Innehållsförteckning för Issue 931 från MoneyWeek

One way of measuring market sentiment is to look at how far the average stock falls when it issues a profit warning. Do that in the UK at the moment and it sums up the general malaise in the investing community quite nicely. In the depths of the eurozone crisis of 2011, if your profits disappointed, the average hit to your share price on the day of the warning was around 17% (in normal times it is more like 10%). Back in 2008 (when the financial world really was on the brink of going to hell in a handbasket) it was slightly more than 20%. By the end of last year, according to Montanaro Asset Management it was 21%. Yes, investors today are, on this measure at least, even more…

Ball Corporation is one of 2019’s most promising stocks, Rivulet Capital’s Oscar Schafer told the Barron’s Roundtable. Having snapped up British rival Rexam in 2016, Ball has become the world’s biggest drinks can manufacturer; it also produces metal packaging for food and household products. Environmental worries surrounding single-use plastic packaging are good news for makers of aluminium cans, which are “infinitely recyclable”. Global consumption of drinks is ticking up as emerging markets become richer, while the decline in “big beer” sales volumes is being more than offset by rising demand for craft beers and mixed drinks. Schafer sees scope for the shares to rise by 30%.…

The man who promised he’d “help save Earth for humanity” and “colonise Mars” is now being forced to focus on some more “mundane goals”, says Russ Mitchell in the Los Angeles Times. In a note to employees last week Musk announced that although last year “was the most successful... in Tesla’s history”, he was going to fire 2,500 workers (around 7% of the company’s full-time workforce) in order to cut costs. The hope is that this will help get Tesla closer to its goal of a $35,000 mass-market Model 3 electric car, which currently looks like a “mirage”. At present, “none of Tesla’s cars... is priced for a middle-income buyer”. Customers usually pay around $60,000 for a Model 3 after adding a few extras; they start at $44,000. The news…

To avoid a “catastrophic crash-out” from the EU on 29 March, MPs have begun “wresting control of the process from the government”, says the Financial Times. This is a “justifiable effort to forge consensus” in the absence of a working government majority. MPs should “legislate against a no-deal outcome” and seek to extend Article 50. They should then hold “indicative votes to test support for other options”. However, if none can win a majority and Theresa May’s deal “remains deadlocked”, then a second referendum seems the only option, it says. Voters don’t seem “very keen for MPs to pass them the buck”, says John Curtice in The Daily Telegraph. Popular support for a second vote is not as great as the People’s Vote campaigners suggest. According to polls, around two-thirds…

Zimbabwe remains on edge following a violent crackdown on fuel-price protests that has left 12 people dead, says Joseph Cotterill in the Financial Times. There are rumours that the “days of beatings and arrests carried out by soldiers against opposition and civic activists” are leading to a split within the ruling Zanu-PF party and in the security forces. After he replaced Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa promised a “new Zimbabwe”, says Panashe Chigumadzi in The New York Times. Hopes he would deliver this have “died” – the country is mired in an economic crisis and Mnangagwa “has turned out to be no different from the strongman he served for decades”. Even the hope he would be the kind of “decisive benevolent dictator” the economist Dambisa Moyo has argued…

Albert Edwards, the ultra-bearish global strategist at French bank Société Générale, has argued for many years now that the world is facing a financial “ice age”, with the developed world following Japan into an era of collapsing bond yields and flattening equity prices. He hasn’t changed his mind yet, telling a conference in London this month that yields on US government debt will slide below zero percent during the next recession. That next recession is shaping up to be a painful one, given high levels of corporate debt among US companies. But the US is not the only one in trouble. China is still struggling, and in Europe, Italy – led by populists including Matteo Salvini (pictured) – is the big danger, says Edwards. Unusually, the European Union (EU) is…

Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford is to have his pay doubled to £150,000 a week, reports the Daily Mirror, to prevent him being poached by Spanish team Real Madrid. Rashford’s new £7.8m salary will put him well ahead of his Premier League compatriots – though with an average annual wage of £2.6m, they are hardly on the breadline. The average professional footballer in England earns around £770,000, according to figures compiled by Footy.com . It’s a different story further down the football pyramid, of course. Championship players have to make do with around £570,000 a year; those in League 1 get £120,000; those in League 2, the fourth tier of English professional football, average around £58,000. The average wage earned by top-flight footballers in the FA’s Women’s…

Investors could still be losing as much as half of their profits to charges, says Ali Hussain in Sunday Times Money, because fund platforms are flouting EU rules that require them to publish the total annual cost of fund investing both as a single percentage and in pounds and pence. Different firms have interpreted these rules in different ways, with certain providers only displaying the costs after a customer has signed up to their platform. Firms that do display the full price of investing up front – factoring in fund ongoing charge figures (OCFs), transaction fees and platform charges – include Hargreaves Lansdown (HL), Fidelity International and Tilney Bestinvest. By contrast, rivals Charles Stanley Direct, Interactive Investor, AJ Bell Youinvest and the Share Centre do not show these fees until…

A couple who launched a competition to raffle off their £3m Hampshire home “caused fury” after changing the first prize to £110,000 in cash and keeping up to £640,000 in “running costs”, says the Daily Mail. Mark and Sharon Beresford promised to give away their riverside property if they sold 250,000 raffle tickets at £25 each. However, they only sold 30,000 tickets, triggering a clause that allowed them to give a cash prize to the value of 75% of the final ticket sales, less the cost of promotion. However, entrants aren’t happy with the couple’s claim to have racked up £450,000 in advertising, PR, legal and marketing bills, and devoted £187,000 worth of time to the venture.…

Now is a good time to fill in gaps in your national insurance contribution (NIC) history. Doing so will ensure you are entitled to receive the full state pension. At present people who reach state-pension age after 5 April 2016 have until April 2023 to fill gaps between 2006-2007 and 2015-2016. However, people doing this before 5 April 2019 (when rates get set at £15 a week) will be able to benefit from especially favourable rates. For example, buying one week of NICs for 2010 -2011 currently costs £12.05, or £626.60 for a year. After 5 April 2019, this would cost £780, an extra £153.40. Buying a single year can increase a state pension by more than £200 a year for the rest of your life – more than £4,000…

Nothing beats cold hard cash. In bull markets, investors are busy chasing rising stock prices; when the cycle turns, they rediscover the appeal of a steady dividend. No wonder. Reinvested income accounts for the vast majority of long-term returns. As the latest annual Barclays Equity Gilt Study notes, a £100 stake on UK equities in 1945 would have been worth £6,294 in real terms at the end of last year, assuming the gross income had been reinvested every year. Without dividend reinvestment, the £100 would barely have tripled after inflation. Now that global markets are wobbling, defensive stocks offering safe dividend yields – and the prospect of at least some share-price growth – are especially sought after. That combination appeals more than cash accounts offering paltry interest rates, especially as…

The industry did not do a great job with alcohol-free beers in the past, Heineken MD David Forde admits to the Daily Mail. They just didn’t taste great. But now brewers are starting to crack it. Heineken’s offering, 0.0, has been a “runaway success”, Forde says, selling 15 million bottles last year. Forde predicts sales will double in 2019, and he is launching it on draught as well as a booze-free version of its premium Italian brand, Birra Moretti. Suffolk brewery St Peter’s has also launched a draught version of its 0% golden ale. For bitter drinkers, Greene King has a low-alcohol brew based on its Old Speckled Hen. Nirvana’s beers are an interesting addition to an increasingly diverse market, says trade magazine The Drinks Business. The big brewers tend…

Recruitment might not be the most glamorous sector, but it can be lucrative. Between 2014 and 2018 Hays (LSE: HAS) saw its revenue grow by 56% and its profits nearly double. At the same time it managed to achieve returns on capital of 25%. Given the backdrop of stagnant or falling real wages during this period, one would expect it to do even better now we’re starting to see the first real wage growth in more than a decade and companies are fighting harder to find good staff. However, this hasn’t been reflected in Hays’s share price, which has fallen by around a quarter from its peak of 209p last October. One big reason for this decline is the risk of a slowdown in the global economy. This would not…

I recently read a thrilling book about investment called 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by US stockbroker Thomas Phelps. It’s a classic, first published in 1972. Here are three quotes from it that neatly sum up Phelps’s message and go a long way towards introducing our approach too. “It would be hard to find a worse slogan than ‘You’ll never go broke taking a profit.’” “Every sale is a confession of error.” “In Alice in Wonderland one had to run fast in order to stand still. In the stockmarket, the evidence suggests, one who buys right must stand still in order to run fast.” Profit from doing nothing You can deduce from this that Phelps was a proponent of a “buy and hold” investment approach – as are…

The Donald went to “The Wall” and the debate goes on. The president visited America’s southern border towns earlier this month, trying to drum up support for his long-promised border wall with Mexico. Meanwhile, the US is losing ground. The country is at least $1.2trn poorer today than it was in 2016. But money isn’t everything. Maybe there are other things – like border security – that are more important. This week, with malice towards none and charity for all, let’s spare a thought for border security. “The case for a wall is mixed, inconclusive, with contributions of malarkey” Walls are built to keep “them” out… or in. The walls of Jericho, Athens’ “Long Walls”, the Berlin Wall – all served a purpose. Hadrian built a wall across Britain to…

Patisserie Valerie went into administration this week. The cafe chain’s downfall puts 3,000 jobs at risk, and means an estimated personal loss of £189m for executive chairman Luke Johnson (pictured), who has extended a £3m unsecured interest-free loan to the business to cover wages in January, says The Times. He bought “PatVal” in 2006, listing it on London’s junior market, Aim, in 2014 with a value of £170m. That figure rose to £511m last June, but the revelation of “significant, potentially fraudulent accounting irregularities” prompted an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office. Parent firm Patisserie Holdings found a £40m hole in its accounts. It has since said the scandal was even worse than first thought. Good week for: Churches that have introduced contactless collections have seen their takings rise by…

Palladium is on a roll. It has risen by 65% to $1,400 per ounce, a new record high, since mid-August, eclipsing gold for the first time in over a decade last month. The metal is used in emission-reducing catalytic converters in petrol engines. High environmental standards and the backlash against diesel in Europe, along with new emissions standards in China, are fuelling demand. Supply, meanwhile, is looking more and more constrained. Palladium “is more valuable than gold as it is rarer”, Michael Jones, chief executive of Platinum Group Metals told Barron’s. While there are dozens of gold mines around the world, only two are primarily mining palladium. There are “no signs” that palladium’s deficit is going away, Dominic Schnider, head of commodities and APAC forex at UBS Wealth Management told…

In 2018, Jamaica’s benchmark stockmarket index rose by 29% in US dollar terms, the world’s best equity-market performance. In the past five years, it has quadrupled. This sort of jump usually reflects a radical improvement in the macroeconomic backdrop. But in this case it’s chiefly due to the market’s small size and illiquidity. It “doesn’t take much investment to make a tiny market boom”, says Bloomberg. The total value of the index’s 37 stocks is less than $11bn, “smaller than the valuation of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc”. Moreover, many companies are majority-owned by foreign conglomerates, which further reduces the number of shares available. Some stocks don’t trade “for days or even weeks”.…

Investors have been looking forward to several big tech flotations in 2019, says Olivia Feld in The Sunday Telegraph, starting with ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft. But the US government shutdown is causing delays. Staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the financial regulator overseeing initial public offerings (IPOs), have not worked since 27 December. Firms preparing an IPO issue a draft prospectus that the SEC comments on, usually within 20 days, before a final prospectus emerges. Proceeding without SEC feedback is deemed risky. The SEC has yet to comment on Uber and Lyft’s initial drafts, so it will be some time before they come to market.…

For the past four months, Swedish politicians have been scrambling to produce a workable coalition out of an inconclusive election result, which saw the Social Democrats come top with 28% of the vote. The big problem was the fragmented nature of the result, complicated by the fact no one was willing to form a coalition with the far-right Sweden Democrats, who got 17.5% of the vote. In the end the Social Democrats managed to get the parliamentary support of the Centre Party and Liberals (as well as the tacit support of the Left Party) by promising to implement many of their policies. Indeed, the unstable nature of the coalition is highlighted by the fact that, even with many centrist parties abstaining, a plurality of Swedish MPs voted against reappointing the…

Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, who died last week (see page 33), popularised passive investing (tracking the market rather than paying a fund manager to pick stocks on your behalf). He did investors a huge service by showing them how to cut costs and boost returns, making life much harder for closet trackers (see below) in particular, in the process. Yet even Bogle had concerns about the growth in indexing. In one of his last articles for The Wall Street Journal, he noted that the “Big Three” passive asset managers – Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street – could easily grow to “own 30% or more of the US market – effective control. I do not believe that... would serve the national interest”. “If you own every airline, you want each…

The banks were meant to be heading to Frankfurt. The hedge funds were off to Paris. The fintech stars would decamp to Berlin, and the traders would create new bases in Brussels or Barcelona, or anywhere where they could stay within the EU’s single market. When the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016 one of the more plausible warnings, amid some fairly wild and hysterical ones, was that our massive financial services industry would take a huge hit. After all, the City had prospered over the last three decades from turning itself into the key finance centre for the whole of Europe. If British firms were no longer allowed to market themselves across the continent, they would suddenly look a lot weaker. The Europeans make their move The…

The dirty but profitable bird business Editorial The Economist In a chicken shed near Colchester, thousands of chickens sit on piles of their own excrement while maggots crawl over the bodies of dead birds, says The Economist. But if the chicken business is dirty, it is also profitable. While pork and beef consumption in OECD countries hasn’t changed since 1990, chicken consumption is up by 70%, boosted by talk of a possible link between red meat and the risk of colon cancer and a growing appetite for the meat in poorer countries. Chickens now account for 23 billion of the 30 billion animals on farms and have become the most widely traded meat in the world. Chicken has been a flashpoint in various trade negotiations – arguments over chlorinated US…

A15%-per-year compound rate of return over 36 years will multiply an investor’s money 153-fold. Although this sounds impossible, this is the return that Peter Spiller has generated since he took over at Capital Gearing Trust (LSE: CGT) in 1982. Ardent bulls, however, should steer clear. “Wealth preservation remains at the heart of everything we do,” says Spiller. This has meant a consistently bearish stance towards equities in recent years, resulting in investment returns well below the longterm average: 3.4% over one year, 24% over three years and 31% over five. Those who share Spiller’s views, though, will regard these returns as far superior to the safe alternatives of cash or government bonds. Moreover, in months in which global equities have fallen, CGT’s net asset value (NAV – the value of…

WeWork, which rents premises and then sub-lets them as trendy co-working office spaces, was recently valued at $47bn after Japanese investor SoftBank said it would invest a further $2bn in the group. While $2bn might sound like quite a vote of confidence, this was way down from an original $16bn. Moreover, the money is no longer coming from SoftBank’s $100bn Vision tech fund, whose investors had apparently “balked” at the commitment, reports the Financial Times. Little wonder – WeWork’s offices might be pretty, but it needs to show that it can make the profit needed to justify its stratospheric valuation. The company’s recent rebranding (as the “We Company”) and its addition of co-living and education branches is an attempt to show that it has growth potential beyond co-working. As co-founder…

Earlier this month the government’s new energy price cap came into effect. But unfortunately this doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax, confident in the knowledge you are not being ripped off. The cap puts a limit on the price a supplier can charge per kWh of electricity and gas you use. It has been set at £1,137 per year for a dual-fuel customer who uses a typical amount of gas and electricity and pays by direct debit. The trouble is that the cap is more expensive than a lot of deals on the market. The average consumer who switches supplier pays £921 per year, according to comparison site Compare the Market. So if you rest on your laurels as a result of the price cap it could cost…

You would imagine that pension-scheme members who have been overpaid should be given a reasonable period during which to rectify the problem, and not be subjected to unfair legal restrictions. But this certainly wasn’t the case when retired pension-scheme member David Carrington learnt that he had been paid £28,000 too much over 11 years. He had been contributing towards a fund run by TPT Retirement Solutions. When the scheme spotted the error, it told him it would immediately cut his pension by 40% in an attempt to claw back the overpayment. Carrington then sought to negotiate a settlement to pay back the money over an extended time period, but was told he would be expected to sign a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from discussing the case. Pension specialists accept that…

Dividend payouts by UK companies hit an all-time high of nearly £100bn last year, writes John Stepek. That was up 5.1% on the year before, according to Link Asset Services. And when you exclude special dividends (one-off returns of cash), the rise in underlying dividend payouts was even higher, at 8.7%, with banks and miners accounting for most of the growth. Combined with a grim year for share prices in 2018, that’s left UK stocks sitting on dividend yields that are higher than anything we’ve seen since the financial crisis era. One safety point we always emphasise is that unusually high dividend yields tend to imply there’s trouble down the road. A high-yielding stock often means that the market believes a dividend cut is coming soon. Yet even if there…

The Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci pinpointed the numerical pattern now named after him in the 13th century after studying how the number of rabbits increases over time. It is a sequence of numbers produced by adding the last two numbers together. It goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3 and then 5 (3+2), 8 (5+3) and so on. As the sequence progresses, the ratio between the last two numbers gets closer and closer to 1.618, which Fibonacci regarded as the “golden ratio”, because it occurs frequently in nature, for example in the patterns of sea shells. As a result, many traders think that the pattern should also have a subconscious impact on short-term price movements. In its simplest form, many traders use Fibonacci’s ratio to help them produce support and resistance…

Spirent Communications (LSE: SPT) provides testing, analytics and security for network systems and equipment. It has had a tough few years, but things are looking up. It has cut back on costs and secured several new contracts in the past year as customers have upgraded their telecoms systems. In a trading update last week, Spirent said it expects to exceed the market’s expectations for 2018, with profits up by 30% to between $75m and $77m. The group has a robust balance sheet with $120m in cash. The shares have risen by more than 40% in the last 12 months.…

Charles Ponzi was born in Italy in 1882 and emigrated to the US in 1903. For the next 16 years he held various menial jobs, and served time for various crimes, including fraud. In 1919 he set up a business  to exploit the difference in price between international postal coupons by buying them in Europe where they were cheap and redeeming them in the US. He raised money from the public by promising them he would double their money within 90 days (quickly changed to a 50% return in 45 days). How did the fraud work? Ponzi quickly realised that, although the arbitrage opportunity was real, delivering the expected returns was a practical impossibility since it would involve buying more coupons than could be transported. Even satisfying the original 18…

I tasted 1,272 Burgundies in the second week of January while compiling my 2017 Burgundy En Primeur Report. Only 167 of these gained my hard-earned accreditation, “QP”. Qualité prix or, to give it its full expression “rapport qualité prix”, is the French term for “value”, but it means much more than this. Great value wines are often thought of as cheapies that over-deliver, but I use these two capital letters to denote wines that demonstrate extraordinary value for money, no matter how steep the price tag may be. The 2017 vintage was a generous one and only the Chablis region suffered from lower yields on account of frost (again). It is good news that Burgundians finally have some wine to sell after two very short harvests. The wines are slender,…

$10m The donation singer Kanye West has promised the Turrell Art Foundation. The organisation funds the Roden Crater Project – artist James Turrell’s multi-decade transformation of an extinct volcano crater in Arizona into an open-air observatory, The Wall Street Journal reports. West said his visit to the site was “life-changing”. £12,029 The price per person for a pair of tickets to the sold-out England versus Australia World Cup cricket match this summer. They were listed for sale on Viagogo, a platform for reselling tickets to sporting and music events. The face value is £115 each. €9bn The cost estimated this week by CERN, the physics laboratory near Geneva, for building the 62-mile Future Circular Collider, a particle accelerator that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider running beneath France and Switzerland.…

Fears are growing that leveraged loans – a high-risk section of the corporate debt market, worth more than $1.2trn – could cause a “subprime mortgage-style meltdown”, say Anna Isaac and Tom Rees in The Daily Telegraph. This time, the borrowers are not US homeowners taking out mortgages, but “US companies with weaker credit ratings”, notes Jim Puzzanghera in the Los Angeles Times. Companies taking out such loans are often already heavily indebted. Last year, for example, toy shop chain Toys R Us and US department-store giant Sears collapsed under the strain of such debt. Investors have flocked to leveraged loans because typically the interest rates charged are not fixed but floating, so they rise along with central bank rates. But in their haste to invest, lenders have been willing to…

“Jim Yong Kim has resigned, three years ahead of schedule, as president of the World Bank… this Korean-American healthcare boffin has made a negligible impact. Critics note that China… now lends vastly more to poorer nations than the World Bank does, and wields more and more influence on their behaviour… Leading the field of alternative candidates for the umpteenth time is former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who I salute for her persistence. But let me go one better and propose Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born economist who began her career at the World Bank, rose via Goldman Sachs to the board of Barclays, and has written bracingly on the failures of aid, the decline of Western economic clout and the rise of China. The Trump family may be unfamiliar with…

Three to buy BAE Systems Shares In troubled times this defence giant offers steady growth at an “undemanding valuation”. The group’s impressive global diversification acts as a hedge against Brexit uncertainty, with BAE making 39% of sales to the US and 16% to Saudi Arabia. 2018 brought fighter jet orders from Qatar and frigate purchases from Australia, ensuring a good pipeline of work in the coming years. The shares offer a 4.6% prospective dividend yield. Full-year results on 21 February could prove a “big share-price catalyst”. 503p Fresnillo The Sunday Telegraph The election of left-wing firebrand Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) to the Mexican presidency last year worried shareholders in this Mexico-focused precious metals miner. But the new government has shelved talk of higher mining taxes. Precious metals are rallying,…

• Many people will be feeling a “certain schadenfreude” at Ryanair’s latest profit warning, says The Independent’s James Moore: the budget airline has “made scant effort to win friends among customers, staff, the media, even investors on occasion”. And CEO Michael O’Leary has warned forecasts may be reduced further owing to intense competition over the winter. However, Ryanair still has “both the resources and the wherewithal to outlast and outpunch its rivals when it comes to the current price war”. This means that when the fracas finally ends, Ryanair will be “in a good position to make back the money it has lost, and more”. • Before his arrest, Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn (pictured) was the “quintessential Davos figure”, says Bloomberg. However, instead of “hobnobbing with the global elite” at Davos,…

Tracker funds (trackers or index funds) invest in a basket of shares (or use derivatives) to mirror an underlying index (such as the FTSE All-Share). These funds don’t employ professional managers to decide what stocks to buy, and as a result, charge relatively low fees. The index fund will always underperform the market slightly after costs, but you can be confident it will otherwise track the market closely. Active funds do the opposite – they charge higher fees and employ stock pickers in the hope that they will beat the market. However, as we note in the story above, and as Jack Bogle’s success made clear, they often fail to do so. In practice it’s an arithmetical inevitability that both active and passive funds will collectively underperform the market. After…

• JK Rowling (pictured) may have finished writing the series of seven Harry Potter books around a dozen years ago, but the cash is still pouring in – and not just from the printed books. Her company, Pottermore, handles revenue from e-books, audiobooks and spin offs, and reported a pre-tax profit of £3.4m, after handing a royalty payment of £4.8m to Rowling, says the Daily Mirror. Add together profits from the printed books, films, theme parks and other merchandising, and Rowling’s worth has risen to some £777m. • Geisha Williams, the former chief executive of California power company PG&E, left with a severance package worth $2.5m. Williams was in the post for less than two years, and her tenure coincided with PG&E being saddled with liabilities of $30bn-plus as a…

“Every time I did a movie we would buy a house in the place that we were in – we would buy a ranch in Montana, or ‘Let’s have Thanksgiving in Sun Valley and be a skiing family’. We had these big houses, but we never had the infrastructure to live the life we were buying. By the time I sold my brownstone in New York, it had depreciated enormously.” Actress and former child star Brooke Shields (pictured), 53, on her family’s overinvestment in property, quoted on Telegraph.co.uk “People thought I was insane. They were up in arms when my books first came out, and now look: it’s a billions of dollars market.” Actress and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow on the food trends she adopted early – such as gluten-free –…

Peter Plumb, the CEO of food-delivery group Just Eat, is to step down from his role with immediate effect, the firm said on Monday. Plumb is to be replaced after 16 months on the job by the current chief customer officer, who has been appointed on an interim basis, says Sebastian McCarthy in City AM. In December activist hedge fund Cat Rock Capital had complained investors were still waiting for Just Eat to announce appropriate financial goals and for the board to hold management accountable with a properly aligned remuneration package. “Although there is no reference to the activist investor in Plumb’s departure announcement, one can... speculate the events are linked,” says Russ Mould of AJ Bell. Shares in Just Eat fell 2.3% on the news.…

This characterful beach hut overlooks North Beach in the popular seaside town of Southwold and is just a short walk from the local pier. It’s ideal for lazy days on the beach and perfect for the less reliable British summers. The hut was replaced in 2015. It has a kitchenette with a window overlooking open fields, while the front doors open onto a walkway with access to the beach. It is sold subject to a 30-year lease from 2009 with a right to renew for a further 30 years. The annual rent is £288 plus VAT. But can you guess the asking price? Answer on the side of this box.…

Could your pension be transferred into a “superfund”? Several new players in the pensions market say they are already in talks with companies about taking on their occupational pension schemes, even though the government has only just published a consultation document on how such arrangements would be governed. The idea is that a pension superfund would consolidate a number of defined benefit (DB) company pension schemes (where payouts are guaranteed) into one set-up, benefiting from economies of scale, operational efficiencies and – hopefully – a mix of investment styles. Members’ benefits would be unaffected, though savers in pension schemes underwritten by an employer currently facing financial difficulties might be relieved to transfer. Many employers, meanwhile, would be pleased to rid themselves of their pension liabilities, though they would be charged…

Thousands of people on low incomes and currently eligible to claim pensions credit will in future miss out on this benefit under new rules published last week by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Currently, pensioners whose partners are still below state retirement age can claim pension credit, a top-up to their state pension of around £255 a month, if their income is below set thresholds. From May, however, new pensioners with a partner still of working age will have to claim universal credit instead, with a maximum weekly payment for couples of around £115 a week. In the worst cases, new pensioners will miss out on around £7,300 of income a year they would be entitled to if reaching state retirement age today. The average age gap between…

Keith Richards has cut back on his drinking. That has got to be a sign of something. The comedian Bill Hicks once paid tribute to the Rolling Stones guitarist for sailing out care-free on a drink-and-drugs tour over the edge and finding, who knew, that there was a ledge beyond the edge. And what’s more, he seemed pretty happy out there on that ledge. Now, Richards is sending back new reports from his experiments in wild excess. “I pulled the plug on it. I got fed up with it,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “But I don’t notice any difference really – except for I don’t drink… I’ve done it. I didn’t want that anymore.” Fellow band member Ronnie Wood, who got sober in 2010, is happy with the changes…

• One area blockchain and smart contracts have always seemed particularly suitable for is supply chain management and logistics. The latest example of real-world blockchain use comes from the Ford Motor Company, says the Financial Times. Ford will use the technology to track the provenance of the cobalt used in the batteries for its electric cars. Working with battery-maker LG Chem and Chinese cobalt producer Huayou Cobalt, it will monitor the shipment of the metal from Huayou’s mine in DR Congo to ensure none is produced by workers subjected to human rights abuses. Up to 20% of the cobalt from DR Congo is mined by hand. • A transatlantic battle for supremacy is breaking out in the world of free share-trading apps. British startup Freetrade, whose fee-free share-buying service went…

The past fortnight has been kind to our long positions. After pushing through the 400p level, where we suggested you put a stop-order, JD Sports reached 437p. Similarly, Greene King rose from 553p to 596p, helped in part by optimism over the appointment of Nick Mackenzie as the new CEO. John Laing increased to 351p (from 333p). Only Cineworld declined, from 273p to 257p. But that wasn’t enough to prevent our four longs from making a total profit of £554, up from £180. However, if the rise in shares around the world was good for our long positions, it did nothing for our shorts. Indeed, every one of our six share shorts went against us. Netflix rose from $297 to $339, Twitter increased from $29.95 to $33.27, Just Eat is…

Interserve (LSE: IRV) is an outsourcing company that employs 75,000 people, including 45,000 in the UK. Most of its £3.2bn turnover comes from government contracts. Borrowings have more than doubled to £650m since 2016 and Interserve recently held a second round of talks with lenders over refinancing its heavy debt; an earlier round took place last April 2018. A year on from Carillion’s collapse, Interserve is determined not to follow in its footsteps. But the share price has fallen by 90% in the last 12 months. With short sellers piling in, further falls are likely.…

A classic Jag has come up for sale – one that’s geared to protecting its passengers rather than the environment (see left). But that’s reasonable given that it was formerly used to ferry around Margaret Thatcher. The former prime minister’s Jaguar XJ8L saloon, her last state car, has a titanium-lined roof, ballistic steel armour in the body, underfloor Kevlar protection and bullet-resistant borosilicate glass. Experts QinetiQ put it through its paces, even blasting it with high explosives from just three metres away. And it still has the blue police siren and flashing lights behind the radiator grille. But while the car was built to withstand a fair amount of pain, inside the feel is pure luxury, with its ivory leather interior and charcoal trim, multimedia system and a DVD player…

• When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, starring Cate Blanchett (pictured), has been hailed as the most shocking play to open in London since Hair – one elderly woman fainted and had to be helped out of the theatre by young actor Samuel Tucker, says Liz Jones in The Mail on Sunday. Surprise, surprise, tickets for the show, “despite costing £50”, are already sold out. “Sadly, I quickly realised the play, being staged at the National’s tiny Dorfman Theatre, should really be called When We Have Sufficiently Tortured The Poor Audience.” At best, the play is perplexing. Tucker explains it thus: “For all women out there, Blanchett is saying even when you are 49 you can… be all-powerful and sexy”. We don’t have to spend £50 to find that…