Indholdsfortegnelse for 1145 i MoneyWeek

“The hot topic among FTSE bosses is how much better their [share] valuations would be [if they were listed in America. UK firms want] to benefit from the US market’s massive liquidity. That means getting into an index, where tracker funds automatically buy the shares... [but] that’s not a foregone conclusion... A prospective member... must be ‘American enough’, filing annual reports with the US regulator and having substantial assets and revenues in the States. There is an annual liquidity test to make sure enough of the share trading has moved to the US... London... is [certainly] unloved... Stocks here... trade on a 30% discount to their global peers... [but] boards thinking about doing the New York flit should [recognise] that it’s not necessarily an overnight fairy tale. [Still] that won’t…

Primark’s focus on the high street and cut-price fashion looks set “to make it one of the retail winners in the post-pandemic world”, says Simon English in the Evening Standard. Sales at its 419 stores should jump by 16% to £4.2bn in the half-year to 4 March. This suggests that “consumer spending is holding up better than economic pessimists have feared”, and also means that Primark’s parent firm Associated British Foods (AB Foods) now expects earnings for the year to be flat, as opposed to its previous guidance of lower profits. Primark’s success will inevitably reignite the debate “as to what it is doing in AB Foods’ portfolio with mediocre performing grocery and sugar businesses”, says Jai Singh on Proactive Investors. However, while it has been suggested “time and time…

This is Mexico’s moment, says WirtschaftsWoche. US firms are now increasingly inclined to consider investing and manufacturing there as America turns away from China. And Hispanics now comprise around a fifth of America’s population, making them a powerful political force. All this bodes well for Grupo Televisa, one of Mexico’s top cable and television providers. An improving Mexican economy will bolster advertising revenues. Moreover, Grupo Televisa holds 45% of Univision, the leading Spanish-language television provider in the US. Politicians will spend heavily on wooing Spanish speakers in the run-up to the 2024 election. The stock also yields 2.4%.…

Rishi Sunak’s “rabbit in the hat” is the so-called “Stormont Brake”, says Oliver Wright in The Times. This will allow 30 of the Northern Ireland assembly’s 90 members, from at least two parties, to submit a “Petition of Concern” to prevent a new EU single-market law from applying in the province. One of the most contentious issues with the current protocol is that it obliges Northern Ireland to follow future as well as existing EU single-market rules, despite having no say in making them. It is not a complete veto, however. Westminster would need to support it – ie, the UK government actually pulls the brake – and if the European Commission objected, the dispute would “have to go through an independent binding arbitration process”. The brake is a “complex…

Jacinda Ardern’s decision to step down as prime minister of New Zealand in late January shocked the world. Her successor, Chris Hipkins, faces a tough fight to remain in power when New Zealand goes to the polls in the general election in October. With £11,952 matched on Betfair, punters have the opposition National party as favourites to provide the next PM at 1.43 (67.5%), compared with Labour at 3.2 (31.3%), and any other party at 120 (0.8%). It’s not surprising that the Nationals are favourites to win given that the euphoria around Labour, which enabled Ardern to win a resounding (for New Zealand) victory in 2020, has long since faded. Indeed, the Nationals have been consistently ahead of Labour in the polls for around a year. These figures, combined with…

We all know the drill. Every time you need to open a new bank account, or hire a solicitor, or change your insurance policy, you run into a wall of money-laundering checks. You have to find a couple of utility bills, less than three months old of course, even though no one gets them in the post any more, and if they ask for them to be sent, the postal workers are on strike anyway. You might well need a certified copy of your passport as well. And perhaps of your driving licence. You might well have to record a video of yourself and send that across as well. It has turned into a nightmare. A simple transaction that should take a few minutes, and a couple of swipes on…

A “real” interest rate is simply an interest rate that has been adjusted to take inflation into account. (A “nominal” interest rate is one that has not been adjusted for inflation.) Real rates matters because inflation reduces the value of any future stream of income. Take a bank account into which you plan to place £1,000. If inflation is running at 1% then a 2% nominal interest rate looks respectable – your savings will have more purchasing power a year from now. However, if inflation is running at 3%, your savings will have less purchasing power when you withdraw them in a year’s time, even though the £1,000 will have grown (in nominal terms) to £1,020. Of course, the advertised rate on savings account will be the nominal one, not…

“To be honest, a part of me just felt like: ‘Not another flipping profile.’ I pity the profiler, because… it’s all been written so many times. But, I need to promote something. What we do, it costs a lot of money – so that’s the exchange. Ha!” Actress Helena Bonham-Carter (pictured) on doing yet another interview, quoted in The Times “So many people want to be MPs that the law of supply and demand suggests they need not be paid anything at all.” Cricket commentator John Arlott, quoted in The Economist “I was not careless. I had good investments with the car dealerships, with real estate. I was cash-poor and asset-rich. You have a divorce, you have another one. [The money] goes quick! It wasn’t that I was spending it…

iea.org.uk They could not get Jeremy Corbyn elected, but the left are still the “culturally dominant force” in Britain, and they set the agenda, says Kristian Niemietz. They have the power to “force their obsessions” on us, whether that is the latest “woke fad” or “Doomsday environmentalism”. They could, then, also cancel “Nimbyism” if they chose. Why don’t they? Socialists tend to look at the stated intention of a policy, while liberals look at the indirect, longer-term effects. Socialists like rent controls, for example, because they lower rents; liberals oppose them because they lower the supply of rental housing, increase demand and gum up the market. But on the crucial Nimby issue of house building, both should agree – we need more houses, increasing supply is a way to lower…

Andy Hornby, CEO of the firm that owns the Wagamama, Frankie & Benny’s and Chiquito chains, is under attack from an activist investor, says the Daily Mail. Oasis Management, which holds a 6.5% stake in The Restaurant Group (TRG), says that urgent changes are needed after the shares slumped 66% in the past year – a performance “disproportionately worse than what the impact of the challenging sector backdrop would alone justify”. It argues that Hornby – who headed banking group HBOS from 2006 to 2008 and has been at TRG since 2019 – and the board have “lost focus on long-term value creation”. TRG said that it had performed strongly relative to peers and rejected Oasis’s request for a board seat and for a strategic review.…

In 1966 author John Brooks decided he was missing a trick when it came to financial fun: he had never attended a “Stockholder Season” – the month in the spring in the US when most big companies held their annual meetings. He had heard that managers planned to clamp down on shareholders’ “unruliness”. In 1965 the chair of the Communications Satellite Corporation called on guards to “eject bodily two badgering stockholders” and hecklers had to be escorted off the premises at the Consolidated Edison meeting too. Shocking stuff – and it suggested the 1966 season was going to be “a particularly lively one”. It was. In the 1960s some individual investors became famous in their own right for their AGM antics. They all turned out for 1966. Mrs Wilma Soss…

Could your business get a better deal from its bank? Despite fierce competition in the business banking sector, research suggests that more than half of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have never changed providers. Many SMEs may therefore be missing out on lower charges and better service. In recent years, the government has sought to encourage competition by commissioning regular studies of the performance of business banks; the new generation of challenger institutions has repeatedly come out on top. The latest such research has just been published. In work undertaken by the consultant BVA BDRC on behalf of the Competition & Markets Authority, SMEs provided their views of their current banks. The top five banks on overall quality of service – Monzo, Starling Bank, Handelsbanken, Tide and Metro Bank –…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underlines the importance of food supplies and the consequences of higher food prices. Before the invasion, Russia and Ukraine together supplied about 28% of the world’s wheat exports, with Ukraine also comprising 14% of global corn exports. Energy prices have increased as Western sanctions minimise oil and gas imports from Russia. This has raised costs for farmers through higher fertiliser, fuel and crop protection prices. Farmers therefore need to raise productivity and this requires further mechanisation and progress towards precision and robotic farming – all trends that reduce both costs and the need for seasonal labour, which is becoming scarcer. Deere & Co (NYSE: DE), with a market value of $120bn, is the world’s leading maker of farm machinery, ranging from tractors to sprayers and combine…

News that Susan Wojcicki is resigning from YouTube after nine years as CEO “caused barely a rustle in the media pages” – a measure of how “little attention Wall Street analysts and entertainment industry scribblers pay to the business of YouTube, even though it has become a hub – as well as a byword – for global video”, says The Economist. It also “does a disservice” to Wojcicki. On her watch, Alphabet-owned YouTube has become an integral part of the entertainment and information landscape. At 54, Wojcicki “is as close to Mountain View aristocracy as you can get without being surnamed Brin or Page”. Although one of the most respected female executives in the male-dominated tech industry, she’ll always be remembered as “Google’s first landlord”, says Fortune. Shortly after Larry…

£49.50, omws.co.uk; £55, oxfordwine.co.uk; £33, per bottle in bond, farrvintners.com, laywheeler.com Aussie wine scribe Tyson Stelzer and I compiled an annual classification of New Zealand pinot noir from 2008 until 2019 – you can download this, free to view, from my website. I ducked out of this commitment a couple of years ago because I could not, hand on heart, see the evolution of this style continuing apace. NZ pinot noir has come a long way over the last two decades, but the classification has, I think, settled with only a few important risers and fallers each year, so it lacks the dynamism and excitement it once had. That is not to say that there aren’t a couple of amazing discoveries each year, and one estate that has skyrocketed is…

The Army’s troubled £5.5bn Ajax armoured vehicle programme “has turned a corner”, according to defence secretary Ben Wallace, says Sylvia Pfeifer in the Financial Times. The UK signed a fixed-price contract with US defence giant General Dynamics in 2014 to buy 589 vehicles, with the first to be delivered three years later. But the Ajax soon got bogged down with problems relating to noise and vibration, which damaged soldiers’ hearing. Payments to General Dynamics were halted, but £3.2bn had already been spent. Those payments are due to resume, and the first vehicles are set to replace ones designed in the 1960s once trials have been completed in 18 months’ time. The fix? New ear defenders and better seat cushioning. “These are not engineering solutions, they are mitigations,” says Defence Analysis…

“Just last year, the world was going to have a shortage of lithium carbonate, one of the key raw materials” for electric vehicle (EV) batteries, says Wolf Richter on Wolf Street. The benchmark China lithium carbonate price “exploded by a factor of 15 in two years”, rising from 40,000 yuan a tonne in late 2020 to 600,000 a tonne two years later. Those “crazy prices” incentivised new supply, while demand for EVs has started to stall this year amid the global slowdown. “When the hype fizzled as it always does, the price began to plunge.” Chinese lithium carbonate prices have fallen by more than a third over the past three months to hit a one-year low, says Trading Economics. That said, prices are still up more than 600% since the…

A four-decade long “golden age” for bonds is over, says George Steer in the Financial Times. Global bonds delivered an annualised real return of 6.3% between 1982 and 2021, according to the Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook. That compares well with the average global equity return of 7.4% over the same period, as bonds typically provide steadier returns than stocks. Yet in 2022 global bonds plunged by 31% for their worst annual showing in more than a century. UK bonds returned minus 39%. Investors should get used to worse bond returns, since the post-1982 bond bull market was an anomaly. “Since 1900 the average annualised real return for bonds across the 21 countries with continuous data was just 0.6%.”…

Drug giant Pfizer is in talks to buy biotech Seagen in a deal that would be worth at least $30bn, say Jared Hopkins and Jonathan Rockoff in The Wall Street Journal. Seagen has pioneered a class of cancer therapy known as antibody drug conjugates. The treatment “works like a guided missile attacking tumours with toxic agents”. Not only has it been approved for cancers such as Hodgkin’s and other lymphomas, but it has also “shown promise in combination with an immunotherapy against other kinds of tumours”. Seagen has more than nine studies evaluating its antibody drug conjugates with immunotherapies. The combination could be used to treat a range of conditions, including lung and colon cancer. Pfizer’s interest in Seagen comes at a time when the drug giant is “struggling to…

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co, the biggest oil company in the United Arab Emirates, is to float its gas division, marking the world’s largest initial public offering (IPO) so far this year, says Bloomberg. Demand for the shares has been so strong that the group upped the proportion of Adnoc Gas it plans to sell from 4% to 5% early this week. The 5% stake of 3.84 billion shares will cost $0.61 each, implying a market value of $50.8bn. Trading in Adnoc Gas starts next week. The IPO should raise up to $2.5bn, eclipsing the previous Abu Dhabi record of $2bn set by chemicals group Borouge in 2022. The Middle East was a rare bright spot in the global IPO market last year owing to high energy prices.…

● We should have “deep reservations” about the market’s focus on banks’ interest-rate margins, says Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. With inflation and rates rising, high margins come at the expense of savers. Banks should focus on providing better savings rates and customer service – rather than axing branches – to reap longer-term advantages. Take Lloyds, where CEO Charlie Nunn (pictured) wants to find new streams of income, including paying more attention to mass-affluent customers. That sounds like a good way to go, but remember, “if there is a loss of goodwill among consumers, they will look elsewhere”. ● ”Boring Bunzl has always been a misnomer,” says Alistair Osborne in The Times. The supplier of “bins, bulks and bog roll” has grown dividends almost every year for three decades…

The days of beating the market by investing in tech stocks is over despite the recent rally, says Steve Eisman, the investor who made his name betting against subprime mortgages before the global financial crisis. “Paradigms change over time,” he tells Bloomberg. “Sometimes those paradigms change violently, and sometimes those paradigms change over time because people don’t give up.” Right now, we’re in the second scenario, with many investors still reluctant to accept that the tech firms who dominated the market over the past decade will not do so in an era of higher interest rates. Previous paradigm shifts included the rotation from conglomerates in the 1990s to tech stocks during the dotcom bubble. Tech gave way to financial stocks in the early 2000s, until the global financial crisis. A…

adamsmith.org/blog Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is looking at measures that could reduce Britain’s childcare costs, which are among the most expensive in the world, reports The Guardian. But that is not, in fact, quite true, says Tim Worstall. Hunt is not looking at reducing childcare costs at all. He is merely looking at altering who has to pay for them. Childcare must, of course, be done. But who should pay? There are only three possible answers. The first is the parents. The second is someone else who the parents pay. The third is that taxpayers should pick up the bill. Or, to put it another way, that everyone else in the country should go to work in order to care for others’ kids. In some parts of London, childcare for two…

■ The new team at fund manager Jupiter should count its lucky stars, says Lex in the Financial Times. CEO Matthew Beesley, who took over in October, unveiled encouraging full-year results this week. While assets, revenues and profits fell, they still beat forecasts. Inflows from institutional clients rose £2bn. Still, Beesley had the good fortune to take over as stocks rebounded. “Jupiter’s new team must prove conclusively that its poor run of form has reversed for good.“ Fellow straggler Abrdn also showed “the odd glimmer of progress” despite £10.3bn of net outflows, says Alistair Osborne in The Times. CEO Stephen Bird has closed or merged 58 funds, strengthened its wealth-manager portal, bought the Interactive Investor platform for £1.5bn and now sold its discretionary fund management arm, all in an effort…

Pension savers are failing to claim millions of pounds of free cash from the government every year – with the taxman swallowing up £1.3bn in unclaimed tax relief over five years. According to a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to HMRC, higher-rate taxpayers have left behind an average of £245m in pension tax relief each tax year, while additional-rate taxpayers have foregone about £18m every year. In 2020-2021, higher-rate taxpayers missed out on an average of £425 each, and £527 in the case of additional-rate taxpayers. The total amount unclaimed between 2016-2017 and 2020-2021 was £1.3bn. Pension provider PensionBee, which submitted the FOI requests, called it an “eye-watering amount that should have gone back into savers’ pockets – or better yet, their pensions”. Basic-rate taxpayers normally have the…

Thousands of small businesses could face expensive penalties because they do not have mandatory insurance for their staff. A study from Smart Money People suggests that 160,000 businesses in the UK with between one and nine employees are breaking the law because they don’t currently have employers’ liability insurance. The cover, which is a legal requirement for almost every company that employs staff, pays out in the event that an employee suffers an injury or illness linked to their work. The insurance provides compensation and legal costs, and therefore offers crucial protection for employees. However, Smart Money People’s research suggests many SMEs are not currently paying for this cover, with the number of uninsured businesses appearing to have increased as economic headwinds have intensified. While the need to save money…

Neil Woodford (born 1960) grew up in Berkshire, and studied for a degree in economics and agricultural economics at the University of Exeter. He then served in various junior roles at City firms, including Reed, TSB and Eagle Star, before studying at London Business School. In 1988 he joined Invesco Perpetual, running various funds for them for more than 25 years. Between 1988 and 2014, Invesco Perpetual High Income, Woodford’s main fund, returned an average of 13.2% a year, significantly higher than the 9.3% that the FTSE All-Share returned over the same period. What was the trade? By 2014 Woodford was managing around £33bn across the various funds he ran. But after a falling out with his employers over claims they were interfering too much in his investments, he decided…

Hanging chairs are all the rage and the Swingrest Hanging Lounger from Dedon is among the most stylish and practical. It is wide enough to seat several people, or alternatively, just one or two sprawled out. The cushions atop the lounger’s synthetic waterproof fibre base come in a variety of colours, allowing buyers to customise their preferred style to suit their terrace, veranda or patio garden. £8,776, shop.mohd.it Hunter Original Wellington Tall Boots are essential for rummaging around in the flowerbeds and they come in classic “Hunter green” or navy blue. They are made from natural rubber and have been vulcanised for added protection from the elements. The boots are comfortable to wear, too, thanks to a soft polyester lining, which features the Hunter Original tread pattern, adding stability and…

Martin Wolf Allen Lane, £30 For those of us old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, “recent history has been something of a shock”, says The Economist. The “triumph of liberal political and economic systems” that seemed so clear then has since been spoiled by “rich-country blunders, the rise of authoritarian China, and ultimately by a distressing loss of faith in democracy itself in what was once called the free world”. True, China’s appalling handling of the pandemic and Russia’s military incompetence make this “crisis of democracy looks less dire than it did a year or two ago”, but the “need to understand democracy’s retreat remains urgent”. This book by financial columnist Martin Wolf is therefore timely. Wolf argues that the fault lies with the form…

One of the first lessons from a wrecked economy with a 99% inflation rate is that… it’s not so bad. People still eat, smile, wear fashionable clothes, enjoy music and read books. Of course, government policies are idiotic. Corruption is widespread. And everyone, trundling along on the road to ruin, gets poorer. But they don’t necessarily have a bad time. We recently went out to dinner in our old neighbourhood, Palermo Soho. We hadn’t seen it in a couple of years. But things change fast in Buenos Aires. The streets were full – people going to bars and restaurants, shoppers or just people out for a walk. “You have to understand,” says a friend. “People want to spend their money. Nobody saves it.” We barely recognised the place. The shops…

Technology bulls are “buzzing that the downturn of... last year is over and the boom of the past decade is back”, says Ruchir Sharma in the Financial Times. Cryptocurrencies have risen by over 60% in the past three months, with Chinese tech and big US tech firms up more than 50% and 30% respectively. Don’t get your hopes up. “This surge [has] all the hallmarks of an echo bubble,” a phenomenon where “investors refuse to give up on ideas that recently made them a lot of money.” The 2000-2002 dotcom bust was “punctuated by three echo bubbles; the biggest saw a nearly 50% increase in the Nasdaq”. Those rebounds eventually faltered following “serial disappointments”. The bear returns The rally comes in defiance of rising US bond yields, says James Mackintosh…

International Consolidated Airlines (IAG), one of the world’s largest airline operators and the owner of British Airways and Aer Lingus, is back in the black, says Emma Powell in The Times. IAG has reported adjusted operating profits of €1.23bn last year, compared with losses of €2.97bn in 2021 and €4.37bn in 2020 – helped by fares rising by more than 10% above pre-Covid levels. It expects this recovery to continue, with profits of between €1.8bn and €2.3bn expected this year despite an uncertain economic backdrop and cost inflation. IAG is clearly benefiting from a “notable revival” in the fortunes of the airline industry, says Philip Georgiadis in the Financial Times. Consumers’ demand for travel is rebounding following the end of most Covid restrictions. European low-cost airlines have enjoyed “record bookings”,…

Five to buy Jet2 Shares Household budgets are under strain, but many families consider their “week in the sun” to be non-negotiable, which will keep driving the recovery in the travel industry. This airline won a reputation for putting customers first during the pandemic and Jet2 is now the UK’s top holidays firm by passenger numbers, eclipsing Tui. Planes are fuller than they were pre-Covid and margins are much higher. On less than ten times earnings the shares could keep soaring. 1,297p Keystone Law The Sunday Times This listed law group’s stable of 400-odd self-employed lawyers “work from home and receive 60% to 75% of total fees”, with the rest going to Keystone. The model, which doesn’t require extensive office space, means that overheads are “a shadow of big-name rivals”.…

After a closely fought election Africa’s most populous country and largest economy has replaced one “ailing septuagenarian” with another, says Richard Assheton in The Times. Yet despite sinking huge sums into building a nationwide political structure, Bola Tinubu only managed to win Nigeria’s presidential election with a mandate of fewer than nine million votes in a country that is home to more than 200 million. The losing candidates, who won nearly two-thirds of the vote between them, have denounced the election as a “sham”. Tinubu will have his work cut out, says The Wall Street Journal. In recent years Nigeria has been “battered by a surge in violence and conflict”, with more than 10,000 Nigerians killed in violent incidents last year, including attacks by Islamist terrorists. Scores more have been…

The Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook is well known to anybody interested in the history of markets by now. When Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton began their study of historical returns back in the 1990s, organised and accessible data on long-term returns was scant for all but a handful of countries (principally the US). Today we have a better idea of what kind of returns we can expect, thanks to this research and similar projects. Still, knowing what markets have returned on average is very matter to forecasting what they might return in the current environment, which is why the one of most interesting snippets in the latest update (out last week) is a look at whether there is a relationship between real interest rates today and…

Tax can help stop gun crime Gillian Tett Financial Times The latest mass shooting in Mississippi is “grimly familiar”, says Gillian Tett. The Gun Violence Archive estimates there were 650 mass killings in the US last year; a year in which 44,000 people were killed by guns. To many, it “seems obvious that far stricter controls are urgently needed on firearm sales and ownership”, but a ban on sales alone would not solve the problem, given the estimated 400 million guns in circulation. Perhaps some “dry economic analysis” could help break the political stalemate. A paper by Sarah Moshary, Sara Drango and Bradley Shapiro finds that first-time gun buyers are the most likely to be deterred by price and that demand for handguns is “far more price sensitive than for…

noahpinion.substack.com Angry and unhappy? Well, so you should be, is the view of a growing “doomer subculture” on the internet. The “OK Doomer” Substack is a case in point, which claims we’re living through the end times. But look at what doomers are depressed about, and we see that things are nowhere near as bad as they say, says Noah Smith. “Late capitalism” keeps getting later and later, but even as it has “conquered the world”, humanity has grown richer now than it has ever been. For the past three decades, income growth has been concentrated in low-income countries. Poverty is down at every level. Child mortality, illiteracy and hunger are all down too. Meanwhile, inequality has been restrained by steadily growing levels of government redistribution. In the US, the…

It’s natural to assume that countries with the highest economic growth generate the best investment returns, but that doesn’t stack up. “Australia is the best market in Asia and China the worst,” says Robin Parbrook, co-manager of the £500m Schroder Asian Total Return (LSE: ATR). “It is the returns on capital of companies, not economic growth, that drive investment markets.” Chinese firms have a record of over-investment and poor capital allocation, he says, which means the Chinese market has lagged far behind its economy. That said, the MSCI China index has risen more than 50% in the past three months, based on optimism about the reopening of the Chinese economy. Even so, it trades on only 11.3 times prospective earnings and 1.5 times book value, so looks cheap. The index…

● Do you bother to increase your pension contributions when you get a pay rise? Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that only 1% of us would up the amount we pay into our pension if we got a 10% pay rise. This report “is further proof that apathy reigns in workplace pensions”, Mark Futcher, a partner at pension consultant Barnett Waddingham, tells the Daily Mail. “Auto-enrolment’s success lies in the fact that there are more people saving for retirement than there were a decade ago, but the biggest weakness is that people are not saving enough.” The IFS recommends an increase in the default pension contribution on higher levels of earnings. ● Using data it receives from online-booking platforms such as Airbnb, HMRC has sent out “nudge”…

● A report from Vodafone Business says 54% of SMEs have been targeted by cyber criminals over the past 12 months, up from 39% when it last conducted the research two years ago. Despite the increase, Vodafone’s research warned that many SMEs do not recognise the risk they face, with almost a quarter either having no cybersecurity protection in place or not knowing how they are protected. The Government Cyber Essentials scheme provides basic advice for SMEs on how to improve protection. ● More women than ever before are starting new businesses. Women founded 150,000 new companies in 2022 – around 20% of all new company formations – according to the latest report from the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurs. The report also points to the increasing support for…

UK investors have enjoyed some excitement in recent weeks as the FTSE 100 has hit a series of record highs. This was in response to signs that global inflation could be easing and that central banks may be reaching the end of their sustained period of hiking interest rates. Larger UK companies have benefited from their strong international focus, as 82% of the post-tax profits in the FTSE 100 index come from overseas. As a result, these companies are less affected by the outlook for the British economy and have benefited from more positive global tailwinds. Nevertheless, UK companies continue to trade at lower valuations than many international peers. Many of these cheap companies are first-rate, boasting strong balance sheets and healthy dividends. This provides an opportunity for us as…

$3.8m How much an 800 sq ft ocean-view mobile home is selling for at Montauk Shores on Long Island, New York. The plots of land sold for up to $25,000 in the 1970s, but Montauk has steadily become as expensive as the Hamptons to the west, says The Times. £53,000 The average total debt of dental students in their final year of study, up from £24,734 in 2013, according to the British Dental Journal. Fees increased twice in the years to 2016 – also the year in which student grants were removed. £4.90 The price per mile for a 1.3-mile ride on the new Luton Dart railway link between the airport terminal and Luton Airport Parkway station, when it opens this month. That’s more than the £3.70 per mile for…