that Big Finance is having a pretty good crisis too – and it is about to come out of its decade-long slump. Last week Goldman Sachs delivered its best third-quarter results ever, driven by rising profits on trading and asset management. JP Morgan Chase, its closest rival, delivered results way ahead of analysts’ expectations, and so did Citigroup and asset-management giant BlackRock. And it wasn’t just the big beasts of Wall Street. In London Man Group reported sharply higher earnings and rising assets under management; stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown saw rising profits as small investors in particular flock to the…

There are many concepts in investing that sound far more complicated than they are. Pound-cost averaging – also known as drip feeding – is no exception. It simply means investing a sum of money into the market at regular intervals rather than in one go. So if you have £1,200 to invest this year, you might invest £100 per month. If you have £12,000, you invest £1,000 per month. The advantage of investing this way is that it may reduce the risk (and pain) of buying just before the market drops. If you put all your money in UK shares this month and the FTSE 100 drops steadily over the next year to end up down 30%, your portfolio isalso down 30%. If you invest equal amounts monthly, you are…

“The idea of studying zoology or biology intimidated me. But I was a beauty, thank God! So I went into the family business.” Model and actress Isabella Rossellini (pictured), on why she didn’t go to university, quoted in The Guardian “The idea that people are going to say to themselves: ‘Darling, let’s go out for a wonderful holiday or a meal tomorrow because interest rates are just 50 basis points lower than they were last week’… People are worried about the health implications of going outside. So I don’t think interest rates are at all relevant to today’s situation.” Former Bank of England governor Lord King arguing against negative interest rates, on the Tortoise Media podcast “So many people who work in the theatre have been left at the bottom…

fee.org People worry about the effect of the coronavirus crisis on children’s education, but there is another impact that may have a long-lasting effect, says Emma Elliott Freire. Government diktats have hit children hard. Familiar routines have ended. Many are still doing schoolwork from home, or being forced to wear masks. For children old enough to remember it in the future, this crisis will be a defining moment. How will it shape their worldview? The gamut of contradictory and increasingly absurd rules imposed will outrage children’s deep-rooted natural sense of what is right and fair. When children walk past restaurants full of people eating but are told they can’t take a picnic into a park, for example, they will see that this is simply unfair. Anyone who watches children play…

“When it comes to activist investing during the pandemic, buy British”, says Lina Saigol on MarketWatch. A new study from consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal looked at the share performance of 245 companies after they were targeted by activist investors in the six months to the end of August. It found that British companies outperformed the pan-European Stoxx Europe 600 equity benchmark by 1.5%. European companies outperformed the same index by only 0.1%, while US companies underperformed the US benchmark, the S&P 500, by 5.8%. UK targets also outperformed their European and US counterparts over a two-year period. The study comes as activists are preparing to intensify their campaigns, taking advantage of lower stock prices caused by the crisis to press for change.…

Should first-time buyers be able to access their pension savings in order to get on the property ladder? Pension industry experts say no, despite pensions minister Guy Opperman this month floating the idea of a product allowing savers to use their pensions to help finance a deposit on a first home. Opperman points to countries such as New Zealand and the US, where retirement savings can be used in this way in certain circumstances. The idea has superficial appeal: young savers are often frustrated that despite having several thousand pounds in their pension funds, they can’t raise the money for a deposit. However, the evidence suggests that if people do raid their pensions in this way, they rarely manage to make up for the shortfall over time. More fundamentally, enabling…

Focusrite (Aim: TUNE) is a music and audio products company supplying hardware and software to professional and amateur musicians. The stock jumped in mid-September after the group reported a sharp bounce in revenue and profit as home recordings during lockdown boosted demand, says James Warrington on City AM. It said it anticipated sales of £129m for the year to the end of August, up from £84.7m last year. Focusrite says demand for sound systems in clubs appears to be recovering. The stock has leapt by 80% in 12 months and by 389% over five years.…

Carlton Cushnie was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1950 and moved to London when he was 16. After studying maths at the University of London, Cushnie started up his own computer software business. His experience led him to start up Versailles Group in 1989, a finance company supposedly acting as middleman between lenders and small firms. By 1995 Versailles had floated on the junior Aim market, and within two years it had reached the main market, later breaking into the FTSE 250. Its share price rocketed from 7p to a peak of 251p in December 1999, giving Cushnie an estimated fortune of £230m (£390m in 2019). What was the scam? As Cushnie later admitted, the firm made only one trade finance loan in its existence, which lost money. Instead, it…

Work A History of How We Spend Our Time James Suzman Bloomsbury ,£25 The last nine months have resulted in radical changes in the way we work, with large numbers of people working from home for the first time. Still, some things haven’t changed. Indeed, even though labour productivity “has increased roughly four-or fivefold” in industrialised nations since World War II, predictions of a “golden age of leisure” have failed to materialise, says Elle Hunt in The Observer. Average weekly working hours have remained constant at just under 40 a week. In Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, James Suzman tries to find the origins of our “innate drive to keep ourselves occupied”. Many of our ideas about work and scarcity “have their roots planted firmly in…