Indholdsfortegnelse for 1142 i MoneyWeek

“Two years ago... shares in GameStop, a struggling video-game retailer, hit an all-time high of $483... up from around $5 [in January 2021]. Retail traders co-ordinated in a Reddit forum and snapped up shares... this [mania] seemed different: it was enabled by new technology... the GameStop crew... pumped up prices for [meme stocks]... such as AMC, a cinema chain, and Bed, Bath & Beyond, a home-goods retailer... Last year was... rough on the meme-portfolio... 2023 will be a reckoning with reality. A slowing economy is going to break many of the companies meme-stockers profess to adore... What, then, is left of the retail era? Individual traders are more important [now]... When the stockmarket rallies, it is [still] faddish favourites, like GameStop... leading the charge. Perhaps what will endure longest, though,…

Last week Meta’s shares surged by 18% after CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) promised a $40bn share buyback at the struggling social-media company, says Gareth Corfield in The Telegraph. The bounce came even though Meta’s sales shrank by 1% to $116.6bn last year, with profits down by 41% to $23.2bn. Performance was dented by a “costly round” of redundancies, with 11,000 people losing their jobs. Heavy losses on Zuckerberg’s metaverse project, with the reality labs division losing $4.3bn in the final quarter, also drained resources. Zuckerberg is finally starting to listen to long-suffering shareholders, says Lex in the Financial Times. He has cut back proposed capital spending to between $30bn and $33bn from an earlier estimate of $34bn-$37bn, and also plans to “control operating expenses”. But he needs to do more,…

Gambling in Las Vegas and Macau is enjoying a post-pandemic upswing, says Mario Gabelli of Gamco Investors. Gambling-resort operators Wynn Resorts and Caesars Entertainment are well placed to take advantage ($93.57; $44.11), . Textron is enjoying solid demand for its business jets and Bell helicopters. It has also been awarded a US government contract to develop the replacement for the Black Hawk helicopter, which gives it exposure to rising global defence spending. Competitors have filed an appeal, but if it keeps the contract then the “stock could go up sharply” ($725). The diversification of supply chains out of China bodes well for Mexico, so there should be upside at local cable-television play Grupo Televisa. The company also has a stake in Spanish-language TV on the US side of the…

● GSK’s CEO Emma Walmsley (pictured) temporarily silenced her critics when she spun off the firm’s consumer healthcare business as Haleon, says Alex Brummer in The Daily Mail. “But as a relatively small life-sciences company, one cannot but feel that GSK is vulnerable.” The group has a market cap of £58.4bn, compared with £159bn for AstraZeneca. GSK has strengths: HIV, respiratory treatments and vaccines. Shingrix for shingles has been a big winner, with £3bn in sales last year, and an RSV vaccine is the “great hope for the future”. It still lacks heft in oncology, but there is potential for its purchase of Tesaro in 2019 to pay off. “Taking treatments from the laboratory through regulatory approvals to the market is a laborious process. Investors need to show patience.” ●…

The amount of debt that’s built up across the global economy over the past decade will cause a market crisis on a par with the Great Depression,says Mark Spitznagel, the founder of “tail risk” hedge fund Universea Investments. “It is objectively the greatest tinderbox-timebomb in financial history – greater than the late 1920s, and likely with similar market consequences,” Spitznagel writes in his latest investor letter, reports Bloomberg. Central bankers kept interests rates too long for too long, leading to asset price inflation and excessive borrowing, says Spitznagel, a long-time critic of the policies that most of the world followed after the global financial crisis. “If this credit bubble ever pops, it’s going to be the most catastrophic market failure that anyone has ever read about,” he told Bloomberg last…

glineq.blogspot.com Netflix’s new documentary on Ponzi fraudster Bernie Madoff is excellent, says Branko Milanovic. But although it is good at showing how he carried out his fraud, it doesn’t explain why he did it. To steal the money, you might say, but not so: Madoff was already wealthy and did not need the money. The true reason, alluded to in the documentary, might lie in Madoff’s desire to be “loved, even adored”, and to “achieve that devotion” by delivering his investor-friends returns they could never obtain elsewhere. “The cause of the fraud thus lies in psychology” – and not just in Madoff’s. Why did the rich and famous clamour to invest with him? The answer is greed, and not just among the rich and famous, either: hundreds of medium and…

■ Britain’s fund managers have been “under siege from the rise of passive investment and competition from retail platforms”, says the Financial Times. Now they are “under assault from falling markets”. Net outflows from open-ended funds reached £50.1bn, the highest since the Investment Association, the industry’s trade body, began keeping records two decades ago. Retail investors withdrew £25.7bn, including £12bn from funds that invest in UK stocks. Net retail sales of UK equity funds have been negative every year since the Brexit referendum, with total outflows of £33.6bn. “Scale is strength” in the funds business, so shrinking assets are a problem for UK managers, which are far smaller than US giants such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Overall, 2022 was “a calamitous year for the UK’s fund management industry”, says Laith…

In my last column, I looked at Supermarket Income Reit (LSE: SUPR), a real-estate investment trust that appeared cheap relative to its high-quality asset base, inflation-linked income streams, strong balance sheet, discount to net asset value (NAV) and 5.7% forward dividend yield. This time I’m going to look at another Reit that appears cheap, Industrials Reit (LSE: MLI). As I noted previously, not all Reits are created equal. While the sector as a whole looks a bargain today, with most companies trading at a significant discount to NAV, some of these stocks are trading at a large discount for a good reason, be it high levels of debt, poor quality assets or bad management. Investors therefore need to pay very careful attention to the underlying assets in each Reit’s portfolio.…

Amid mounting speculation that the government plans to raise the state pension age sooner than expected, some savers may be overlooking a crucial change that is definitely on the way. From 2028, the earliest age at which you may access your private pension savings will rise from 55 to 57. Since the pension freedom reforms of 2016, which gave savers more flexibility over how to use their pension savings, the principle that the cash is available to people from age 55 onwards – known as the normal minimum pension age (NMPA) – has become well established and widely understood. However, that rule was based on the state pension age at the time, which was 65. The age at which you can claim your state pension has already increased to 66,…

Inflation may finally be starting to peak, while the looming recession is looking a little less daunting than feared a few months ago. However, things are by no means easy, with the combination of sky-high energy costs and below-inflation pay rises still biting. No wonder then that discount retailers such as Lidl and Aldi have done brisk business over the past few months. However, people’s search for a bargain doesn’t stop there. According to YouGov, the opinion pollster, a fifth of parents are now buying food from budget retailers where food is not even the main offering. One of the stores that has benefited from this is B&M European Value Retail (LSE: BME), which saw its like-for-like sales in the UK jump by an annual 6.4% in the final three…

European markets have started the year on a positive footing. While the energy crisis affected sentiment throughout 2022, warmer temperatures and well-filled gas storage facilities across Europe have now tempered anxiety. The reopening of the Chinese economy could also provide a fresh boost for Europe’s export-orientated economy. The renewed optimism is reflected in recent data, with the European STOXX benchmark index outperforming America’s S&P 500 by more than 18 percentage points since 1 September. Yet we believe European valuations remain compelling, particularly compared with the US. As a result, European equities could now offer an attractive entry point for long-term investors looking to diversify. “LVMH’s sales barely slipped during the global financial crisis” Resilient luxury-goods group When looking at European equities, we focus on well-governed companies with a long history…

Competitors in a TV show based on Squid Game (pictured) – the hit Korean series about “sadistic rich people who entice people in debt to suffer for their amusement with the promise of a cash prize” – didn’t enjoy the experience, says Vice. Squid Game: The Challenge, which is being filmed in Bedfordshire, offers 456 contestants the chance to win a $4.56m prize in elaborate versions of children’s games (with the distinction that, unlike in Squid Game, the challenges aren’t lethal). But eliminated participants who spoke to sources including The Sun, Variety and Vice complain of “chaos and disorganisation”, players collapsing from “cold and fatigue” in freezing conditions, and a belief that games were “rigged” to eliminate them. The producers, which include Netflix, reject the claims. “Any suggestion that the…

The Treasury has launched a consultation on plans to regulate the cryptocurrency industry, says Ryan Browne for CNBC. The government wants to create a “robust world-first regime strengthening rules around the lending of cryptoassets”. The hope is to turn post-Brexit London into a “leader in crypto and blockchain technology on the global stage”. Last year’s repeated scandals in the crypto industry mean that seeking to become a “global crypto hub” feels “a bit like volunteering as the landing zone for the fiery wreckage of a plane crash”, says Helen Thomas in the Financial Times. If anything, last year’s crypto implosion has probably induced more realism at the Treasury, ending the “worst of the political salivating” over the industry. The proposed framework “looks broader and tougher than expected”. The UK financial…

It’s boom time again in America’s Permian Basin, says Myles McCormick in the Financial Times. While the US shale sector as a whole is struggling to ramp up production, output from the “vast hydrocarbon trove” that extends across Texas and New Mexico hit a record high of 5.6 million barrels per day (mbpd) in 2022 – “almost half of all the oil produced in the US”. The number of drilling rigs deployed in the region is up 20% year on year, while generous wages in the sector have created acute staff shortages in the retail and hospitality industries. Production in the state of New Mexico alone has now eclipsed the entire oil output of Mexico, where the oil industry is managed by cash-strapped state operator Pemex.…

America’s Newmont is hoping to secure the biggest deal in the history of the gold-mining sector. It has offered $17bn in shares to buy Newcrest Mining, Australia’s largest listed gold producer, says Rhiannon Hoyle in The Wall Street Journal. The offer comes after Newcrest’s directors rejected a previous offer as being too low. The deal “illustrates how producers are seeking to do deals to shore up their gold reserves, cut costs and improve returns for shareholders”. Newmont is clearly attracted by the fact that “Newcrest’s network of low-cost mines are some of the world’s largest”, and are expected to produce “between 2.1 million and 2.4 million troy ounces of gold in the year”. You can see what’s in it for Newmont, says Lex in the Financial Times. The deal “would…

A national-security trial that is in effect “a trial of the territory’s pro-democracy movement itself” began in Hong Kong this week, says The Guardian. A group of 47 former politicians, activists, campaigners and community workers are accused of “conspiracy to commit subversion” over the holding of unofficial pre-election primaries in July 2020 that aimed to select the best candidates to run against pro-Beijing candidates. The accused face life in prison. The trial shows how quickly the national security law, which was imposed by Beijing in 2020, has transformed life in Hong Kong, says Tiffany May in The New York Times. The “one country, two systems” pledge that guaranteed the city a high degree of autonomy after Britain gave it back to China has been abandoned, and more than 200 people…

Last year wasn’t a good one for most investors. The MSCI World index lost more than 7% in sterling terms, while the MSCI Emerging Markets index fell more than 9%. Still, at least one group seems ready to slap themselves on the back. In the past few weeks, there have been several stories about how active funds finally outperformed passive funds in some sectors – notably large-cap US stocks. This shows that active managers can do a better job of protecting your wealth in downturns, say advocates of active management. I’m a little cautious about over-interpreting these numbers. Measuring the performance of active funds against index funds is more subjective than it sounds: you have to choose which passive funds should be compared to which active funds. A couple of…

China needs to win back business Minxin Pei Bloomberg Chinese vice-premier Liu He left a “strong impression” at Davos with assurances that “China is back”, says Minxin Pei. Few Western CEOs can “afford to miss out on China’s anticipated 5.5% GDP growth in 2023”. However, Chinese entrepreneurs, who have “suffered years of increasingly statist policies and arbitrary crackdowns”, are the ones who matter, as their scepticism could “derail” the recovery. China’s private sector plays a “far more crucial role” in the economy than foreign or even state-owned firms. In 2019, private firms contributed more than 60% of China’s GDP and invested $4.57trn in fixed assets, “dwarfing” the $138bn China received in foreign direct investment. To win back confidence, the Chinese Communist Party should immediately issue an official document pledging support…

economist.com During lockdown, waiting times at driving-test centres rose to more than six months, so “enterprising sorts” created a secondary market, says The Economist’s Bagehot columnist. They built online bots to “hoover up scarce slots”, then sold them on. Sovietologists will recognise the phenomenon. Propaganda portrayed the Soviet command economy as totally centrally planned, but a flourishing “second economy” of capitalist entrepreneurship operated on the black market, lubricated by blat, or favours. “In a land of queues, getting hold of a fridge, theatre tickets or a better apartment relied on a network of contacts, cunning and petty bribery.” This system has arrived in Britain. “Universal public services” is the closest thing Britain has to a state ideology and, just as in Soviet Russia, the reality is falling short of the…

In my last column, I urged investors to be cautious about real estate and private equity. Still, while it may be early for bottom fishing, at some point attention will turn to sectors that have posted huge losses. Both of these are trading at large discounts, making them likely candidates. So is all the pessimism fully justified? For real estate, news flow isn’t looking hopeful. For example, AEW UK Reit (which is about 50% industrial property, with the rest in warehouses, retail and offices) is one of the first to report each quarter, and its latest update showed a 13.9% drop in net asset value (NAV). All the headwinds you’d expect were there, yet the fund is only trading at a sub-5% discount. Transaction volumes have declined in the past…

“Demand will continue to grow in the medical, tech and aerospace sectors” Liquid helium is the coldest substance on Earth. It is also the only material that never exists as a solid, only as a cryogenic liquid and as a gas. Helium is the second-most common element in the universe after hydrogen. The problem is that most of it is up there, and down here there is a shortage. On Earth it is relatively rare: 0.00052% by volume in the atmosphere. The global market for bulk liquid helium (how it is usually transported, if not as a compressed gas) is hardly huge – it’s worth around $3bn. Annual global demand is estimated at around six billion cubic feet (Bcf). The price can be hard to establish because there is no…

If your local bank or building society branch has closed recently – or intends to close soon – you are not alone. Thousands of bank branches have closed in recent years. Lloyds and Halifax recently announced they would close another 40 this year, while Barclays plans to shut another 15. Last year, HSBC said it would close 114 branches from April 2023. Consumer group Which noted last year that almost half of the UK’s bank branches had closed since 2015. Moreover, almost a quarter of ATMs that are free to use have vanished since 2018. The banks say demand has fallen as more and more customers do their banking online. Nevertheless, some people rely on their bank branch to withdraw and deposit cash (including small businesses), some customers struggle to…

Savers invested in certain types of pension funds through their occupational pension schemes may soon face higher fees following a government review of the auto-enrolment system. At present, occupational pension funds are not allowed to levy an annual fee above 0.75%, a maximum set to ensure that providers’ charges do not erode the value of people’s savings. However, ministers have announced that performance-related charges are to be exempted from this cap. In theory, that means the investment managers who offer pension funds to occupational schemes would be able to make additional charges above the 0.75% cap, assuming that they hit pre-agreed returns targets. The aim of the reforms is to encourage more providers to offer funds that invest in areas such as the green economy and infrastructure, where the government…

This weekend the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs will square off in the State Farm stadium in Glendale, Arizona, in the Super Bowl match to determine the best American football team. However, while millions of Americans will tune in, they will also be looking at the advertisements during the television broadcast, which are estimated to cost up to $7m for a 30-second slot. While some advertisements, such as Apple Mac’s “1984” (which had its first national airing during the 1984 Super Bowl), have achieved legendary status, the impact on the share price of the companies involved is more controversial. Some traders argue that the publicity for the firm buying a Super Bowl advertisement can only be good for the share price, as it makes more investors aware of…

Shares in educational publisher Pearson (LSE: PSON) have soared, says the Financial Times. Underlying sales rose by 5% in 2022, with adjusted operating profit increasing by 11% to £455m. Pearson’s CEO, Andy Bird, has steered the firm away from a dwindling textbooks business, emphasising instead the provision of digital services to students and the workplace training market. Pearson operates a popular software subscription service called Pearson+, offering students access to a library of Pearson’s textbooks for $14.99 a month. The stock has risen by 51% in a year.…

John Neff was born in Wauseon, Ohio, in 1931. After leaving school he worked in a range of factory jobs before briefly joining his father in the industrial supply business. He spent two years in the navy, then returned to college, graduating from the University of Toledo before working as a securities analyst at the National City Bank of Cleveland while doing a masters degree in banking and finance. In 1963 he joined Wellington Management, acting as portfolio manager for its Windsor Fund for the next three decades, until his retirement in 1995. What was the trade? In the 1970s and early 1980s, the major US car companies became complacent, allowing Japanese rivals to steal market share. With the US economy then in the midst of a recession, investors were…

A car doesn’t have to be vintage to fetch a high price at auction. Last week, Bugatti sold its last purely petrol-powered car with RM Sotheby’s in Paris. The Chiron Profilée sold for €9.8m, a new auction record-high price for a new car, beating the €8.3m paid for a Ferrari LaFerrari Aperta in 2017. This year has also seen a new auction record-high price set for a car dating from before World War I. A 1912 Simplex 50HP 5 Passenger Torpedo Tourer (pictured) fetched $4.8m with Bonhams in Arizona at the end of January. The auction house advertised the 111-year-old car in its catalogue as having a “massive four-cylinder, T-head engine, with power getting to the rear wheels via a prodigious pair of chains, all in a svelte and sporty…

Gold has risen 18% from its level in November 2022, and that has got speculators excited. It has piqued our interest too. It looks as though the yellow metal is poised to break out to new all-time highs above $2,000. But if you measure your wealth in gold, a rise or a drop in the price is (almost) meaningless. Your wealth is unchanged. Your ounces of gold only multiply if you sell them. Real wealth comes from providing real wealth – goods and services – to others. All honest people do it that way, whether selling their time or lending their property. An investor has an asset (money) that other people can use. He lends it out for interest, or he participates in the profits. Those profits are the difference…

“India is a vast, vibrant country packed with talented people,” says Lex in the Financial Times. Yet suspicions of “financial chicanery” have caused it to “undershoot” optimistic forecasts in the past. Now it is ports-to-energy conglomerate Adani Group that finds itself at the centre of market scrutiny, says Archana Shukla on the BBC. On 24 January Hindenburg Research, a New York short-seller, accused Adani of “‘brazen’ stock manipulation and accounting fraud”. The Adani Group has denied the allegations, but the combined valuations of its seven listed companies have almost halved. At the peak, Adani’s shares “accounted for more than 6% of India’s two main exchanges; today, the figure is barely 3%”, says Alex Trevelli in The New York Times. Gautam Adani, the businessman at the centre of the furore, is…

Last week energy giant Shell posted one of the highest annual earnings figures on record for a British company, say Matt Oliver and Chris Price in The Telegraph. It more than doubled profits to a record $39.9bn (£32.2bn) in 2022. Roughly two-thirds of the profits came from Shell’s gas business, which sold 16.8 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas in the final quarter of the year. CEO Wael Sawan said “the surge in gas prices in the wake of the Ukraine war demonstrated that supplies were still sorely needed across the globe”. Shell has clearly benefited from the fact that the “European natural gas market has suffered massive shortages” owing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, says Lex in the Financial Times. European gas prices have almost quadrupled since 2014. But…

Five to buy DS Smith The Telegraph The FTSE 100 still contains bargains despite its record high. Packaging giant DS Smith has shrugged off the downturn – operating revenue and margins continue to climb. That demonstrates that the firm has the scale and market power to pass price rises on to customers, an advantage at a time of high inflation. The structural shift towards e-commerce is not going away, and on a forward price/earnings (p/e) ratio of a mere 8.5 the shares offer a way to play the trend at a very reasonable price. 354p Haleon The Mail on Sunday This global £30bn consumer-health group specialises in “everyday health” products, such as pain reliever Panadol, Nicorette gum for smokers trying to quit and Sensodyne toothpaste. These are “trusted from Beijing…

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared a state of emergency in southern Turkey as the death toll from the worst earthquake in decades rose past 11,000 there and in neighbouring Syria. Severe winter weather conditions have added to the logistical challenges of providing aid to 13.5 million people in a region that is home to roughly 15% of the country’s population, but Erdogan also has himself to blame, says Bobby Ghosh on Bloomberg. By enacting laws that expand government control over the years, many of the NGOs that he now needs have struggled to access finance and been forced to shut down. Tellingly, as he announced emergency measures, a “visibly angry” Erdogan took a “pre-emptive” swipe at those criticising relief operations, warning that his government would eventually “go…

Last year saw the rise of Florida governor Ron DeSantis to become the frontrunner for the Republican nomination and for the US presidency itself. But with £2.35m matched on Betfair, he is now joint second with Donald Trump at 4.7 (21.3%) to be the next president, with Biden now in poll position at 3.85 (26%). Trump is now back as favourite to win the Republican nomination at 2.34 (42.7%), with DeSantis at 3.1 (32.2%). I think DeSantis still has a better chance of winning the GOP nod than the markets are giving him. He is closing the gap in national polls and several recent polls put him ahead in the crucial early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, despite Trump’s superior name recognition. I also think there will be…

Investors in UK stocks have not had a lot to feel good about over the past few years. But 2023 has at least got off to a good start. The FTSE 100 is up by close to 5% since Christmas. Coming off the back of a strong December, that was enough to take it past its last all-time high five years ago. It might only take one or two strong sets of company results to take it all the way up to the giddy heights of 8,000 or more. It probably won’t be long before Rishi Sunak or Jeremy Hunt makes a speech citing the stockmarket as a vote of confidence in their government, and a sign that the UK has come back from the crisis around the catastrophic mini-Budget…

A put option gives the holder the right (but not the obligation) to sell an asset, such as a share, for an agreed price, on or before a certain date. When you buy a put option, you pay a fee (known as a premium) to the seller of the option (also known as the writer of the option). If you exercise the option, the seller must buy the underlying asset from you at the agreed price. Otherwise the option expires worthless and the seller has no further liabilities. Let’s assume that Acme Widgets is trading at 100p per share and a put option to sell at 90p costs 5p. You buy a block of 1,000 options at a cost of £50 (5p × 1,000). If the shares fall to 70p,…

“I don’t subscribe to the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness… that’s not one of my mantras. I want people to live their purpose, and if they can be profitable and purposeful, they’re going to live an amazing life.” Former monk turned wellness guru Jay Shetty (pictured), quoted in The Telegraph “The case [for land-value tax] is great. But it can’t happen – that would mean change on an impossible scale. More likely? It is introduced but piled on other taxes. Which is the worst of all worlds.” Bloomberg columnist Merryn Somerset Webb, on Twitter “I know there are going to be recessions, ups and downs. I don’t spend that much time worrying about it. I do worry that poor public policy damages American growth.” JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon is…

vox.com/the-goods Job seeking can be an “exercise in immersive futility”, says Emily Stewart – you throw your CV “into the abyss and pray to the gods” for a favourable outcome. But be careful what you wish for, because a positive response might be only the first step in a complicated and extended assault course. You might have to go through “endless rounds of interviews, arbitrary tests, and complex exercises and presentations” that entail hours of work in preparation, all the while continuing to hold down your day job. It can come to seem like you’ve got a second job, and with no guarantee of success at the end of it. Indeed, you might never have really been in the running at all, just strung along as a back-up, or as…

Kelso, an activist firm founded last year to invest in UK-listed companies, has taken a 0.4% stake in e-commerce firm THG, says This is Money. The beauty and nutrition specialist – which last month issued a profit warning and announced a strategic review – is “a hugely exciting, but significantly undervalued business”, says Kelso. THG (formerly known as The Hut Group) listed in 2020 and hit a peak share price of 800p shortly afterwards, but now trades at around 55p after a slowdown in growth and a series of corporate governance concerns. THG’s nutrition division alone is potentially worth as much as the firm’s current market cap of about £800m, based on valuations for comparable deals in the sector over the past few years, argues Kelso.…

There is an old adage in investment that you should buy a share or market whose price rises on bad news. The bounce shows that the bad news was fully discounted so the outlook has improved. The worst of the bear market in 2022 was in growth – especially technology – stocks in general and the Nasdaq in particular. But, with the Nasdaq up by 16% this year, compared with less than 9% for the S&P 500, this is where the best gains have been seen. A perfect example was provided by Meta, probably the most despised and hated “growth” stock of all. Last week it announced quarterly earnings that had halved year on year and were 22% below consensus forecasts. Yet the share price, already up by 60% from…

● The Bank of England’s (BoE) base rate is at a 14-year high of 4% after the tenth successive increase last week. But “a price war between lenders, and the expectation that interest rates will soon peak, has brought down the cost of fixed deals”, says George Nixon in The Times. “The cheapest mortgage now starts with a three for the first time since September, with Lloyds and Virgin Money both offering ten-year fixes at 3.99%.” If you don’t want to fix for a decade, then Platform, part of Co-op Bank, has launched a five-year fix at 4.09%, but lower rates could be on the way. Lenders had already priced in last week’s interest-rate rise and now the expectation is that there will be “one quarter-point rate rise in March,…

● Is chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt about to offer wealthier pension savers a lifeline? In recent years, the direction of travel on the lifetime allowance (LTA), which effectively caps the amount of pension savings that people may amass, has been one way. In 2010, the LTA stood at £1.8m. Today, savers face tax penalties of up to 55% on funds that exceed £1.073m. Now, however, reports suggest that the chancellor is planning to increase the LTA. Hunt is said to be concerned that some over-50s are opting out of the workforce because they are not allowed to continue adding to their savings. ● Savers who build up small pots of pension cash in an employer’s occupational pension scheme may soon see their money automatically transferred to their next…

My long tips have done well during the last fortnight, with seven out of eight rising. Construction and industrial equipment-rental firm Ashtead rose from 5,038p to 5,654p, retailer Dunelm climbed from 1,097p to 1,193p and luxury-clothing retailer Burberry advanced from 2,362p to 2,447p. Builder DR Horton also increased, from $95.73 to $98.30, while Savills advanced from 938p to 1,102p. Streaming service Netflix rose from $357 to $361 and online retailer ASOS went up from 775p to 922p. The only share that fell was telecoms operator Gamma Communications, which fell from 1,200p to 1,178p. Overall, my long tips are making collective net profits of £5,729, well up from £4,205 a fortnight ago. However, my short tips didn’t do so well, with three out of four moving against me. Real-estate investment trust…

Housebuilder Inland Homes (Aim: INL) has unnerved investors again by forecasting a pre-tax loss of more than £90m for the year to September 2022, up from an initial estimate of £37m. It reports later this month. A downturn in the housing market and rapidly rising construction costs are the principal culprits. The group is also carrying almost £100m of debt (four times its market capitalisation), while CEO Donagh O’Sullivan departed in early January after a mere five weeks in the role. The company’s share price has slumped by about 8% over the past 12 months.…

approx. £40, hedonism.co.uk, nattyboywines.co.uk Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and instead of selecting a pink fizz or a Provençal rosé, I have found the most incredible pair of elite chardonnays, and you can pick the style that most suits you and your loved one! As I write this article, only a couple of merchants have ordered stock of these two spectacular wines, but this number is sure to balloon as word spreads. I have no doubt that 2022 Crystallum The Agnes Chardonnay (£29.95, fortnumandmason.com), and my headliner, Clay Shales, are the two finest white wines Peter-Allan Finlayson has made to date. The Agnes is brittle, edgy and iceberg-shaped with profound depth beneath the gorgeous crystalline exterior, while Clay Shales is luminous, luxurious and gorgeously structured. These are world-class wines…

Going… Bonhams is offering “one of the most important and evocative World-Championship-winning Grand Prix racing cars of all time” at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November. US racing legend Mario Andretti drove the John Player Special Lotus-Cosworth Type 79 (pictured) to championship victory in 1978. The Type 79 represented a major technological leap forward in F1 motor racing. From 20 starts in 11 Grand Prix races, the “Black Beauty”, as the car was known, notched up six wins and five podium finishes from 20 starts for racing team John Player Team Lotus. Andretti and his teammate “Super-Swede” Ronnie Peterson finished first and second four times that season, earning themselves the moniker the “Mario and Ronnie train”. Andretti’s car is expected to fetch between $6.5m and $9.5m. Gone… An F1…

€1.5m How much it costs Ahtari zoo in Finland each year to rent and keep a pair of pandas. China dispatched Lumi (snow) and Pyry (blizzard) in 2018. However, the pandas are facing deportation as the zoo says it cannot afford to house them. £15bn How much the government has written off on the personal protection equipment (PPE), drugs, and testing equipment it bought during the pandemic and that will now never be used, or will be sold at a loss. Storage alone costs around £24m a month. 1.6trn How much in Norwegian kroner (£133.3bn) Norway’s NOK13trn sovereign-wealth fund (SWF), one of the world’s biggest SWFs, lost last year. CEO Nicolai Tangen blamed rising inflation, interest rates and the war in Ukraine for the roughly 14% fall. 2,000 The face…