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“Most people’s finances are not complicated. And if they are, they shouldn’t be” Most people’s financial affairs are not complicated. If they are, they probably shouldn’t be. One savings account, one mortgage, one individual savings account (Isa), one self-invested personal pension (Sipp) and most of us are pretty much done. Only the very well off go beyond these basics. That’s not a bad thing: with complication comes expense, risk and usually not much gain. If you find yourself with a mix of offshore bonds held in trusts for some reason, it is more likely something has gone wrong than right. Given this, it has always struck us as odd that regulators mostly think all financial advice should be bespoke. If we all need much the same advice (with minor variations…

TV psychic Maurice Amdur, 56, faces a £100,000 legal bill after a judge said he had lied about “losing his powers” in a car crash, says Joe Roberts on Metro. Amdur sued the insurers of a driver who hit his car in 2015 for £250,000, claiming that he couldn’t return to work until 2017 as he “struggled with the intense concentration needed” for readings. The court said his claim was “fundamentally dishonest” as he had in fact performed readings during that time. A lawyer for actor Robert De Niro claimed at a divorce hearing this week that the 77-year-old has had to “take on every project that comes along” to support estranged wife Grace Hightower’s (pictured) “thirst for Stella McCartney”, reports Priscilla DeGregory on PageSix. The pair split in 2018…

A global shortage of semiconductors is affecting everything from smartphone sales to car manufacturing. Disruption caused by Covid-19 has collided with an unprecedented surge in demand for electronics, says Wallace Witkowski for MarketWatch. Research firm IDC reports that PC sale volumes are expected to advance by 18% this year. Global shipments could hit 357.4 million computers, beating the record set in 2011. Car makers have been particularly badly hit by the shortages; many cancelled chip orders when the pandemic hit, only to be surprised by the strength of demand for new vehicles. The shortage means it’s a good time to be a chip maker. The PHLX Semiconductor Index has gained 92% in a year. Building a new manufacturing plant can take two years and costs several billion dollars, so analysts…

The FTSE 100 has broken through the 7,000 mark for the first time since the pandemic began. London’s blue-chip index rallied through 7,000 last Friday before falling back again in the middle of this week; it remains 12.5% short of its all-time high of 7,877, which it reached in May 2018. In capital-gains terms the FTSE 100 has made a miserable 1% gain since the millennium, notes Laith Khalaf of AJ Bell. While the index is a good “day-to-day” indicator of how UK Plc is doing, it also doesn’t factor in London’s greatest strength: generous dividends. Note that £10,000 invested at the turn of the century in the FTSE All Share (which also includes mid-cap and smaller firms) would today be worth £25,540 with dividends reinvested.…

Second-hand gadget-recycler and reseller musicMagpie has been preparing for a £208m flotation on London’s junior market, Aim, this week, says Naomi Ackerman in the Evening Standard. The company was “founded in a garage in Stockport in 2007” and is the UK’s biggest mobile-phone recycler, allowing users to trade in their old devices for a payment. It sells the recycled items with a 12-month warranty. The firm made a profit of £13.9m for the year to December from sales of £153m. The £110m it is raising will be used to cut debt and finance its latest projects, notably an iPhone rental offering and “the recent launch of phone-recycling ‘smartdrop kiosks’ in supermarkets”.…

GlaxoSmithKline has suffered several setbacks this year. A cancer drug seen as a potential “blockbuster” failed a late-stage trial, while another drug suffered an unexpected delay owing to Covid-19, says Jamie Nimmo in The Times. Some analysts worry that these “serial disappointments” are becoming a “major concern for GSK’s... outlook”. But help may be at hand. Elliott, the US hedge fund led by activist investor Paul Singer, who is “feared in boardrooms” worldwide, took an undisclosed multibillion-pound stake in GSK last week. The news boosted the shares by 4.6%. No wonder shareholders are frustrated, says Lex in the Financial Times. GSK’s share price has moved sideways since Emma Walmsley was appointed CEO four years ago. However, “one wonders what change is sought”. After all, while most activists “demand some form…

Rishi Sunak has a new wheeze for making homes affordable again. On Monday, the government launched a new guaranteed mortgage scheme. Anyone borrowing up to £600,000 will be able to get a 95% loan, with the state backing a slice of that to allow banks and building societies to increase the amount they lend without having to worry about defaults. Pouring petrol on a housing boom In fairness, it’s not a completely crazy idea. Raising the deposit for the first property is often the hardest task for anyone getting on the property ladder, especially if they don’t have any help from their parents. If they only have to save 5%, then with £15,000 they can purchase a £300,000 home. Once that is completed, it will get a lot easier to…

Jack Bogle, the late founder of giant asset manager Vanguard, made a huge difference to the finances of private investors across the world by popularising the use of index funds. These offer a cheap way to copy the return on an underlying stock index and in the process, beat most active managers over the long run. Bogle showed investors that if you could get the average return at a below-average cost, you would enjoy better returns with less stress than someone who chased complex but costly strategies instead. In other words, focus on the thing you can control (the price of investing) rather than the one that you can’t (attempts to beat the market). “Focus on costs rather than attempting to beat the market” Now Vanguard is applying that ruthless…

EU seeks to shake up bond market Marcus Ashworth and Mark Gilbert Bloomberg “The fixed-income landscape is set to be transformed as the European Union revs up to borrow $1trn by selling bonds in its own right,” say Marcus Ashworth and Mark Gilbert. Talk of creating a market to rival US Treasuries may be “overblown”, but the “flood of securities will offer investors agenuine alternative to German bunds as the region’s debt benchmark”. The EU is set to issue up to €200bn of bonds each year with maturities as long as 30 years. Although one would expect increasing supply to undermine the value of existing securities, the yield premiums available on existing EU bonds compared with German bunds has shrunk, as demand is “boosted by the prospect of bigger, more…

project-syndicate.org The Covid-19 pandemic “damaged the stock of physical and human capital”, says Edoardo Campanella: firms cancelled investment projects and laid off workers. Yet Covid-19 “could leave a positive legacy”: a stronger base of “social capital”. Social capital is made up of such intangible things as networks, norms and trust, which “facilitate action and cooperation for mutual benefit”. It is, in other words, “the glue that holds communities and nations together”. Countries with an abundance of such capital fared better in the pandemic – people living with such bonds of trust were quicker to take steps of mutual benefit such as social distancing, even in the absence of government diktats. Social capital also played a key role in keeping economies going through lockdowns and remote working. Employees working from home…

Renewable energy accounted for just 25% of US installed electricity-generating capacity in 2018, well behind the UK and Europe, and 43% of that was from long-established hydroelectricity schemes. About 22% of US capacity still came from coal-fired generation, which has all but disappeared in most of Europe. Yet renewable energy is expected to account for 53% of US capacity by 2040, of which just 14% will be hydroelectric. This offers a major opportunity for the two specialist funds recently listed in London. The US Solar Fund (LSE: USF) raised $200m in April 2019 and the Ecofin US Renewable Infrastructure Trust (LSE: RNEW) raised $125m last December. The former is fully invested and, at $1.04, trades at an 8% premium to net asset value (NAV). The latter has only invested $61m…

Mass international travel spread Covid-19 across the globe. No wonder, then, that the airline industry has borne the brunt of governments’ restrictions on movement during the pandemic. This has affected all parts of the sector, with “some airlines going bankrupt, others being forced to seek state bailouts and most carriers having to make large numbers of staff redundant”, says Dr Alexander Grous from the Department of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics. Still, recent signs that vaccines could bring the virus under control have fuelled optimism, with the share prices of many airlines higher than they were a year ago. But will the bounce endure? How many passengers will return? There is considerable uncertainty about the exact pace of the recovery in passenger numbers. Grous, who has…

My long tips have put in a mixed performance over the last two weeks, with two rising, two falling and one staying steady. US homebuilder DR Horton increased from $92.64 to $95.72 while construction firm Morgan Sindall Group went up from 1,804p to 1,918p. However, transport group National Express declined from 331p to 309p and cruise ship operator Norwegian Cruise Line fell from $29.71 to $27.97. Media group ITV remained unchanged at 122p. Overall, my long tips are making total net profits of £6,380, slightly down from £6,686 a fortnight ago. By contrast, my short tips did relatively well, with three falling and only one appreciating. Electric-lorry manufacturer Nikola fell from $12.83 to $10.29, cloud-computing firm Snowflake declined from $233 to $230 and electric-vehicle maker Plug Power slipped from $33.44…

With social-distancing rules forcing us all to meet friends and family in our gardens, it’s no wonder we have spent over £16bn on gardening over the past year, according to a survey commissioned by power-tool manufacturer Stihl. The average household has “splashed out “ £241 on renovations and £180 on accessories as coronavirus restrictions meant more time was spent in back yards than usual, says Alice Hughes in The Independent. Garden furniture is selling out at several high-street retailers, and fire pit and hot tub sales have gone through the roof. But one thing we aren’t considering is whether our purchases are protected. “When it comes to the contents of their garden, many people are underinsured – or may not be covered at all,” says Rupert Jones in The Guardian.…

Did you meet the 5 April deadline for using your 2020-2021 annual allowance for pension saving in full? If not, don’t despair. Special provisions, known as the carry-forward rules, could come to your rescue. The annual allowance caps the amount you may put into private pension savings each year, including your own contributions plus anything you receive from an employer and the tax relief paid by the government. For most people, the limit is £40,000 or the value of their annual income if this is lower, but once the tax year ends, the allowance expires. The good news is that the carry-forward system enables you to make use of any annual allowance that you have not used during the three previous tax years. You must first use this year’s annual…

Versarien (Aim: VRS) is an engineering-materials company; offerings range from metallic products to graphene and plastics. The shares struggled in 2020, collapsing by 70% in the early stages of Covid-19, and while they have partly recovered they remain well below pre-pandemic levels, says Zaven Boyrazian on The Motley Fool. The company’s customers are mostly in the electronics, aerospace, energy and industrial engineering sectors, all of which have faced major disruption throughout the past year. It’s also unclear when Versarien is going to become profitable. The shares are down by a fifth in a year.…

Three Chinese imperial seals went to auction with Sotheby’s in Hong Kong this week, each with an astronomic valuation. Given their rarity, not to mention the growth of the auction market in Asia, it’s not hard to see why. The seals also give us a window into the lives of China’s imperial rulers. The rise… The first, the Qianlong Emperor’s “Ji’entang ” seal from 1766, is made from white jade. On top, the knop (grip) is carved in the shape of a dragon and, in delicate lettering around the base, the emperor sets the record straight on his succession. His grandfather was the Kangxi Emperor (1654-1722), at that time “the single most powerful person on earth”, notes Sotheby’s. In the 61st and final year of his reign, the Kangxi Emperor…

• Fresh from forcing Boris Johnson into a U-turn over his refusal to provide holiday support to children on free school meals, and his campaign encouraging children to read, Marcus Rashford (pictured) is now aiming to get young people cooking, says Karren Brady in The Sun on Sunday. The Manchester United footballer has teamed up with chef Tom Kerridge to launch “Full Time”, a series of “how-to” videos showing low-income families how to make food go further on a budget, as well as reviving forgotten cookery skills. Each recipe costs between 25p and £1 a portion. Rashford knows that if children can cook, and understand the importance of good nutrition, their lives will be that bit better. “So good on Marcus for doing something else amazing and inspiring at the…

A Manchester man suspected of being the “mastermind” behind a bitcoin scam that targeted thousands of victims has been ordered to pay $572m by a US court – but he has “vanished without a trace” and may not ever have existed, says Margi Murphy in The Daily Telegraph. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused Benjamin Reynolds, 38, of stealing around $1.3bn-worth of bitcoin through his company, Control-Finance, which in 2017 targeted customers via Facebook adverts promising 1.4% daily returns on their bitcoin investments. A New York court ruled that Reynolds must repay $143m to defrauded customers, plus a $429m fine. But Reynolds has proved impossible to track down, “much of his digital trail appears to have been scrubbed”, and scammed investors are now questioning whether he existed in the…

Spring is here and the economy is blossoming, says Randall Forsyth in Barron’s. Mass vaccination and “trillions of dollars of fiscal and monetary Miracle-Gro” have nourished the economy’s green shoots. US GDP is expanding at a 6% annual rate; jobs growth has surpassed expectations. Retail sales rose by 9.8% month-on-month in March as Americans spent their stimulus cheques. Signs of a global recovery are especially clear in manufacturing, says Jim O’Neill in Project Syndicate. The US manufacturing purchasing managers index (PMI) has recorded its highest reading since 1983. The eurozone equivalent hit the highest level in the bloc’s 22-year history, while the UK manufacturing PMI rose to a ten-year high. Inflation emerges Global markets have been basking in the recovery. America’s S&P 500 and Dow indices both finished last week…

“The hunt for bonds that pay more interest... has taken... investors to some exotic places... Last month they alighted on Ghana, which issued $3bn-worth of eurobonds, as dollar bonds issued outside America are known. Ghana [is] risky. Its government debt-to-GDP ratio was a hefty 78% in 2020. With such risks come rewards: the yields on Ghana’s new eurobonds were roughly 8%-9%. The alternatives are hardly compelling. The spread, or additional yield, over Treasury bonds offered by American corporate bonds is close to its pre-pandemic low and not far from its all-time low. [Meanwhile a] kinder, gentler [International Monetary Fund] has kept sovereign defaults in check much as central-bank action and fiscal stimulus have kept corporate defaults [low] in the rich world... more yield-starved investors may soon be dusting off their…

Three to buy Ricardo The Mail on Sunday British engineering group Ricardo “is helping the US defence department to make its [Hummer trucks] safer” with devices that keep them stable; they are prone to rolling over. The Indian army is a customer too, but the company is diversifying towards helping public and private bodies “prepare for a low-carbon future”. Ricardo compiles Britain’s annual greenhouse-gas inventory, which records emissions and progress towards net-zero, and advises NHS Scotland and Her Majesty’s Prisons, among others, on cutting energy use. 435p Gym Group Shares Retail closures have “increased the availability of high-quality sites” that were previously beyond low-cost fitness firm Gym Group’s budget. It now plans to open new gyms in Oxford, York and Cambridge. A study by consultancy firm PwC , meanwhile, estimates…

• Prima i kas h been by far “the biggest high-street loser” of the pandemic, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. Not only has three-quarters of its 380-strong European store estate closed during repeated lockdowns, but its lack of an online operation has also left it “horribly exposed ”, costing it an “eye-watering £3bn in turnover and £1bn of profit in the past 12 months”. Yet plans for developing an online arm are “vague”, amounting to “just a single line in a 32-page announcement” detailing the half-yearly results of parent firm Associated British Foods. Primark risks losing people who will come to view visiting a high-street store as “outdated as listening to a CD”. • In a moment of apparent “validation” for bitcoin and other digital currencies, equity investors…

Last week, US president Joe Biden sought to deter recent Russian aggression by banning US financial institutions from buying new Russian sovereign debt, says the Financial Times. These sanctions, which come hard on the heels of the expulsion of Russian diplomats, seem to have failed to sap Russian resolve, with “troops, tanks, helicopters and fighters” continuing to mass in bases in Crimea and southern Russia. Russia’s military build-up on the borders of Ukraine is“bigger even than before its armed intervention in 2014-2015” and there are growing concerns that it will invade Ukraine. This show of military might comes, perhaps not coincidentally, at a time when Russians are showing “fatigue” with President Putin’s “increasingly authoritarian and open-ended rule”, says The New York Times. Putin shows no sign of backing down domestically.…

• Terry Smith (pictured), “one of the UK’s most popular fund managers”, took home £29.7m in pay last year after “amassing a large following among retail investors”, says the Financial Times. That was almost double the £16.2m Smith received for the previous year. “The bumper pay package, part of a profit sharing agreement between eight Fundsmith partners, comes on the back of soaring profits at the investment company he set up in 2010, and makes Smith one of the best paid executives in the fund industry.” • “Disgraced” fund manager Neil Woodford and his chief executive, Craig Newman, shared a last dividend of £1.5m from Woodford Investment Management a month before the suspension of the company’s Equity Income fund, says Citywire. The latest, and probably final, filing, covering the period…

If you’re new to investing then you may find some of the jargon around financial services companies a little confusing. An “investment platform” is simply a company that allows you to buy and sell investments and hold them in one place. The term is used interchangeably with other terms such as “fund supermarket” and, depending on context, even more specific terms such as “stockbroker”. Investment platforms are “execution only”. All this means is that they don’t advise you on what to buy or sell –you make the decisions and the platform “executes” them. That said, platforms mostly come with plenty of news services and analysis tools that can help you to research investments, while some also offer “best buy” lists of funds that pass certain selection criteria, although these have…

“Whoever tells you that money isn’t important is either rich or religious.” Singer and actress Pauline Black (pictured), quoted in The Sunday Times “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” Former US senator Mark Hanna, quoted on FloridaPolitics.com “My terrible handwriting and sketches have turned into a billion-and-a-half-dollar industry with my books and films. So never underestimate the value of allowing children to mess around.” Children’s author Cressida Cowell, quoted in The Times “I’ve been so lucky. A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time. I’m quite good at not working for the sake of working, although sometimes it would have benefited me fiscally.” Actress Kelly MacDonald, quoted in…

spectator.co.uk The Aga oven is “impractical, environmentally unfriendly and expensive”, says Ameer Kotecha. Yet these “enamel-coated, cast-iron behemoths” remain popular and will celebrate their centenary next year. What explains the appeal? After all, they have to stay on 24/7 and use lots of energy. Running costs are ruinous. They “turn your house into a sticky sauna” in the summer months. They are notoriously awkward to use. And they cost upwards of £8,000, plus installation charges. Yet herein lies the Aga’s appeal. They are “a proud rebuke to modern living” and fiddly modern recipes. They are a celebration instead of homely cooking – pot roasts and pies – and turn the kitchen into the snug centre of the house. Owners, including celebrity cook Mary Berry, love them. Ultimately, an Aga is…

The bounce in Barclays’ share price has given its second-largest shareholder a boost, says Ben Martin in The Times. Activist investor Sherborne Investors saw its net asset value (NAV) drop last year to £422m from £546m in 2019 after Barclays’ shares slumped in the pandemic. But the bank’s recovery has propelled the fund’s NAV to £554m. Sherborne’s stake in Barclays was revealed three years ago, and CEO Edward Bramson has been pushing the bank to shrink its investment-banking business ever since. Sherborne has “also failed... to have Bramson installed as a director on the bank’s board”. An analysis has revealed that Barclays’ investment bank saw a 22% increase in sales last year, “strengthening [Barclays CEO] Jes Staley’s defence”.…

One exchange-traded fund (ETF) worth considering is the Invesco STOXX Europe 600 Optimised Travel & Leisure UCITS ETF (Frankfurt: XTPS). This tracks the STOXX Europe 600 Optimised Travel & Leisure Total Return index. Four out of the ten largest holdings are airlines (IAG, Ryanair, WizzAir and easyJet), although it is important to note that it is very far from a pure play on aviation: betting firm Evolution Gaming Corp is the largest single holding. The annual management fee is 0.3%. The recovery is likely to favour budget airlines such as Wizz Air (LSE: WIZZ), as they are less dependent on business travellers. Wizz Air was originally set up to focus on central and eastern Europe, which had traditionally been underserved by the large airlines. However, it has successfully started to…

The FTSE 100 may have broken through the 7,000 threshold, but some sectors have done much better than others over the past 15 months. Shares in companies hit by restrictions, such as pubs and travel operators, are still some way off their pre-crisis highs. Technology and food delivery groups, on the other hand, have profited from lockdowns and their stocks are now substantially above their early 2020 levels. The question now is which recent outperformers will continue to race ahead once things return to normal. One company that should keep doing well is Plus500 (LSE: PLUS). Plus500 specialises in contracts for difference (CFDs), financial derivatives similar to spread bets in that they allow investors to bet on fluctuations in the price of a share, currency or asset without holding the…

As high-street bank branches close, older customers are switching to the sector’s digital challengers. Starling Bank has seen a 4.7% rise in sign-ups from over-65s in a year. That age bracket is now its fastest-growing customer group, with 39,000 customers. But the over-65s aren’t alone. Younger customers are leaving the likes of Barclays and Lloyds too. In the first nine months of 2020 Monzo’s customers increased by 39,776 while Starling’s climbed by 39,599. Rave reviews Those that have made the switch to a digital bank seem happy with their decision. Customers at Monzo and Starling were most likely to recommend their current account, according to a survey last summer by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). “For the first time in three years of running the poll the CMA included…

More than 40,000 people took out equity-release plans last year, cashing in on almost £4bn of value locked up in their homes. The figures, just published by the Equity Release Council, underline the ongoing popularity of equity-release plans with older people looking to supplement their income in retirement, or to find a cash sum for purposes such as paying off debt or a home refurbishment. Financial advisers have traditionally been sceptical about equity release, pointing out that the plans are often expensive, and that they reduce the size of any inheritance left over for children. But while selling up and downsizing is still likely to be a more economic route to unlocking value from your home, assuming it is practical, fierce competition in the equity-release market is paying off for…

Much of today’s investment landscape is populated by stocks offering seemingly “unique” growth opportunities, tapping into themes such as disruption, asset-light models, renewable-energy sources and post-pandemic consumer behaviour. Yet, as is so often the case, a good number of such stocks will quickly fizzle out, inflicting painful losses on investors. Such is the nature of the investment world that many practitioners fall into the trap of perceiving binary outcomes: sure-fire winners versus total duds. Today’s version of this sees terrific benefit of the doubt – and capital deployment to match – afforded to sectors such as food delivery, sustainable energy and digital retail. The rush into such “opportunities” has accelerated as the phenomenon of environmental and social governance (ESG) investing has emerged. Cementing progress “Roads and bridges are unlikely to…

Alex Chesterman has been described as “the most effective doer of deals in British business”. He’s certainly one of the speediest, says the Financial Times. Less than 18 months after launching Cazoo in December 2019, he’s planning to float the online used car-dealer for a hoped-for $7bn, using billionaire investor Daniel Och’s special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). It’s expected to be “the highest initial listing value of any UK company on the New York Stock Exchange”. Britain’s second-hand car market is notorious for its sharp-elbowed dealers – as encapsulated in the 1980s TV series Minder. But a deal that size is enough to have Arthur Daley spinning in his grave. A good pedigree as a disruptor Chesterman, 51, who talks of building “the Amazon of cars”, doesn’t lack confidence or…

2013 Castelnau de Suduiraut, Sauternes, Bordeaux, France £14.99, half bottle, reduced to £12.99 each in a “mix six”, Majestic.co.uk; £15.50, exelwines. co.uk; £16.87, strictlywine.co.uk ; £16.80, shelvedwine.com; £16.95, fintrywines.co.uk; £17.77, winepoole.co.uk; £17.99, handford.net. One of the first truly fine wines that I ever tasted, back in 1987, was 1983 Château Suduiraut, and one of the most memorable was the 1899 vintage I tasted a few years later. This estate has always been one of my favourite sweet-wine properties. The other day I had the great pleasure of Zooming with Suduiraut’s technical director, Pierre Montégut. We chatted about the dry white project here and we tasted the soon to be released 2020 Blanc Sec de Suduiraut. A plush vintage, this is a seriously attractive, dry wine that should certainly help to introduce…

Going… Christie’s in Hong Kong is to offer a “impo o ta t and extremely rare” blue and white “kui dragon” jar on 28 May. The jar hails from China’s Xuande period (1426-1435) and features a kui dragon, inspired by the mythical Makara from Indian mythology. Only a few jars are known to exist from the Xuande period, with one preserved in the Palace Museum in Beijing, and another in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The sale is in celebration of Hong Kong collector Robert Chang’s 95th birthday, with the proceeds to benefit his foundation. Christie’s hasn’t released an estimate, but it is bound to fetch more than the £30,000 Chang paid for it when he bought it at auction with Christie’s in London in 1988. Gone… A rare pale…

Like pilgrims crossing the Atlantic, we keep our eyes on the horizon, watching for land. Consumer price inflation… it must be out there somewhere. We’ve been headed in that direction for many years. And lately, huge gusts of big spending/big printing – from both Donald Trump and Joe Biden – have been driving us forward. In 2020, the feds spent $3.7trn they didn’t have. In 2021, the Biden Bunch is still adding to the total deficit. US debt topped $28trn last week. It’s not as if there’s any mystery as to what happens next. “And what’s this? A seagull! Inflation Land must be getting close” There’s a huge, sad continent out there – Inflation Land. And it requires no navigational skill to get there. Just keep going in this direction…

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was nominated to America’s Supreme Court just seven months ago by former US president Donald Trump, has signed a reported $2m book deal “for a tome about how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule”, says Daniel Lippman in Politico. A Thai police officer who “bit down on something hard” while eating a bowl of sea snails could make a fortune after discovering it was a melo pearl, says Gavin Blair in The Times. The pearls, which are formed by melo snails, have never been successfully cultured and are thus extremely rare. A fisherman who had a similar experience was offered more than £250,000 for one in January.…

Irish building-materials group CRH has always enjoyed solid longterm prospects as the world urbanises and bolsters its infrastructure, says Wirtschaftswoche. But it is now receiving an additional fillip thanks to the US government’s infrastructure spending spree. With a presence in 48 states, CRH is the market leader in America. Its clients are largely in the public sector, which will be key to improving the country’s decrepit airports, roads and bridges. The splurge is also driving up the price of building materials such as asphalt, which has become a fifth dearer since December. CRH has 22.3 billion tonnes of reserves that can be turned into building materials – an additional tailwind.…

The $40bn acquisition of British semiconductor manufacturer Arm Holdings by America’s Nvidia has been left hanging in the balance, says Amy Thomson on Bloomberg. The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, says the government may intervene to prevent the tie-up. Dowden has ordered the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is already looking at the impact on competition, to investigate the national security aspects of the deal too. He notes that the semiconductors are not only “fundamental” to a“wide range of technologies”, including those in defence and national security, but also “underpin the UK’s critical national infrastructure”. Nvidia’s ownership could bring Arm under the “control of powerful US national security laws” that could one day be “used against Britain’s interests”, says Hannah Boland in The Daily Telegraph. The next US tech monopoly…

India “reached an unwelcome record” of more than 2,000 deaths in 24 hours on Tuesday amid warnings that there could be “hundreds of new variants circulating in the country”, says Jordan Kelly-Linden in The Daily Telegraph. The country is reporting the world’s highest number of new daily cases, approaching the peak of 297,000 reached by the US in January. In total, India has reported more than 15 million cases of Covid-19, second only to the US, and has the fourth highest death toll. The double-mutant variant, known as B.1.617, is causing alarm because it has two spike proteins rather than one, says Grace Roberts in The Conversation. This may reduce vaccine efficacy, although this is yet to be confirmed. There are currently 103 known cases in Britain, mostly picked up…

With local elections only a fortnight away, punters still believe that Sadiq Khan is a near-certainty to be re-elected as mayor of London. Indeed, with £5.3m matched on Smarkets as well as £3.8m matched on Betfair, his odds are 1.02 (98%) on both sites to win. Ladbrokes also has him at 1/50 (98%) to win. That hasn’t stopped Ladbrokes from offering a huge number of markets on pretty much every other aspect of the vote. You can bet on the performance of the various fringe candidates’ vote shares, including those of Brian Rose and Laurence Fox, as well as the absolute number that YouTuber Niko Omilana and “Count Binface” will get. (The Count is pictured: one of his key policies is free parking between Vine Street and the Strand for…

“We are all in this together, corporate bosses told us last year as they promised to forgo parts of their salaries or bonuses in recognition of the havoc wreaked by Covid-19,” says Brooke Masters in the Financial Times. By the end of June, 17% of US companies in the Russell 3000 index had announced “adjustments” to executive pay. At the same time, nearly 19% of large public firms worldwide trumpeted an environmental or social target in their executive pay plans, double from 2017. But it’s all a “marketing ploy”. Median CEO pay for the Russell 3000 in fact rose by 6% last year due to stock incentives, along with increased personal use of private jets. Meanwhile, median employee pay at S&P 500 companies fell in 2020 by 17%, taking the…

After years of lagging growth stocks, some scepticism from investors about the recent rally in value is justified. However, Nitin Bajaj tells Citywire’s Gavin Lumsden that he believes the rally has legs. “In the year 2000, we were already six months into the style rotation out of growth into value and people were still questioning whether growth was going to come back... my sense is that this time, it’s going to be very similar.” He expects the trend to continue for “a few years at least”. Bajaj has been running the Fidelity Asian Values (LSE: FAS) investment trust – which specialises in small-cap value stocks – since 2015. The fund holds around 100 stocks out of a possible 18,000 and Bajaj keeps around 20% of the fund in large stocks…

npr.org A drive to get Amazon workers in the US to join a trade union was knocked back when the vast majority of votes cast by Amazon’s workers in Bessemer, Alabama, were against unionising, says Alina Selyukh. Amazon has thus withstood the largest union push yet among its US workers, despite celebrity endorsements for the idea, including support from actor Danny Glover, a group of House Democrats, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter organisers and “implied solidarity” from President Biden. The union is filing alegal challenge, claiming Amazon “created an atmosphere of confusion, coercion and/or fear of reprisals”. Amazon rejects this, saying its employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages than they heard anti-union ones. “Amazon didn’t win” this battle, the company said. “Our employees made the choice to vote against joining…

■ Investors have poured £50bn into UK funds since the pandemic-induced March 2020 market slump, says investment platform Morningstar, “underlining the strength of the market recovery”. Funds were buoyed by £3.8bn in March 2021 alone, almost twice as much as February’s total. Equities brought in £1.7bn, but allocation (mixed-asset) and income funds also remained sought after; “sustainable” funds dominated the top-five list of the most popular funds for the month of March. Year-on-year to March 2021 equity funds stayed in the lead, boasting £23bn of new money compared to the £19bn for fixed-income and £17bn for allocation funds. With inflows of £1bn Royal London claimed the number one slot for March from Baillie Gifford, which saw its smallest net inflow since March 2020 as a result of the recent “value…

This year the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite index has become increasingly volatile. The very high valuations of many large tech stocks offering no dividends have made investors nervous; they are also concerned that President Biden’s stimulus programme could increase inflation. Shares in electric-car maker Tesla, for example, fell by 36% between late January and early March. A safer sector is healthcare, historically it’s one of the least volatile sectors. And within healthcare some of the large US biopharmaceutical stocks now offer reasonable valuations, worthwhile dividends and steady growth through new patented treatments for serious diseases. One such stock is Merck (NYSE: MRK), which offers over 100 products to treat a range of diseases. Key areas for the group are oncology, vaccines, infectious diseases (including HIV), cardiometabolic disease and animal health. Merck…

GameStop, which surged from $17 at the start of the year to a peak of $483 a few weeks later, was a global sensation. It also led to a debate about how retail investors, encouraged by websites such as the r/ WallStreetBets subforum on Reddit and trading through platforms such as Robinhood, are changing the stockmarket. While some saw it as a temporary phenomenon fuelled by the frustrations of lockdown, others interpreted the surge of ordinary investors as a fundamental change in a market hitherto dominated by professional traders and fund managers. However, for traders the more practical question is whether activity on WallStreetBets or Robinhood provides a good idea as to how shares will perform. Some argue that it makes sense to follow the crowd and buy the stocks…

■“The pandemic has made some self-employed workers feel like second-class citizens as they struggle to get bank loans, government financial support and mortgages,” says David Byers in The Sunday Times. But now Santander says it will not take last year’s income into account when calculating how much a self-employed mortgage applicant can borrow. This suggests banks accept “that the pandemic is an aberration and are... confident that earnings will recover”, says Byers. ■ Lloyds Bank has created a pay-monthly home-contents insurance policy that allows you to get insurance without having to commit to a year of cover. “The flexible contents insurance covers items worth up to £10,000, such as bicycles, laptops, mobile phones, clothes and handbags, and can be cancelled or changed at any time without extra fees,” says Kate…

• Ride-hailing app Uber is to set up pensions for its workers following February’s Supreme Court decision that its staff are not self-employed. The ruling means that Uber now has to pay its workers at least the national living wage and that they fall within the scope of the auto-enrolment system, which requires employers to set up pension schemes and pay into them on behalf of eligible employees. Pension experts believe the case will have an impact across the gig economy, with many more workers employed on a more casual basis qualifying for pension rights. • Three of the UK’s biggest final-salary pension schemes are taking the government to court over changes to the way the official rate of inflation is calculated. In November, ministers announced plans to replace the…

Restaurant operator Loungers (Aim: LGRS) has announced plans to open four new outlets in the next month, bringing its estate to 172 sites in total, says Giulia Bottaro on Proactive Investors. Around 50 of its sites reopened last week when restrictions began to lift, and the group looks poised to be a key beneficiary of the end of lockdown. The stock has jumped by 192% over the past 12 months, but analysts believe there could be further to go as trading rebounds and margins improve. The firm has a “strong coastal presence”, which bodes well as Britons consider a “summer of staycationing”.…

Joseph Forte was born in 1955 and went on to graduate from Villanova University in Pennsylvania before working as an investment manager. In 1995 he set up Forte LP, an unregistered commodity pool, with three other partners, to trade commodity futures, mostly S&P 500 stock index futures, but also foreign-currency, 30-year Treasury bond, foreign-bond and metal futures. As part of the deal, the other investors agreed that Forte would be paid a large fee equal to 2% of the assets under management and a sliding share of excess returns of about 3%. What was the scam? Forte claimed to be making high returns from his trading, of more than 36% in 1999 and 35% in 2000. These were later revealed to be completely fictitious. Forte lost money on the relatively…

Ever wondered what a unique digital “artwork” of a single pixel would cost? Last week, we found out. The single grey pixel by the anonymous artist (or artists) Pak, imaginatively titled The Pixel, was bought for $1,355,555 at an auction via online marketplace Nifty Gateway, in partnership with Sotheby’s. Another non-fungible token (NFT) by Pak sold for over $1.4m. More intriguing still was the sale of a fungible token – a digital work that wasn’t unique – over three days. Called Cube, people could buy an image of a single cube for $500, an image of five cubes for $2,500, and so on, up to 1,000 cubes for $500,000. On the first day, around 19,740 cubes were bought for $9.9m. On the second day, the price of a cube doubled…

£5.33 The average cost of a pint of beer in London, an increase of 3% on last year, according to comparison site finder.com. That is £2.26 more than the average in Perth, Scotland, and double the £2.45 global average, but much less than the £9.93 cost of a pint in Dubai. €12,000 The value of the annual cheques Spain is planning to pay workers in exchange for their postponing retirement, thereby reducing debt in the public pension system, says The Times. The government also wants to extend the retirement age from 64.6 years to 65 or 66. £175m The asking price for Britain’s most expensive flat. The 18,000 sq ft penthouse at One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge, London, belongs to property tycoon Nick Candy and occupies two floors, with a…