Indholdsfortegnelse for 1063 i MoneyWeek

MoneyWeek will turn 21 in early November. It has been a busy couple of decades. We’ve been through the dotcom bubble, two commodities supercycles, the housing bubble, a once-in-a-century financial crisis, and a once-in-a-century pandemic. We have, in short, been round the block more than a London traffic warden. But one thing we have yet to experience: a nasty bout of inflation. I wonder if we now will. Not so transitory John explains in detail why we’re worried on page 22, but the (rapidly rising) bottom line is that all the signs are there. Massive money-printing, which this time is going straight into the system rather than plugging balance-sheet holes in banks as in 2008-2009. Supply bottlenecks, skill shortages and rising raw-materials prices – a combination that points to a…

The National Gallery of Australia will return 14 works of art to India that are suspected to have been stolen, looted or illegally exported, says the BBC. All but one of the works, together worth almost £1.6m, are linked to former New York art dealer and alleged trafficker Subhash Kapoor. The gallery has already returned several other works it bought via Kapoor, including a bronze statue of Hindu god Shiva acquired for £3.6m in 2008. The late owner of publisher Scholastic stunned his wife and sons by leaving the $1.2bn firm “not to his sons or siblings but to his former lover”, says The Times. Richard Robinson Jr bequeathed Scholastic, which published the Harry Potter series in America, and all his personal possessions to Iole Lucchese. The family say they…

“Big agriculture is having a field day,” says The Economist. Food prices are soaring amid “transport logjams and paltry harvests”. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s price index hit its highest level since 2011 in May. Soybean prices have risen by 56% in 12 months; corn is up by 68%. When lockdowns were first imposed there was concern that global supply chains would buckle and prices would spiral, says Florian Zandt on weforum.org. In the event, prices slumped. Lower oil prices reduced demand for biodiesel, an alternative use for some crops. Yet prices began to rally last summer and have since soared to multi-year highs. Despite a pullback in June, average global food prices are “still 25% more expensive than the 2014-2016 average”. Reopening restaurants have shifted demand back towards…

Your morning cup of coffee is getting more expensive. Futures prices for Arabica beans soared to a six-year high above $2 a pound last week. Prices have almost doubled over the past year, with a rise of nearly 30% last month alone, say Jeffrey Lewis and Joe Wallace in The Wall Street Journal. The latest spike came after Brazil, the world’s biggest producer, was hit by its worst frosts in more than 25 years. That came on the heels of a drought that had already badly affected production. The global shipping container shortage and political turmoil in Colombia have also driven prices higher. Prices of lower-quality Robusta coffee, much of which comes from Vietnam, are also increasing. They are up by 40% in a year.…

The digital economy is booming in India. Online insurance marketplace PolicyBazaar is the latest start-up to attempt to capitalise on the trend, filing for an initial public offering (IPO) that could raise as much as Rs60.18bn (£582m). If successful, the flotation would be the third-largest Indian debut of 2021. The company was founded in 2008. It targets the large number of underinsured people in the country, and allows users to compare prices and features of life, auto, travel, health and property insurance from dozens of providers, side-stepping middle men. More than a dozen start-ups are expected to debut on the stockmarket in the next 18 months.…

Last year HSBC took “billions of dollars” in loan losses, say Stephen Morris and Tabby Kinder in the Financial Times. Now it has announced an “almost fivefold rise in second-quarter earnings as the global economic outlook brightened”. Pre-tax profits “surged” from $1.1bn last year to $5.1bn in 2021, while the group “cancelled a further $300m of credit provisions”. HSBC’s decision to reinstate its dividend is “another good sign” for shareholders, says Jennifer Hughes on Breakingviews. However, the fact that it is handing back “a mere seven cents ashare for now”, suggests that HSBC’s management think that things are “only slowly moving in the right direction”. The payout, worth far less than half the group’s earnings, is pretty “meh” when set against UK rivals Barclays and NatWest. And while HSBC is…

The past few weeks have seen Boris Johnson’s personal approval ratings fall and the Conservative lead in the opinion polls shrink from the double-digit leads that they enjoyed earlier this summer to just 4% by one recent poll. With £192,500 matched on Betfair, punters still think it is unlikely that Johnson will depart this year, offering odds of 14.5 (6.8%) for a departure in 2021. The odds of him departing in 2022 or 2023, however, are 5.1 (19.6%) and 4.8 (20.8%) respectively. The odds of him surviving until 2024 are 1.8 (55.5%). In the medium run, Johnson has a tough time ahead of him. He will have to find a way to deal with the massive hole that the various lockdowns have blown in the public finances for one. Still,…

Eight of the ten highest-paid civil servants at the Department of Health and Social Care were working for NHS Test and Trace during the first quarter of this financial year, says Laura Donnelly in The Sunday Telegraph. The top three working at the app behind the “pingdemic” also all have a background in supermarkets. Gareth Williams, chief operating officer, and a former head of human resources at Sainsbury’s, and Ben Stimson, who was chief customer officer until he left in May, and previously Waitrose’s retail director, were the best paid. Both were on salaries of between £240,000 and £245,000 a year. Testing chief operating officer Mark Hewlett, who is a former buying director for Aldi, was the third-highest paid on a salary of between £220,000 and £225,000. The Commons Public…

Investors don’t see discounted cash-flow (DCF) models as relevant today, says Michael Mauboussin, the behavioural finance guru who writes on “consilient” (cross-discipline) research for Morgan Stanley’s investment management division. “High valuations for many start-ups and companies with negative earnings, as well as the existence of ‘meme stocks’, where gains and losses are determined more by online forums than fundamentals, make thinking about cash flows seem quaint.” Even where investors take valuation into account, they use heuristics (rules of thumb) – eg, price/earnings(p/e) multiples – instead of cash flow-based analysis. That’s partly because DCF analysis isn’t easy. Small changes in assumptions for a DCF model can mean large changes in estimated value. Valuation is particularly tricky early in a company’s life cycle, because the range of possible outcomes is large. Situations…

■ Experts are warning that multi-asset funds, which target “cautious investors”, are taking too much risk, says David Brenchley in The Sunday Times. The funds provide ready-made portfolios of assets, including equities, bonds, commodities and property, in one investment vehicle. They also provide varying levels of exposure to risk, and market themselves as a simple way for investors to diversify their investments. But they are constrained by how much they can hold in stocks, and are thus “loading up” on risky bond investments, including emerging-market debt and corporate bonds. Yet those investing in multi-asset funds are seeking protection for when the market turns. Multi-asset funds tout their “balanced portfolios”, yet truly balanced portfolios traditionally hold 60% in shares and 40% in bonds. A third of so-called balanced funds on the…

glineq.blogspot.com The Norwegian government is one of the most active in the world in highlighting the threat of climate change, says Branko Milanovic. It is proud of its green policies. At the same time, it remains one of the world’s largest exporters of gas and oil. It recently decided to expand exploration into the Arctic Circle. If one of the richest countries in the world baulks at implementing climate policies that will crimp its income, just how will it be possible to convince Mexico, Gabon, Nigeria and Russia to act? The median income in Nigeria is 1/20th of the real median income in Norway. Climate activists “need to think much more seriously about the trade-off between economic growth and climate-change control”. The need to act on climate may be urgent,…

Nicolas Rabener and his team at FactorResearch analysed the returns on US stocks during four different inflation regimes between 1947 and 2021. Their analysis confirmed what we’ve noted here before: equities are fine in deflation and mild inflation (below 5%), but once you get above 5%, real returns deteriorate; above 10%, they barely keep up with inflation. But that average disguises the fact that some sectors do better than others. The worst-hit “sectors were those that dealt directly with consumers” – everyone from retailers to consumer-goods suppliers saw their costs rise, yet struggled to pass these costs on to consumers. So who did best? As you might expect, suppliers of raw materials. Miners of all types, oil and steel producers, chemicals manufacturers – even if you strip out the 1970s…

British entrepreneurs in the UK continue to launch businesses at a record pace. Data from Companies House shows that 772,000 new businesses registered during 2020 – a 13% increase on 2019 – and this trend appears to have continued over the first six months of this year. Preliminary data suggests that the first half of 2021 registered a 4% increase on a year ago. The surge in start-up activity largely reflects the pandemic’s impact on employment. As people have lost jobs – or been furloughed for an extended period – they have launched new ventures of their own. In practice, that means many of these new businesses will be run by entrepreneurs with relatively little experience, potentially driving failure rates higher. Already, some 20% of businesses fail in their first…

Pharmaceuticals group Sareum Holdings (Aim: SAR) says it has raised £1m “courtesy of a high-net-worth individual” to help finance drug development, notes Liam Roche on UK Investor Magazine. The company is using the money to improve its autoimmune-disease therapies. Sareum also produced positive results from its government-funded Covid-19 research project, which is looking into the “immune overreaction” to coronavirus and other viral infections. Investors are “clearly galvanised” by recent developments: the stock has soared by 1,046% over the last 12 months.…

Sir Roger Tichborne was born in Hampshire in 1829, the son of a wealthy landowner. He spent most of his childhood in Paris, went to school at Stonyhurst College, then served in the British Army. While on leave he became attracted to his cousin, but the relationship was frowned upon and he was forbidden from seeing her. In frustration he quit the army and went on a tour of South America. While there, a Jamaica-bound ship he was travelling on was lost, and Tichborne was presumed to have died in the shipwreck at the age of 25. His mother refused to accept his death and advertised widely in Australian newspapers after hearing rumours that he had made his way there. In 1866, an Australian butcher, named Thomas Castro, came forward,…

An Ugly Truth Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang Bridge Street Press, £20 There have been so many books about Facebook that “I’ve lost count”, says John Naughton in The Observer. Most of them are by so-called “insiders” – early investors, friends of Mark Zuckerberg, or ex-employees “with a bad conscience”. They cannot, in the end, avoid being just one person’s perspective. By contrast, An Ugly Truth, by journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, aims to take a broader look at the company and its global impact. Frenkel and Kang have interviewed 400-odd people, including former and current employees, investors and advisers, and lawyers and activists who have been “fighting the company for a long time”. Drawing on Kang’s expertise in technology and regulatory policy, and…

• For 17 years, TV song contest The X Factor was “the golden goose that kept laying”, says Alison Boshoff in the Daily Mail. It was an “all-conquering juggernaut of popular entertainment” and made panel judge and producer Simon Cowell (pictured) “very, very rich”. Not only was he paid by ITV, but Cowell also received revenues from the pop stars the show created and from the 150 versions of the show in other countries. Cowell had been netting up to £50m a year. The XFactor has now been axed in favour of family-friendly game shows. “Not that Simon is losing out.” His company, Syco Entertainment, is behind one of the new shows, Walk The Line, and Cowell has also landed a big deal to launch a sort of US version…

£15,499 The cost of entering the Highland Kings Ultra, a luxury four-day ultra-marathon covering 120 miles on the west coast of Scotland, says BBC News. As part of the package, runners will have access to butlers, hydrotherapy pools, speed boats and Michelin-starred chefs. $200 The price of the world’s most expensive French fries. Serendipity3, a restaurant in New York, has set a Guinness World Record for its Crème de la Crème Pommes Frites, which are blanched in Dom Pérignon and served with truffles and edible gold on a crystal plate. £250m The budget for the new British-built “national flagship”, which will be the “jewel in the crown” of Britain’s national shipbuilding strategy, defence secretary Ben Wallace said last week. The competition for contractors will run to the end of October.…

The Ferrari 250 GTO is “a collector’s dream”, says the Times: fewer than 40 were made. But the car has “proved to be a source of accelerating legal wrangles” for the children of the late French luxury-goods tycoon Pierre Bardinon. France’s highest court has ruled his eldest son Patrick, 64, was wrong to sell the “Mona Lisa of Ferraris” to a Taiwanese businessman for $48m in 2014 without permission from his siblings, Jean-François, 62, and Anne, 67. Patrick claims that after he nearly died in a crash in Germany, his father gave him the car as a gift, but his siblings said he had taken it “one morning before daybreak” and sold it in the US without their knowledge. The court ordered Patrick to pay them €52.3m, representing the auction…

Are Chinese stocks “uninvestable”? asks Farah Elbahrawy on Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs says its clients are wondering whether they should pull their money out after Beijing broadened a clampdown on businesses it blames “for increasing inequality and financial risk”. The resulting market volatility has pushed “key stock indexes to the brink of a bear market”. Investors wake up Investment trusts focused on China have suffered “average losses of a third” since a recent peak in February, notes David Brenchley in The Times. The benchmark CSI 300 index is down by more than 6% in 2021. “Chinese regulatory interference… is turning out to be one of the big stories of 2021,” says Russ Mould of AJ Bell. What’s next? Keep an eye on “highly indebted” property developer China Evergrande. The shares have…

“We think that ten-year [US Treasury bond] yields are too low... yields do not appropriately reflect the strong US economy, or the Fed’s stance... investors are fitting a narrative of excessive pessimism to lower yields [that doesn’t bear] scrutiny... take the concern about the Delta variant. In the UK... hospitalisations remained low as cases spiked, the economy reopened anyway, and ultimately cases have started receding, suggesting overstated downside risks from Covid-19... We think that the Treasury market will price in a faster pace of rate hikes, resulting in higher US ten-year yields, consistent with a stronger economy... Which catalysts will drive yields higher?... Strong economic data, starting with the July payroll report... could kick-start a move towards higher yields... [A Federal] infrastructure package... would further support a push to higher…

Three to buy Carlsberg The Daily Telegraph The craft-beer movement was seen as a threat to the “drab monoliths” such as Carlsberg. But the movement has revitalised the beer market. Carlsberg had “lost its way” but the CEO, Cees ‘t Hart, brought in six years ago has turned the company around, updating the firm’s infrastructure and dividing the portfolio in two. One half comprises premium products such as craft beer, while the other focuses on fast-growing emerging markets. Expect double-digit profit growth in the next few years. Dkr1,169.50 Weiss Korean Opportunity Fund The Mail on Sunday Many Korean firms have voting and non-voting shares, a structure designed to ensure founders “retained control of their businesses” once they floated. Non-voting shares pay higher dividends to make up for this, but still…

• Commission-free US brokerage Robinhood has built its business on helping millions of US investors lift stocks “to the moon”, says the Financial Times. However, when it floated last Thursday, the favour “was not returned”. The shares fell by 8.4 % from the initial $32bn market valuation, “one of the worst-ever starts” for a flotation of this magnitude. No wonder: the company’s rise has been pockmarked by “crisis and scandal”. As a result, many in the investing world are not convinced that its business can withstand “growing pressure” from regulators, or that the US public will “keep trading once the pandemic is over”. Keep in mind, however, that the first few days after listing “aren’t final judgments on a stock”, says Telis Demos in The Wall Street Journal. Facebook and…

This will be a big year for corporate profits. Last week Apple, Microsoft and Google-owner Alphabet reported combined quarterly profits of more than $50bn. Amazon chipped in with another $7bn for the quarter. At Barclays, profits quadrupled and the dividend was up; HSBC this week also reported astrong increase in earnings. And all the main mining companies are minting money as commodity prices recover, as are the oil majors. In the second quarter of this year UK dividends rose by a remarkable 51% and right now they show little sign of slowing down. Investors were expecting companies to make lots of money as they recovered from the pandemic – and they have been proved spectacularly right. Don’t provoke more anger Nothing wrong with that. Companies exist to make profits. But…

Shares in Big Oil – BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Total – collapsed at the start of the pandemic and have remained out of favour even as the market recovers. BP and Shell (both down 35% since the beginning of 2020) are especially weak, but Eni, Exxon, Chevron, Conoco and Total (down 15%- 25%) are also lagging, despite oil rebounding to where it was three years ago. The evident fear among many investors is that these firms operate in a dying industry. The world will move away from oil and they will be out of a job. This is a very real uncertainty – but as profits rebound, it’s worth recalling how much cash these firms can generate and what their options are. Running down…

My categorisation of Witan Investment Trust (LSE: WTAN), the £2bn global investment fund, as a “lame duck” at the start of the year brought an immediate response from its lead manager, Andrew Bell. I had written that its investment record, a 4% return over one year and 15% over five, was dismal, it had been too slow in reducing a heavy UK exposure and that the “fund-of-funds” investment model had proved inflexible. Bell admitted to being “wrongfooted” by the pandemic but explained that they had taken early action, allocating 14% of the trust to two new “quality/growth” managers. He expressed confidence that the reduced but still large UK exposure was starting to work in the trust’s favour and was keen to avoid being whipsawed by making radical changes. The trust…

A virulent new variant takes hold Larry Elliott The Guardian Alongside variants of the virus that has upended global economies, “a new variant of global capitalism” has come into being, says Larry Elliott. For decades, the “Austrian variant” – characterised by small states, non-interventionism, free trade and low taxes – was dominant. It replaced the Keynesian variant of the 1970s because it was seen as an answer to the challenges of the time: inflation, weak corporate profitability, loss of business dynamism. The Austrian variant is now giving way to something new again. Governments of the left, right and centre have, during the pandemic, intervened in their economies in ways that would have been “unthinkable” two years ago: paying the wages of furloughed workers; keeping businesses afloat through grants and loans;…

conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com Prediction markets allow you to bet on the outcome of future events: Iowa Electronic Markets, for example, takes bets on elections. Rising or falling prices can then be used as a measure of the likelihood of particular outcomes. Such markets took a “serious public relations hit” in the early 2000s, says Timothy Taylor, when critics baulked at the thought of profiting from adverse outcomes – a project within the US defence department sought to investigate whether prediction markets could help guide policymaking, but was dropped when there was an outcry over the idea of selling “terrorism futures”. Since then, prediction markets have taken a back seat. Now, they’re back. A post on the Lawfare blog reports on various experiments under way in academia, US intelligence and the corporate world.…

Every few years a bull market comes along in a niche, but strategically important commodity. I’ve seen it in cobalt, lithium, graphite, phosphate, uranium, rare-earth metals and many others. Get the timing right and you can make a great deal of money. The story is almost always the same. Years of underinvestment has led to a shortage of supply of the commodity. Government stockpiles are exhausted. And now, suddenly, the commodity is essential to some new technology. Cue bull market. The trick is to identify tomorrow’s commodity today. With this in mind, I have, for a couple of years now been beating the drum about helium. I first recommended it on these pages in late 2018. Now the party is getting started. We have had the aperitifs – but the…

Consumers’ group Which reports that Britons have lost £2.3bn to fraud over the past year. The number of cases in the UK (excluding Scotland) surged by 33% in the year to April 2021. The biggest jump was in online-purchase scams, with cases up by 65%: fake websites duped shoppers into paying for goods they never receive. The average loss per incident was £674. While purchase fraud is the most common type of scam, it is not the most costly. The surge in cryptocurrencies has helped fuel a rise in investment scams. Which reports that an average of £25,496 per incident was lost to investment fraud over the past year – a total loss of £535m. Modern scams can be very elaborate. They often feature multiple stages to win the victim’s…

• Are you underclaiming for business expenses with the taxman? Most small-business owners underestimate what they can set against their tax bill, new research suggests. A survey of more than 1,200 small business owners by The Accountancy Partnership found that 81% don’t understand what qualifies as a legitimate business expense. Almost a fifth are underclaiming by more than £1,000 a year. You can claim avery broad range of expenses as part of your annual tax return. The main examples include expenses incurred on your business premises, such asrent, utility bills and insurance, as well as vehicle costs and mobile-phone bills. But other items often get overlooked – work clothing, for example, is an allowable expense, as is food and drink in some circumstances. Check the rules to be sure you’re…

Aboom in demand for cleaning products bolstered consumer-goods group Reckitt Benckiser’s (LSE: RKT) shares last year. But they have sagged in recent months as the cleaning frenzy has abated and commodity-cost pressures have intensified, says Alistair Gray in the Financial Times. Like-for-like sales in the three months to June 30 dipped by 1% from a year ago, while operating-profit margins slipped by 2.9% in the first half of 2021. On the plus side, sales of Durex condoms have picked up now that restrictions have eased. The shares have declined by 30% in a year.…

2019 Dalrymple, Pinot Noir, Pipers River, Tasmania, Australia £172.20 for six bottles (£28.70 each), vinvm.co.uk; £32.99, flagshipwines.co.uk; £29.95, fieldandfawcett.co.uk; £31.95, nywines.co.uk As every year passes Dalrymple makes finer and finer wines. The 2011 vintage of this very wine made my 100 Best Australian Wines Report, back in 2013, and beautiful wines from this estate have popped up four times since. Every time they gather more intensity, flair and accuracy. Tassie’s climate is perfect for both elite pinot noir and chardonnay and over the last decade or so the wines have graduated from being diverting and enjoyable to seriously collectable and globally relevant. Winemaker Peter Caldwell is a brilliant chap, humble, great fun, honest, and aware of just how bright the future is for his winery. As he says, “What I’ve…

We created the Doom index to sound the alarm ahead of the next crisis. It tracks 12 key indicators to detect when there’s stress in the economy and markets are overheating. What is it signalling now? There’s good news, and bad news. “The stockmarket still appears to be way ahead of the economy” The good news? The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) Manufacturing index, a great indicator of economic activity, came in at 60.6. Areading above 50 signals expansion. The US Railcar Utilisation measure tells us the amount of goods moving throughout the economy. It was up a percentage point from the previous quarter. Nonfarm Payrolls, which measures the number of workers in the US, excluding farm workers, and accounts for approximately 80% of US business sectors contributing to GDP,…

The sale of her production company means actress Reese Witherspoon (pictured) is set for a major payday, says The Times. The Oscar-winning star is to sell Hello Sunshine, which makes hit HBO drama Big Little Lies, to private equity giant Blackstone in a deal that values the firm at $900m. Blackstone will spend over $500m buying out some Hello Sunshine investors, while Witherspoon will retain a stake after the deal closes. Spirits firms will be toasting soaring sales after Britain became “a nation of amateur mixologists”, says MailOnline. Data from Waitrose revealed sales of “trendy Italian spirit” Aperol jumped 148% in July compared to the same time last year. Pimms sales also jumped by over 100%, and sales of Vermouth are up 64% as those working from home “wind down…

One of the main beneficiaries of Covid-19, apart from Big Tech, is Barcelona-based Fluidra. It is the world’s biggest provider of swimming pools and related accessories, ranging from pumps to water-testing products. Pool ownership is on the rise amid the increase in global wealth and construction, and the pandemic has given the trend an additional fillip. Travel bans and heatwaves have increased demand, says Wirtschaftswoche. In 2021 sales are expected to rise by 25% to €1.87bn while net income is set to more than double to €220m. The global market is fragmented, with 1,000 companies comprising more than 50% of it and Fluidra 17%. Ongoing growth will allow the group to keep snapping up rivals.…

AstraZeneca is “reviewing the future of the Covid-19 vaccines business”, says Farah Ghouri in City AM – and could decide to exit vaccines altogether. Its jab helped boost overall sales by almost a quarter to $15.5bn in the first half of 2021. But AstraZeneca has suffered a “series of setbacks”, including “being sued” by the European Union over jab deliveries. It’s not surprising that AstraZeneca “is now weighing up whether it wants a future in vaccines at all”, says Hannah Boland in The Daily Telegraph. After all, the vaccine, which was developed in conjunction with Oxford University, has been the victim of European “envy” of “British scientific expertise” and “animosity over Brexit”. For example, in February French president Emmanuel Macron falsely claimed that it was “quasi-ineffective” in older people. At…

The “deadly drone attack” on an Israeli-linked tanker last week has raised tensions in the Persian Gulf, says Arsalan Shahla and Gwen Ackerman on Bloomberg. Israel, the US and the UK blame Iran for the attack. The strike off the coast of Oman represents a major escalation of previous attacks on shipping as it was the first to kill crew members, including a Briton. Already the three countries have vowed a “collective response” – Prime Minister Boris Johnson called it an “unacceptable and outrageous attack on commercial shipping” – although they have not made clear what this will entail. The attack represents not just“state-sponsored murder on the high seas”, but also a “patent threat to the safe passage of merchant shipping”, which therefore makes it a “direct challenge to the…

• Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Dublin-based airline Ryanair, “is in sight of landing a €100m payday” despite the business racking up “huge” €1.1bn losses over the last 15 months, due to the pandemic, says The Daily Telegraph. O’Leary (pictured) will be entitled to a bonus of ten million shares so long as the company’s share price hits €21 between 2021 and 2024, from around €16.75 at present. The shares have almost doubled since March 2020. • The potential £100m payout for Wizz Air’s CEO Jozsef Varadi if the Budapest-based airline’s shares climb from £47 to £120 over the next five years has been approved in a “controversial vote”, says the Financial Times. Two-thirds of votes approved the plan, but the total votes represented only 16% of the issued share…

According to a concept called the time value of money, cash that you’re promised in the future is worth less than cash received today, because you can invest today’s money so that it grows tomorrow, or spend it on a larger quantity of goods than you could in the future (assuming that inflation and interest rates are positive, which is not always the case). For example, if you have £1 and can invest it at an interest rate of 5%, then in a year you will have £1.05. This means the future value of £1 in one year is £1.05. Put it the other way around and the present value of £1 received in one year is £0.952. This is because £0.952 is the amount that would grow to £1,…

Activist investor Cat Rock Capital Management is urging Just Eat Takeaway, the largest food-delivery company in Europe, to consider “urgent action to prop up its share price” and avoid a hostile takeover, says Tim Bradshaw in the Financial Times. The hedge fund, which owns 4.7% of Just Eat’s shares, wants the group to consider divestments or a merger with a larger rival. It says the 27% drop in Just Eat’s share price this year is a result of “broken communication” with investors. Cat Rock is particularly irritated by Just Eat CEO Jitse Groen’s tweets, says Graham Ruddick in The Times. Though “pretty entertaining”, Groen is notorious for clashing with people on Twitter. He has also accused analysts of failing to do basic maths.…

“Good on ya, ladies. I’ll be happy to pay your fines for you. Keep it up.” Popstar Pink (pictured) to the Norwegian Olympic beach handball team after the ruling body fined them for wearing “improper clothing”: shorts instead of bikini bottoms, quoted in Metro “Fifteen years ago they would give us $25m and say we can make $50m at the box office and then the DVD sales would come. Not any more.” Actor Matt Damon on the ascendancy of streaming platforms putting cinemas under pressure, quoted in The Sunday Times “Liking money like I like it is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.” Salvador Dali, quoted in Forbes “The Twitter-educated youth should sit with surviving traders sipping aged brandy, shut up, and learn.” Statistician and financial writer Nassim…

quillette.com In recent years, journalists and environmentalists have been alarming us with talk of an “insect apocalypse”, says Jon Entine – bees and other insects are being wiped out, they say, which will lead to ecological collapse and famine. Is the claim true? In a word, no. It all began with a study from a German entomological society, which claimed that flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 76% over just 26 years. The paper was seized on byjournalists, but met with widespread scepticism and criticism among entomologists. Similar claims about honeybees met with a similar fate – news outlets have been sheepishly rowing back on claims that there ever was any “worldwide honeybee catastrophe”. Scientists have spent much of the succeeding years trying to calm the hysteria.…

Last April, when coronavirus was tearing around the globe and most Western economies were tightly shut down, we argued in MoneyWeek that central-bank and government policies designed to tackle the crisis were likely to result in inflation. What with rampant unemployment, a huge (if short) recession, and oil prices turning negative, you could have been forgiven for being sceptical. Yet here we are, a year and a bit later, and prices everywhere are indeed picking up. Notably, inflation in the US is at multi-decade highs regardless of the precise inflation index you use to measure it (in June, consumer prices were up by 5.4% year-on-year), while oil – which you literally couldn’t give away in April last year – is back around the $70-a-barrel mark. Yet no one seems too…

There is good news for self-employed workers still struggling with the financial impact of Covid-19. The government has now opened applications for the fifth – and final – round of the self-employment income support scheme (SEISS). You could be entitled to a grant of up to £7,500. The eligibility criteria for the SEISS are broadly unchanged, and HM Revenue & Customs will look at your previous tax returns to check you meet the basic requirements. These are that you traded in both the 2019/2020 tax year – and submitted your self-assessment tax return for that period on or before 2 March 2021 – and the 2020/2021 tax year. “You should apply for SEISS online by 30 September” Further key conditions are that at least 50% of your total income must…

The approach I take to managing the Fidelity China Special Situations trust is to focus on undervalued companies that have good long-term growth prospects and have been underestimated by the wider market. The Chinese market is the perfect hunting ground for such stocks. It is broad with the winners still growing rapidly, and there are plenty of hidden gems that fly under the radars of local and international analysts. I hone in on opportunities in small and medium-sized companies, where lower levels of research by the market leads to greater potential for mispricing, but I also invest in large or mega-cap companies, including state-owned enterprises, where mispricing appears. China’s capital markets are increasingly dynamic, with new firms coming to market all the time. We are finding more opportunities to take…