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Misery loves company. So this week I took a break from dwelling on our seemingly endless problems and decided to look at Germany’s instead. Given that it is in recession and starting to resemble Britain in the 1970s (see page 18), its economic difficulties are arguably even worse than ours. But the differing structural backdrops aside, their day-to-day preoccupations are very similar, a flick through the financial press suggests. The government has brought a bill before parliament stipulating that new heating systems in building must run on 65% renewable energy. Heat pumps are key to the switch, and they are constantly in the news in Germany too. At present soaring demand is fuelling a nasty spate of heat-pump thefts; to add insult to householders’ injury, some insurers are refusing to…

“Silly me, I thought we had hit peak artificial intelligence (AI) [mania]... a few months ago. But here we are. We’ve reached the point where suddenly every public firm is an AI play... It’s reminiscent of the dotcom days, when every company became a dotcom, regardless of what it did... Or during the blockchain frenzy, when... [beverage group] Long Island Iced Tea Corporation... rebranded itself to Long Blockchain Corporation... [Now headlines tell us that] ‘AI is coming to restaurants’ as they add AI to drive-through ordering... It’s so transparent... yet investors and... companies fall for it over and over and over again – all... to join whatever parade is marching down the street... when this stuff reverses, it’s always brutal... There’s no question the latest [progress in] AI is real...…

Shares in both General Motors (GM) and Tesla rose last week after GM said its future electric vehicles (EVs) will use the same charging hardware as Tesla’s, says Mike Colias in The Wall Street Journal. From next year, GM’s customers will have access to 12,000 of Tesla’s fast chargers, known as “Superchargers”. While existing customers will need an adaptor, GM will start making EVs with the Tesla charge port by 2025. The deal is similar to an agreement between Ford Motor and Tesla last month. Ford’s customers will be able to use more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers. The fact that three major EV companies seem to have settled on the same charger technology matters because only owners of Tesla’s EVs have hitherto had access to the company’s “plentiful and reliable…

”Inflation has taken a bite out of budgets,” says Barron’s, especially when it comes to food. So consumers are all the more inclined to trade down from major food brands to generic, “off-label” versions of a product. TreeHouse Foods makes own-brand food for retailers including Costco Wholesale, Amazon, Aldi and Walmart. The sector was growing before the pandemic as the “stigma” attached to cheaper alternatives receded, and with the high cost of living demand is now likely to remain buoyant. Penetration of store brands in the US remains below that of other countries, while recent management changes and asset sales have left the group “leaner and more focused”.…

Donald Trump became the first former US president to appear in federal criminal court this week, say David Charter and Will Pavia in The Times. Trump has been charged with 37 charges of mishandling classified documents and lying to investigators, charges that could send him to prison for decades. It’s hard to understand why Trump put himself in this situation by holding on to so much material after he had left the White House, “well past the point where it became clear this put him in a legally precarious position”, says Ben Domenech in The Spectator. “Negotiation over such documents is a very normal thing to happen after presidencies,” but his predecessors promptly complied with the demands to return contentious papers. By contrast, Trump insisted on holding on to the…

● When Mike Ashley (pictured) handed over the CEO role at Frasers to his son-in-law Michael Murray, it seemed to signal “a less freewheeling approach to buying other companies”, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Ashley liked to take a punt on things he felt were undervalued. Murray “spoke the language of investment discipline”, talking of “luxury”, “premium” and “add[ing] value to our ecosystem or platform”. So it was hard to explain why Frasers increased its stake in struggling online fashion firm Asos to nearly 9% last week. Now it’s taken an 18.9% stake in AO World, the online electrical retailer – an even odder move for a clothing-centred conglomerate. Some of Ashley’s past investments have paid off (Hugo Boss), some have not (Debenhams). “Murray’s promotion to public face of…

sambowman.co Why is France so rich despite being so statist and heavily taxed? asks Sam Bowman. Post-war France has “consistently been about as rich as the UK, or richer” Firstly, there are fewer restrictions on building new housing. Since 1945, “the overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area [has] roughly tripled... whereas London’s has grown only a few percent”. France has triple Britain’s motorway length, and those roads are “smoother and better kept” thanks to tolling and private-sector management. Meanwhile, 29 French cities have trams, compared to just 11 in the UK. Electricity, most of it from nuclear power plants, is “more abundant” than in Britain, keeping the manufacturing sector humming along. Meanwhile, UK monthly childcare costs are almost twice as dear as in France, partly because French law requires…

■ Edinburgh Investment Trust is a good example of how a change in management can have a huge impact on performance, says The Telegraph. Since the fund moved from Invesco’s Mark Barnett to James de Uphaugh and Chris Field (then at Majedie, now part of Liontrust) in March 2020, its shares have risen by 60% against a 38% rise in the FTSE All-Share benchmark. It has not yet delivered on the second part of its mandate, which is to grow dividends faster than inflation: payouts were cut in 2021 and despite a 5.6% hike last year they are still 9% below where they were in 2020. “However, a restructured portfolio that offers attractive dividend growth potential means that income returns are likely to improve over the long run.” The fund…

The sterling-denominated WisdomTree Agriculture ETC (LSE: AGAP), an exchange-traded commodity fund, provides access to a basket of agricultural commodity futures contracts that track the Bloomberg Agriculture SubIndex. Note, though, that you need to answer a sophisticated investor questionnaire before buying it. The Barings Global Agriculture Fund has sterling-denominated shares. The fund aims to achieve capital growth by investing in equity and equity-related securities in the agricultural sector. The firms’ activities range “from planting [and] harvesting to delivering food to the table”. The fund focuses on quality and long-term growth potential. Moving on to individual stocks, Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE: ADM), with a market value of $40bn, is a global leader in human and animal nutrition and the world’s top agricultural processing company. Its work includes developing plant-based proteins and probiotics,…

Markets now expect the Bank of England (BoE) to raise interest rates to 5.75% by the end of the year, from the current 4.5%, and these projections are having a knock-on effect on mortgage costs. The yield on the two-year UK government gilts, off which two-year fixed mortgages are priced, hit its highest level since 2008 this week, rising to 4.7%. Following this jump, the average two-year mortgage fix stands at 5.86%, according to Moneyfacts. With lenders pulling deals almost daily, this figure is rising rapidly. Last week, HSBC temporarily withdrew all new mortgage rates. On Monday, Santander did the same, while on Tuesday NatWest said it was increasing rates for new residential mortgages by 0.2 percentage points (pp). The pain is particularly acute in the buy-to-let market: NatWest hiked…

It’s one of the most attractive perks of private pensions – but new research suggests more than half of savers don’t know about it. A survey from Standard Life reveals that 52% of savers aged 50 to 54 – just approaching 55, the age they can begin making withdrawals from private pensions – don’t know they can take up to 25% of their money as a lump sum. The rules are relatively straightforward. At the point you decide to cash in your pension savings, you can opt to have 25% of the pot paid to you in a single lump sum, with no tax to pay. You then use the rest of the cash to generate income, whether by buying a guaranteed annuity for life or through an income-drawdown plan…

It is a promising sign when a company reports its annual results and says of the outlook that, “given the performance to date, the board expects the outturn for the full year to be materially ahead of its previous expectations”. These were the words used by Ashtead Technology (Aim: AT) when it reported its 2022 results last month. Ashtead Technology, a company with a market capitalisation of £309m, should not to be confused with Ashtead Group (LSE: AHT), a £23bn multinational industrial-equipment rental group. Ashtead Technology is a leading provider of subsea equipment rental and caters to the global offshore-energy sector. It provides services throughout the life cycle of offshore wind farms and offshore oil and gas infrastructure. Ashtead has headquarters in the UK and nine international customer-service hubs to…

Betting on takeovers is a popular strategy. Virtually all takeover bids involve the company doing the buying offering far more than the current share price in order to get existing shareholders to sell. So an offer will result in the share price of the target company rising, and the stock of the firm doing the buying falling. However, as there is always a chance that the deal will unravel, the new price of the target will usually still be below the offer price, unless investors expect a bidding war. There are three basic strategies. If you think that the deal will go ahead, then you should buy the shares of the target in the expectation that their share price will rise to the offer level. However, if you think that…

“History is made up of people who blossomed in the second half of their life,” says The Telegraph: Daniel Defoe, Hitchcock and Cézanne come to mind. We might add Anne Boden to the list. In 2014 she began touting for investment in a bank, working from a coffee shop on Marylebone High Street. “It would be the Uber of banking” which would one day be as big as Barclays, she explained in hundreds of emails – and she was the woman to start it. The reaction from much of the City was incredulity mixed with condescension. Boden hardly came across as your average fintech “bro”. Diminutive, a tad eccentric and garrulous, she once described herself as “the sort of person who’ll chat to somebody in the ladies”. Starting a new…

“That’s quite nice, isn’t it,” says Gregory Swartberg, coming into the room. I turn around. “The collage for the Queen’s Award… That’s what you were looking at, right?” I confessed it was. Swartberg is the founder and CEO of fine wine specialists Cru Wine, a ten-year-old start-up that has ranked among the Financial Times’ list of the 1,000 fastest-growing European companies for the last four years. In 2020, the then-Prince of Wales handed Swartberg the Queen’s Award for Enterprise and it was a photo of the occasion that Swartberg had caught me admiring. “He’s a great person,” says Swartberg of the new king as we settle down to talk fine wine (the next best thing to drinking it) at Cru Wine’s office in Kensington. “He had a funny joke in…

George Soros, the legendary 92-year-old hedge-fund manager, has made his son Alex (pictured), 37, the leader of the family’s non-profit Open Society Foundations (OSF), says Gregory Zuckerman in The Wall Street Journal. The OSF spends $1.5bn a year bolstering human rights and governance, and Alex had already been elected to the board. He is also the president of the Soros “super PAC” (political action committee), which supports the Democratic Party. And he is the only family member on the investment committee overseeing Soros Fund Management, which looks after money for the foundation and the family. Outsiders had expected George Soros’s first-born, Jonathan, 52, (Alex’s half-brother) to take over. But after stabilising the family firm in 2002 following the exit of several directors, the heir-apparent fell out with the patriarch. Jonathan…

British mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have had their weakest start to the year since 2016, says Helen Cahill in The Times. The total value of deals involving UK firms more than halved to $89bn in the first five months of 2023, with the number of deal announcements down 29%, according to the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). Globally, the total value of deals dropped by an annual 42% year-on-year to $1.1trn in the first five months. “Geopolitical tensions, volatile stockmarkets, interest-rate hikes and the banking crisis” as well as “fears of recession” have dented corporate confidence, says Lucille Jones of LSEG. London taxi drivers have noticed the deal drought, says Sommer Saadi on Bloomberg. “We’re still operating at 70% pre-Covid levels in the City,” says Liam Griffin of private cab…

Lockdowns turbocharged Britain’s online economy, propelling the percentage of total retail sales made on the internet from 20% in 2019 to 35% by early 2021, says Hermione Taylor in the Investors’ Chronicle. The figure has fallen back as the economy has reopened, but we can’t wholly “shake” our newfound addiction, with over a quarter of UK retail sales still taking place digitally. The prevalence of online shopping is attracting regulatory scrutiny. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is “concerned about unfair urgency and price-reduction claims”. Misleading “pop-ups saying how many people are... viewing a product” and countdowns declaring that an offer is about to end may soon be a thing of the past.…

Last week UBS axed several senior Credit Suisse directors after it completed the £2.6bn takeover of its stricken rival, says Simon Foy in The Telegraph. The cull included Credit Suisse’s finance chief and the co-head of its investment bank. Only a fifth of the top 160 roles will go to Credit Suisse employees following the takeover; a tenth of Credit Suisse’s staff have departed. In a further attempt to avoid “cultural contamination”, UBS has “drawn up a list of nearly two dozen red lines” that bar Credit Suisse staff from certain activities. For instance, there will be a ban on new clients from risky states such as Libya or Russia. Complex financial products are another no-no. UBS’s management can be forgiven for being wary of its new inheritance, says Liam…

Cava is about to test US investors’ appetite for both restaurants and growth stories after a difficult period for the initial public offerings (IPO) market, says MarketWatch. The fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant chain, with 263 outlets nationwide, will be worth up to $2.2bn when it floats on the New York Stock Exchange. It is the first US listing of a restaurant group since late 2021. Sales have risen at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52.2% over the past six years, but losses widened to $59m last year. The group’s “path to profitability is nonexistent as [it] spends money it doesn’t even have to open more stores”, according to one analyst.…

The dramatic events of last week mean that there will shortly be three by-elections. These include Mid-Bedfordshire, as a result of the resignation of Nadine Dorries, and Selby and Ainsty, to replace Nigel Adams. However, the most prominent will be one in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where voters decide on a successor to Boris Johnson, who has represented the seat in London’s commuter belt for eight years. The betting markets have all but written off the Conservatives’ chances of retaining the seat. With £7,284 matched on Betfair, punters have Labour as favourites at 1.1 (90.9%), with the Conservatives at 9.8 (10.2%) and the Lib Dems at 160 (0.6%). Smarkets think that a Labour victory is even more of a certainty. With £1,200 matched it also has Labour as favourites, on…

Big Tech’s flawed advertising James BallThe Atlantic Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple gobble up around $340bn of the annual $500bn advertising spend outside China, says James Ball. Yet users hate advertisements, they’re “easily exploited” for fraud and encourage “controversial practices” such as tracking. Fewer than 1% of users click on them. Things are set to get worse. In the ChatGPT era of AI-generated low-quality content, we will have a “grey goo” internet “created by algorithms for algorithms”. But the improved targeting of users AI may bring creates a conflict of interest. If the most valuable piece of a target’s identifying data is, say, that they read a paper enjoyed by rich people, that paper’s home page “now becomes the most expensive place” for advertisers to reach its readers. Why pay…

unherd.com Conservative party think tanks have been “puzzling” over why “young people hate them”, says Nicholas Harris. The reason is obvious. Historically, getting on the housing ladder and having children turned young leftists into middle-aged conservatives. Yet with the oldest millennials now pushing forty, many are still locked into long-term renting by inflated house prices and high marginal tax rates. A third of those aged between 35 and 45 rent privately, as opposed to a tenth in 1997 (a chunk of the non-renters aren’t property owners either, but instead still live with their parents). Too many young people “live in very poor conditions, kept there by private landlords who suffer from near-criminal levels of apathy” while charging eye-watering rents: I once paid rent equal to 40% of the London Living…

Investors always look for parallel eras in past markets and a favourite idea at the moment is that we are doomed to repeat the 1970s. Some argue that this will mean a new star rises again in the investment firmament: gold, which started 1970 at $41 an ounce and finished the decade at $459. Many people – me included – are sceptical about the case for these kinds of arguments about outsized gains. But there is a more reasonable claim that gold could still be a safe-haven asset in these uncertain times. So how can you add it to a portfolio, if you are so inclined? You could buy physical gold via bars and coins, but these command a premium that can be as much as 8% of the value…

Over the next few weeks, Nationwide will be handing a total of £340m to 3.4 million of its members under its widely publicised “Fairer Share” scheme. Qualifying members will each get £100 paid to their accounts between 13 June and 30 June. However, the building society’s decision to exclude some of its long-standing customers from the distribution – which is being paid after it reported record profits – has attracted fierce criticism from those who think the criteria used are unfair. To qualify, members must have had – as of 31 March 2023 – a current account and either a savings account or a mortgage, and the current account must have been “active” in the first three months of the year (the definition varies depending on the exact type of…

Annuity rates have risen sharply over the past month. A 65-year-old with a £100,000 pension fund can now buy an annuity income of more than £7,000 a year for life, according to Hargreaves Lansdown. Compare that with two years ago, when £100,000 bought less than £5,000 a year. The question is whether annuity rates will remain at these levels or go even higher. Rates have increased in the past few weeks because they’re closely linked to gilt yields. These have been rising in line with expectations that interest rates are going to have to remain higher for longer in order to get unexpectedly sticky inflation under control. So, if you think the inflation problem is going to be prolonged, there is good reason to expect even higher rates. Alternatively, however,…

Over the last four weeks three of my long tips have appreciated, while four have fallen. Builder DR Horton advanced from $110.29 to $115.17, Gamma Communications rose from 1,153p to 1,200p and discount chain B&M rose from 495p to 539p. Computacenter fell from 2,442p to 2,302p, brick and tile manufacturer Ibstock dipped from 131p to 130p and estate agent Savills slipped from 935p to 901p. What’s more, luxury-retailer Burberry went down from 2,541p to below the 2,200p stop-loss, closing the position. Counting Burberry, my long tips are making net profits of £880. Only one of my eight short tips fell, with electric car-charging group EVgo plunging from $5.80 to $3.82. The rest rose, with real-estate investment trust Digital Realty increasing from $98.53 to $104.19, AST SpaceMobile advancing from $4.97 to…

Charles Ponzi was born in Lugo in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna in 1882.Although he studied at the University of Rome, he was more interested in spending money than absorbing information. He eventually left without getting a degree. He then decided to seek his fortune in the United States, emigrating to New York in 1903. Ponzi started out as a waiter and then secured a position at a bank in Canada, where he was convicted of fraud for writing himself a cheque for $400 shortly after it collapsed. He then tried to sell advertising and run his wife’s fruit business, failing in both endeavours. What was the investment? In 1919 Ponzi noticed that although international postal coupons were much cheaper in Europe than in the US, when consumers redeemed…

2015 Bluebell Vineyard Estates, Hindleap Blanc de Blancs, England £32.95, bluebellwines.com English Wine Week starts tomorrow, and I have selected one of the most serene and beautiful wines for you to raise a glass to our thrilling home-grown wine industry. This is a noble creation made from 100% chardonnay and with a mighty 52 months spent resting on its lees before disgorgement. Firm, taut and cleansing, this is a rapier-sharp blanc de blancs that awakens the senses and brings a sense of drama to proceedings. The value afforded here is spectacular, as I would match this creation to Champagnes at more than twice the ticket price, so mark my words – this is a world-class wine, drinking perfectly right now! In addition, the clever folk at Bluebell make a sensational…

“We don’t need more digital currency,” Gary Gensler, chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), tells CNBC. “We already have digital currency: it’s called the US dollar”. Last week the US regulator and its pugnacious boss launched an all-out assault on the cryptocurrency sector, says Edward Helmore in The Guardian. The SEC filed a lawsuit alleging that Coinbase, the biggest American crypto platform, is running an unregistered securities exchange. The SEC has also levelled a string of even more serious allegations against Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange: “Binance entities engaged in an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law,” says Gensler. Both platforms dispute the charges. Departing to Dubai? The claim that the exchanges should have registered with…

Shares in US stock-exchange operator Nasdaq slumped by 10% on Monday after it agreed to buy software firm Adenza for $10.5bn, says CNBC. The deal, a record purchase for Nasdaq, comprises $5.75bn in cash and 85.6 million shares of Nasdaq’s common stock, with Adenza’s former owners, the fund Thoma Bravo, receiving a 14.9% stake in Nasdaq, making it one of the company’s top shareholders. Nasdaq has been on a buying spree to diversify its portfolio of technology and intellectual property. This latest deal will fit in with CEO Adena Friedman’s desire to move Nasdaq “beyond its historical roots in running exchanges”, says Alexander Osipovich in The Wall Street Journal. Already it sells market data to asset managers and “provides brokers with software to detect market manipulation”. Buying Adenza will give…

Four to buy Greencore The Sunday Times Greencore boasts of being the world’s top “fresh pre-packaged sandwich-maker”, producing “795 million sarnies, pies [and] quiches” a year. Industry-wide sandwich sales are still only at 85% of pre-Covid levels as the rise of working from home dents demand for food on the go. The shares look undervalued on eight times earnings as commodity prices ease and there is long-term growth in convenience food. 80p Haleon Shares This £30bn consumer healthcare giant was spun off from pharmaceutical business GSK last year. Haleon boasts a stable of trusted brands, including pain reliever Panadol and Sensodyne toothpaste along with various vitamins and supplements. The group should enjoy structural growth as shoppers in emerging markets increasingly opt for more “premium” personal healthcare products. Net debt, £9.9bn…

The artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT, which is taking the world by storm, has developed a reputation for wacky answers to basic questions. For example, it decided there were no countries that start with V, which might come as a surprise to anyone in Vietnam, Venezuela, or indeed the Vatican. But when it said that an American radio host had been convicted of embezzlement it went too far. Mark Walters, the founder of a pro-gun radio station in Georgia, has sued the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, for libel. He is not alone. In April, the Australian mayor of Hepburn Shire threatened to sue ChatGPT after learning that it was telling people he had been involved in a foreign bribery scandal. In fact, he had never been charged. It remains to…

“We were barred from the working mens’ club on our street, because my dad was black. It gave me a proper idea of justice and of taking a moral stance. When I got into the Spice Girls, I went back to that club and said: ‘I’m going to report you.No, in fact I’m going to buy this place, because you didn’t let me in when I was a kid.’” Mel B, former member of pop band the Spice Girls, quoted in The Observer “There are no solutions. Here are only trade-offs.” Economist Thomas Sowell, quoted in The Washington Examiner “The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth generally deadens the talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he…

adamsmith.org Australia has the world’s highest cigarette taxes in the world and “pioneered plain packaging”, says Tim Worstall. Yet the country’s fight against tobacco has started to backfire: smoking among young people “has increased sixfold since 2019”. This illustrates a timeless point. While a certain amount of regulation and taxation will discourage an activity, if a government goes too far with punitive rules then people will start ignoring the law altogether and the black market steps in. Australia’s smoking rules have fostered “a large illegal tobacco sector”. Illegal cigarettes sell for much less than the official price, which means consumption is likely to end up higher overall, which is the opposite of the desired policy effect. In the same way, US prohibition didn’t “stop booze consumption”, while 18th-century British brandy…

Activist fund Starboard Value has taken a 2% stake in a British biotech firm whose co-founder is trying to take back control, says The Times. Abcam, which supplies protein research kits to the life-science sector, abandoned its London listing last year in favour of a sole listing on the Nasdaq exchange in the US. Now co-founder Jonathan Milner, who hold 6.3% of the shares, is pushing to be installed as executive chair, saying that Abcam suffers from “sustained financial underperformance and value destruction” due to a lack of focus and rising costs. Abcam says that Milner’s claims are “without merit and self-serving” and that it has “worked tirelessly and constructively” with him, including offering him a seat on the board.…

“The wheel is come full circle,” says Shakespeare’s Edmund when confronted with the carnage surrounding him at the end of King Lear. The notion of a wheel of fortune has endured since antiquity. There are good times and bad times. There are bull markets and bear markets. There is boom and bust, a pattern chancellor Gordon Brown said he was going to eliminate. Commodities, for instance, are very prone to secular bull markets, or supercycles. In 1947, Edward Dewey and Edwin Dakin published a book called Cycles: The Science of Prediction. It is now out of print; but Dewey and Dakin noticed a 54-year index cycle in wholesale prices – in other words, commodity prices – going back to 1790. Based on this they made projections for the future. They…

● The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has announced new rules for firms selling cryptocurrencies to users in the UK, following government legislation that brought these promotions into the regulator’s orbit, says Reuters. From 8 October 2023, firms marketing crypto assets to UK consumers will need to introduce a “cooling-off period” for first-time investors. Platforms will also be banned from “refer a friend” bonuses and must put in place clear warnings about the risks of crypto. Any adverts featuring digital assets must have clear risk warnings and be “clear, fair and not misleading”. The FCA is trying to make it clear to consumers that crypto is a high-risk asset class, and not suitable for all investors. ● New forecasts suggest that car insurance premiums are expected to continue rising over the…

● The government is offering people the option to make additional national insurance (NI) contributions for missed years going back to 2006 but had previously said they would have to do so by 31 July. But with the Department for Work and Pensions struggling to cope with demand, the deadline has now been moved back to 5 April 2025. It’s an option worth investigating (top-ups have usually been limited to the past six years only), but use tools such as the government’s online state-pension forecasting service to check whether it’s right for you. ● Planning on retiring early? If so, have you thought about how you’ll replace the income that you won’t be receiving from the state pension system in the first few years of retirement? The cost of this…

Shipping is not a particularly glamorous industry. However, it is crucial to the global economy, as around 90% of the world’s traded goods travel by sea. The sector has also been hampered by both Covid and the recent backlash against globalisation, which has seen countries around the world focus on encouraging companies to move supply chains closer to home. Nonetheless, the long-term outlook remains auspicious. The expanding global middle class is buying more and more goods from overseas, which means that the volume of goods shipped worldwide is set to keep growing. One company benefiting from the rise of global shipping is Clarkson (LSE: CKN). Clarkson provides shipping services, mainly as a shipbroker, negotiating deals between those who own and operate ships and those who want to use them to…

“Microsoft’s cloud services are one of its fastest-growing segments” The following three stocks are from very different industries, but their characteristics demonstrate resilience throughout economic cycles, and each is driven by long-term growth themes in our framework of three megatrends: demographic changes, future of technology, and resource scarcity. Ferrari’s growth driver Ferrari (Milan: RACE) has a well-known brand, enviable pricing power and a loyal customer base built on a strong franchise. Many of its cars sell out before production even begins. Ferrari is well positioned to benefit over the next decade from the growth of the middle class in emerging markets, where the number of high-net-worth individuals is increasing most rapidly. In the electric-vehicle sector, Ferrari has entered the hybrid market. Its first hybrid car, the SF90 Stradale, was the…