Innehållsförteckning för Issue 965 från MoneyWeek

Care homes are a long-term growth market, says Wirtschaftswoche. Another one million people are expected to need carers in the next 15 years; if a third of them – the same proportion as today – end up in a home, that means another 230,000 places will be required. Private care homes are expanding very quickly. Enter France’s Orpea, a European leader in this field. It operates 950 facilities with around 97,000 beds across 14 countries. Overall sales rose by almost 10% to €1.84bn in the first half. Homes containing another 17,400 beds are in the pipeline. The group is also eyeing up Latin America, where another 700,000 people are expected to need care over the next decade.…

Last week’s takeover bid from Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) for the London Stock Exchange (LSE) was met with a “withering rejection”, notes Christopher Williams in The Sunday Telegraph. The LSE called HKEX’s plans “simply not credible”. Regulators aren’t too happy about the deal either, with the Financial Conduct Authority making it clear that the proposed deal “would face tough regulatory hurdles, both in Britain and abroad”. The deal comes as the LSE is in the process of negotiating a “landmark” tie-up with Refinitiv, the former Thomson Reuters trading terminals business. “It is not hard to see why” regulators around the world are going to have “major problems” with this deal, says Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. The LSE’s clearing business, with its “commanding” market share in a…

Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO) are one of the “unconventional” monetary policy tools used by the European Central Bank (ECB). The ECB agrees to lend money to commercial banks over a set period at a very low rate, on condition that they lend this money out into the “real” economy (by making loans to businesses, for example). The point is to give banks a cheap source of funding that they are encouraged to lend out, in order both to raise bank profit margins and to boost economic activity and growth. The first tranche of TLTRO loans was launched in June 2014, with a second batch following in March 2016. The third tranche was launched in June this year, and began in September. Initially the plan was that banks would be…

• A team of economists has revealed that Hollywood actresses earn around $1.1m less per film than their male co-stars, says The Observer. This gender pay gap gets wider with age, and by the time the female stars hit 50, they are earning just under $4m per film less. The researchers analysed wages from 1980 and 2015, and found that there has been little change for the better over time. • KPMG, the accountancy, consultancy and auditing firm, has handed partners in its restructuring division a 25% payrise. KPMG is hoping to avoid breaking its business up, after the Big Four accountancy firms were accused of conflicts of interest between the auditing and consulting parts of its busines. The restructuring division has around 20 partners, reports The Sunday Times, and…

HMRC has updated its guidance on the structures and buildings allowance (SBA). This tax relief, first announced in 2018, entitles businesses to 2% of the cost of buying or improving their business premises, provided they did so on or after 29 October 2019. The building may not have been used as a residence at any stage. Companies may claim the annual allowance for up to 50 years. The SBA requires an allowance statement identifying the structure and outlining the cost and date of the investment; if ownership changes, the buyer can only claim the SBA with a copy of the statement. If you have already handed in a return for a time in which you incurred costs that qualify for the SBA, says the tax Tips and Advice newsletter, you…

Revive the single market Editorial The Economist The EU’s single market “was once breathtaking in its ambition to eliminate all internal… barriers for goods, services, capital and people”, says The Economist. But it has fallen badly behind the economies it was designed to shape. Ten years ago, 40 of the world’s biggest listed firms by market capitalisation were headquartered in the EU. Now only two are – “in 32nd and 36th place”. The benefits of the single market are clear: making a product meeting 28 national standards is more expensive than fulfilling one EU rule, while a genuine pan-European market would break down local oligopolies, lowering consumer prices, and spread innovation faster. One way to revive the single market is to ensure member states stop ignoring its rules to protect…

bankunderground.co.uk Economists have long entertained the idea that beliefs are powerful enough to grow the economy or depress it, say Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Sinem Hacioglu Hoke and Kristina Bluwstein. In this view, hopes of rosy times ahead are enough in themselves to drive growth. It’s a “fascinating view”, but hard to test. Hard, but not impossible. The authors combined data on patent applications and survey forecasts to isolate news of potential technological progress, and studied how macroeconomic data responded. They found that positive news induces a slow but steady increase in aggregate productivity. And despite the long time that it takes for news to translate into actual meaningful technological improvements, the expectation that it may happen pushes up consumption and investment, and hence output. The authors were able to determine that…

Passive investing is on a roll. In the US both exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and passively managed funds have recorded massive inflows. Both products share the same idea: keep costs low and eliminate the risk of an active fund manager underperforming a benchmark index by just buying the stocks inside an index. The 20 American index funds with the largest net inflows over the past three years raked in a combined $626bn. Those funds, nearly all of which are ETFs, hold a combined $1.4trn. One key factor driving this has been lower costs. Costs have fallen fast The average expense ratio of America’s top 20 funds is 0.07%, nearly 0.4% lower than last year’s figure of 0.48%, according to fund platform Morningstar. The industry’s largest index tracker, the Vanguard Total Stock…

Box trading was a strategy developed by the dancer-turned-trader Nicholas Darvas (pictured), who wrote about it in the 1960 book called How I Made $2,000,000 in The Stock Market. As the book’s title suggested, Darvas claimed that his system, along with some fundamental analysis to spot industries with plenty of growth potential, helped him make $2m in the stockmarket during an 18-month period in the late 1950s. The idea is that shares tend to trade within a certain range, or ‘box’. The upper and lower bounds are determined by the highs and lows within a certain period, such as 52 weeks. Darvas’ theory is a momentum-based strategy, which involves looking for stocks that are bursting out of the box by making new highs or lows. Provided a rise was accompanied…

Mitchells & Butlers (LSE: MAB) is a restaurant and pub operator with around 1,700 outlets across the UK. Its famous brands include All Bar One, Harvester and Nicholson’s pubs. Last year’s dividend cut and shareholder rebellion seem to have been shrugged off, while competitor Greene King’s takeover by Hong Kong’s CKA has given the broader sector a fillip. The latest trading update highlighted sales consistently ahead of the market, while the share price has risen by over 40% in the last 12 months to its highest level in over three years.…

Harry Marks was born in London in 1855 and left school at 16 to seek his fortune in America. After a brief stint as a salesman, he became a journalist in Texas, and then New York, eventually becoming editor of the Daily Mining News. After moving back to London in 1883 he set up the Financial and Mining News (later shortened to the Financial News), remaining editor until 1909. The magazine focused on giving financial advice and exposing financial and public corruption. What was the scam? Marks’ most flagrant abuse of his position was with the Rae-Transvaal Gold Mining Company, a firm that he tipped heavily in his newspaper. Unknown to his readers, it was created when he acquired a farm in the Transvaal (South Africa) for £10,300, and then…

An underpopulated region in southern Italy is offering incomers up to €25,000 if they move to one of its villages, set up a business and live there for three years, reports The Guardian. Molise is Italy’s second-smallest region and has a population of just 305,000, which is shrinking – 9,000 people have left in the last five years. Anyone who moves to a village with a population of less than 2,000 qualifies, says Donato Toma, the region’s president. They will receive €700 a month for up to three years, as long as they set up a business. “They can open any sort of activity”, says Toma. “A bread shop, a stationery shop, a restaurant, anything. It’s a way to breathe life into our towns while also increasing the population.” Good…

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quick to point the finger at Iran for Saturday’s Abqaiq attack despite Tehran’s denials. Donald Trump tweeted that America was “locked and loaded” and pledged support for his Saudi allies. The standoff between Saudi Arabia and Iran has deep religious and political roots and is “in many ways a regional equivalent of the Cold War”, says Jonathan Marcus on the BBC. The two sides are engaged in proxy conflicts, notably in Yemen where Riyadh has been conducting an unsuccessful war against Iran-backed Houthi rebels for the past four years. Neither side is prepared for a direct confrontation, but Saudi Arabia has been emboldened by the White House’s support and the Abqaiq incident “could upset the apple cart”. All sides have reasons to resist…

Bonds advanced after the attack on Saudi Arabia, with investors ignoring the potential for a rise in inflation (see page 4). This chart also suggests they are being complacent. As James Ferguson of MacroStrategy Partnership points out, there is a close link between the annual percentage change in the price of an equally-weighted basket of oil and gold prices and the annual rate of America’s consumer price inflation (CPI); the basket leads CPI by a month, so where it goes inflation follows. Interestingly, MacroStrategy Partnership’s research suggests that this basket of oil and gold is far more closely correlated to inflation than wage growth, which is widely considered a leading indicator of consumer price rises.…

Europe has a new technology giant. Prosus, a collection of consumer internet investments belonging to South African e-commerce group Naspers, floated in Amsterdam last week. It was valued at €125bn, making it the exchange’s third-biggest firm after Shell and Unilever. Prosus contains Naspers’ 31% in Tencent, the Chinese social media group that boasts the popular WeChat platform. Naspers’ $34m punt on Tencent at its inception in 2001 was “one of the most lucrative bets in corporate history”, says Toby Sterling on Reuters. Tencent is now worth $130bn. Prosus shares are being distributed to Naspers’ shareholders rather than being sold directly to the public.…

WeWork has suffered an “embarrassing setback”, say Eric Platt and James Fontanella-Khan in the Financial Times. The shared office space provider is delaying its planned initial public offering (IPO). A “chilly response” from institutional investors and calls by its biggest backer, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, to postpone the IPO have prompted it to wait a few months. While it still plans to list by the end of this year, or in early 2020, the failure to immediately list on the stockmarket means that it won’t be able to access a $6bn loan that was contingent on a successful listing. WeWork’s decision isn’t surprising, says Tom Knowles in The Times. It is facing “increasing scrutiny from investors over its management practices and its ability to make a profit”. Its pre-tax loss of…

Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson put Brexit at the core of the next general election campaign by promising in a speech to her party’s conference to revoke Article 50 should they win power, reports Peter Walker in The Guardian. Swinson dumped the party’s previous policy of re-running the 2016 poll in favour of halting Brexit without a second referendum. The pledge has been “divisive” even within the Liberal Democrats, but Swinson argued it was important to revoke because “there is no Brexit that will be good for our country”. It is an “empty pledge” as the Lib Dems have little chance of winning the majority they’d need to put it into practice, says Robert Shrimsley in the FT. But it does clearly signal that, with Labour now promising a referendum…

“The Great Depression, we talked ourselves into,” Robert Shiller tells The Daily Telegraph. The Yale economics professor and winner of the Nobel Memorial prize, can credibly claim to have predicted the two biggest crashes of the last 20 years – the tech bust and the US housing collapse. Now, in his latest book, Narrative Economics, he argues that economists must stop focusing purely on economic data, and pay more attention to another “important driver of economic change, which is narrative.” Stories affect behaviour, which in turn affects economic outcomes. For example, Shiller argues that a respect for frugality actually worsened the Depression. “It wasn’t proper to live high and show off, you had to be more modest, which is a narrative that encourages curtailment of expenditure.” What narratives are we…

England’s football players negotiated in secret to secure a £3m bonus for reaching the semi-finals of the 2018 Fifa World Cup, says The Sun on Sunday. The deal was struck between a group of players including Harry Kane, who earns £200,000 a week in his day job at Tottenham Hotspur, and Manchester City’s Kyle Walker, who is on £150,000 a week. Not all the squad’s players were aware of the negotiations, however, and the payment took some of them by surprise, says The Sun. And while the players did donate their £2,500 match fees to charity, the bonus meant an extra £137,000 each. France’s Kylian Mbappé, by contrast, who played for tournament winners France, donated the whole of his £360,000 fees and bonuses to charity, as did his teammate Blaise…

■ As life expectancies rise and people extend their careers, many will retire later than they originally anticipated. In theory, that should give you extra years to generate valuable income. But failing to share your plans with your pension provider could see you missing out. Many savers have opted for the default investment strategies offered by providers rather than deciding on asset allocations or funds themselves. The default plans shift savers’ money into less risky assets as retirement approaches: providers don’t want you to be caught out by market volatility when it’s too late to recover. But timing is crucial. If, say, you told your pension provider you expected to retire at age 65, but you now plan to work until 68, it will begin moving you into low-risk assets…

“I have never seen it. By all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” Michael Caine (pictured) on playing the lead in the universally panned film Jaws IV (1987), quoted in The Guardian “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” Oscar Wilde, quoted in The New York Review of Books “I will never invest in a football club again. It’s only a good idea if you’re very rich and looking for ways to waste your money. In two years you’ll be very poor and won’t have that problem anymore.” Multimillionaire Flavio Briatore, former commercial director of Benetton’s Formula One business, quoted in The Sunday Times “When I left Belgium it was a joke that we were paying such…

ofdollarsanddata.com The “Turing test” is a thought experiment designed to determine whether artificial intelligence has been created, says Nick Maggiulli. You ask a screened entity questions, and from the answers you must determine whether what you are talking to is human or not. It’s a good idea to think about how you could apply this test to finance – could it help us distinguish between financial sages and the charlatans? What question would you ask? Some of my Twitter followers suggested asking those tested whether they time the market or know where it is heading – a sage would know that this is near impossible to do on a consistent basis. But the question I would ask is: “How do you get rich without getting lucky?” A true sage should…

ETFs are having a growing impact on the UK market, especially among technologically savvy investors who use online dealing platforms. Freetrade has a major focus on ETFs and online bank Revolut is also avidly promoting ETFs on its brand new share dealing service. Australian challenger Stake – soon to launch in the UK with fee-free US shares – will also be concentrating on the huge pool of American ETFs. This growing demand is percolating through to the major ETF issuers, who are getting more adventurous with their new ideas. Over the last few months we’ve seen several interesting new products launched. Here are the ones that have caught my eye: ■ Lyxor US Curve Steepening 2-10 UCITS ETF (STPU): a first-of-its-kind European ETF that delivers positive returns when two-year US…

A private education has long been seen as the preserve of the wealthy. But many students at elite schools are there thanks to bursaries and scholarships. According to the Independent Schools Council one in three students at private schools receives financial assistance: either their school fees are reduced, or waived completely. Eton spent £6.5m this year providing financial assistance to more than 20% of its students. “Growing pressure on independent schools to justify their charitable status has encouraged greater generosity,” says Lindsay Cook in the Financial Times. “At some schools, parents who apply for means-tested support could qualify even if they have a household income of £90,000.” With almost 6,000 private schoolchildren having their places fully funded by bursaries it certainly pays to check if you meet the criteria. Most…

My long positions have had an extremely successful fortnight. Five out of six buys have gone up in value. Safestore, which fell marginally, from 648p to 644p, was the only one to decline. By contrast, Superdry went up from 392p to 429p, Bausch Healthcare from $21.34 to $23.28 and JD Sports from 626p to 718p. Bellway also moved upwards, from 2,961 to 3,268p while Ted Baker, our latest tip, went from 929p to 1,043p. The long tips are now making a collective profit of £3,184, the most that they have made since this column’s inception. Of course, every silver lining has a cloud, so it should come as no surprise that four out of five of my short tips have also advanced. Weis Markets moved from $38.23, Tesla increased from…

Galliford Try (LSE: GFRD) is a construction, infrastructure and housebuilding company with revenues of £2.8bn listed on the FTSE 250 mid-cap index. Losses at its construction business have doubled in the last year after high-profile projects such as the Queensferry crossing over the Firth of Forth hit trouble. Galliford is now trying to slim down – it has closed its Scottish infrastructure business and is in talks to sell its housebuilding division to Bovis for £1.1bn – and it plans to concentrate on more profitable areas. The stock has lost 37% in the last year.…

Businesses could be enjoying tax breaks if only they used more frequently a scheme that allows for art donations in lieu of cash payments, says Edward Harley, who chairs the government’s “acceptance in lieu” panel. This year’s report from the group found that a number of museums and galleries, particularly outside London, have benefited from individuals gifting £60m so far via the scheme. Artworks that some institutions might not otherwise have been able to afford on the open market, including portraits by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and English painter William Hogarth, are now in  their collections. A Damien Hirst sculpture, Chippendale furniture and the archives of Labour politicians Clement Attlee and Tony Benn have also been submitted. A Bernardo Bellotto painting of Venice on Ascension Day settled the most…

• The print version of Marie Claire is the latest magazine to fall prey to the digital revolution, says Alexandra Shulman in the Daily Mail. But its demise isn’t solely down to the rise of the internet. Magazines have to strike a balance between what is worthy and what people actually want to read. Many mags are filling their pages with “woke” topics, such as climate change and diversity. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still an appetite for magazines that help find a great new dress for your cousin’s wedding. Or a pair of boots for winter.” Yet few magazines these days feel comfortable being so unapologetically consumerist. “They could be missing a trick.” • “Backpacks are the new briefcases, but with enough heft to them to inflict upon…

464m The number of bottles of DOC (denomination of controlled origin) prosecco produced last year, compared with just 90 million bottles of DOCG (denomination of controlled and guaranteed origin) prosecco from the hilly vineyards of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene in Veneto, Italy. The DOCG growers are considering dropping the prosecco name, arguing the cheaper plonk has ruined prosecco’s reputation for quality. £1.5m How much Englishman Billy Hampton has left in his will to Irish republican party Sinn Féin – the largest-ever political donation in Northern Ireland – as a snub to the British establishment. Hampton blamed authorities in England for preventing him from inheriting the full £7m from his father, because the younger Hampton had spent time in a psychiatric hospital, says The Guardian. He died in Wales. £15bn The estimated…

Saturday’s attack on Saudi oil facilities was “the big one”, says Spencer Jakab in The Wall Street Journal. The drone strikes on the world’s largest oil processing plant at Abqaiq has forced Saudi Arabia to cut output of of crude oil by 5.7 million barrels per day (mbpd), roughly 60% of its output and as much as 6% of global supply. World oil production is around 100 mbpd. Even if supplies are restored quickly, as Saudi Arabia has reportedly indicated they will be, the “technological sophistication and audacity” of this strike against critical infrastructure, for which Iran-backed Houthi fighters in Yemen have claimed responsibility, “will linger over the energy market”. A game-changer The attack prompted the biggest one-day rise in Brent crude prices in at least 30 years. The benchmark…

”It wasn’t just the attacks on Saudi Arabia that caught the eye of the bond bulls... Chinese macro data showed the world’s second-largest economy cooling off more than expected in August. Industrial production growth weakened to a 4% year-on-year pace... This was the lowest print since 2002... retail sales growth dipped to... the weakest pace in four months. The mantra is the central bank is getting set to cut banking sector reserve requirements ratios once again – but this is a limited response to the magnitude of the slowdown. And in recent days, we saw both Turkey and Vietnam ease policy (along with the European Central Bank) – so we have 19 central banks... cutting rates this year and by a cumulative 1,470 basis points. The monetary authorities have turned…

Three to buy Filta Group The Mail on Sunday This Aim-listed business specialises in managing fat, oil and grease for commercial kitchens. Filta works with more than 6,000 customers each week – including the likes of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Hilton hotels – to drain and filter their used cooking oil. Most of the fat can be recycled, making it an environmentally-friendly operation. Many restaurants still use inefficient processes to clean their frying vats themselves, which presents a huge growth opportunity in the UK, US and Germany. 156p Bank of America Barron’s Bank of America, one of America’s “big four” banks, was “almost destroyed” during the financial crisis but has since bounced back. The shares slumped to $3.14 in March 2009 but today trade at $30.17, a reminder that “real…

• A new wave of arrests and searches related to the fatal collapse of Genoa’s Morandi bridge has “slammed” the shares of the highway and airport manager Atlantia SpA, says Bloomberg’s Tommaso Ebhardt. While not directly related to the 2018 disaster, in which 43 people died, the arrests stem from a probe into other bridges and roadways operated by the company, and involve allegations that managers made false statements on maintenance work. The Five Star party has demanded that Atlantia lose its permit to operate other Italian highways, causing an 8% dip in the share price. Still, the most likely outcome is a compromise that would involve revoking the concession to operate the roadway where the Genoa bridge was located, leaving its other permits in place. • Whitby-based Sirius Minerals…

Even after recent regulatory changes designed to limit the risk to the punter, financial spread betting remains a multibillion-pound industry. Spread bets are an easy way for retail investors to take punts on price moves that would otherwise require you to buy exotic financial instruments, but you can also spread bet on politics. Sporting Index has an open market on the number of seats that each individual party could win at the next election, for example. As in ordinary spread betting, you buy or sell seats and then make (or lose) the difference between the purchase price and the final amount, multiplied by your stake per seat. So if you buy Labour at 230 (the current buying price) at £1 per seat, and they get 300, then you make £70.…

Last week was European Central Bank (ECB) governor Mario Draghi’s penultimate monetary policy meeting before he hands over to Christine Lagarde (formerly at the International Monetary Fund). Markets had hoped for fireworks from the man widely viewed as having “saved the eurozone” at the height of the sovereign debt crisis in 2012. So did he deliver? As expected, Draghi cut interest rates from –0.4% to –0.5%. He also restarted quantitative easing (QE). The ECB will buy €20bn of eurozone sovereign bonds every month, with no end date – the purchases will continue until the ECB is ready to raise interest rates again, which may be a while. “The limits to monetary policy have just been lifted” The market and press reaction was muted. In the Financial Times, Laurence Fletcher reported…

Just about every company – at least you would hope – has by now put in place plans for a no-deal exit from the EU. But now there is something else – argh! – they have to plan for as well. Revoke and remain. The Liberal Democrats this week committed to revoking Article 50, cancelling the referendum result and staying in the EU (see page 8). The odds are not high that they will win the power to do this, but a Lib Dem-led or “national unity” government committed to it is not exactly inconceivable either. You might think business doesn’t need to plan for that – that it is just the status quo and everything will carry on as before. But in reality remaining will have a big impact.…

Financial advisers and pension providers routinely tell savers to consolidate their disparate pension pots into a single plan. And with the typical worker now averaging 11 jobs over the course of their career – each with its own pension – this is often sound advice. Holding all your pension savings in one place generates economies of scale and administrative simplicity. There is also less danger of forgetting about old pensions. However, before you rush to transfer your old plans into a single fund, do some research. Consolidation can sometimes prove to be an expensive mistake. Many older pension schemes offered valuable benefits that it is not possible to replicate today – and which you’ll lose by moving your money out of such plans. In some cases, these benefits date from…

The government’s attempts to resolve the crisis that has seen doctors refuse to take on extra shifts – or even opt for early retirement – because of pension tax rules are at risk of backfiring. Other public sector workers have now begun to demand similar concessions. Ministers had hoped that reforms to the NHS Pension Scheme would help solve a growing staffing crisis in the health service partly caused by senior doctors choosing not to work more because of the impact on their tax bills. The changes should mean fewer doctors are caught out by the tapered pension allowance, which reduces the contributions that higher earners may make to pension schemes; it also levies high tax charges on those who exceed their allowances. However, the changes have now prompted calls…

conversableeconomist. blogspot.com The idea of a universal basic income – where the state gives everyone cash without strings – has proven attractive to many. The devil, says Timothy Taylor, is in the detail. Is it affordable? Would it complement or replace the welfare state? Discourage work or incentivise it? End inequality – or make it worse? A slew of new papers sheds light on these issues. An “intriguing thought” that emerges from several of them is that the arguments for a basic income may be stronger for poor countries. A basic income there can help to raise a large share of the population out of poverty at relatively low cost without the need for an effective bureaucracy. There is also a lot of evidence that unconditional cash payments in such…

For the past few years Volkswagen AG (Frankfurt: VOW) has been trying to escape the shadow of the 2015 emissions scandal. The German carmaker was forced to confess that it had fitted devices to its diesel cars allowing them to cheat on emissions tests. This led to a blizzard of lawsuits, fines, a temporary halt to sales for certain lines, and even the arrest of Audi CEO Rupert Stadler last year. As a result, Volkswagen’s (VW) share price is still 40% down from its pre-crisis peak in March 2015. The smog is lifting “VW’s electric roadster, the Porsche Taycan, has won rave reviews” Recently, however, there have been two good pieces of news for the company. Firstly, it has continued to make progress with mopping up the remaining legal liabilities…

We believe that the rise of the middle-class consumer in emerging markets is the world’s most compelling long-term growth theme. Emerging markets account for 85% of the world’s population and nearly 90% of its under-30s; their GDP is also growing at more than twice the rate of the developed world’s (4.4% vs 1.8%). The conditions for what the consultancy McKinsey & Co. calls “the greatest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism” are now being realised. Where consumption meets technology At the epicentre of these macro trends in emerging markets there is what we believe to be an unprecedented growth story. As the bulk of the global middle class shifts to emerging economies, billions of people in the developing world have just begun to join the online community via low-cost…

“The best way to strike it rich was ‘prospecting via merger’” A billionaire who made his fortune from oil, only to become a firm advocate of natural gas and wind power, T. Boone Pickens was “a maverick until the end”, says Katie Mehnert for CNN Business. The “pioneering oil tycoon”, who was also a foundational figure in the rise of modern shareholder activism, died last week at the age of 91 in Dallas, Texas. Back in the 1980s “shareholder activists” were known by a different name, says Joe Nocera on Bloomberg. Men like Pickens who launched hostile takeover bids were dubbed “corporate raiders”. Some investment banks refused to advise anyone doing it and CEOs thought it terribly impolite to “buy a company that didn’t want to be bought”. As Pickens…

2018 Jessica Saurwein, Chi Riesling, Elgin, South Africa £24, swig.co.uk The South African wine tasting was nothing short of eye-opening this year. All too often the annual show is a predictable mish-mash of heroes and villains, but the title of this year’s event, “New Wave”, was accurate – wineries showed their best wares and nobody dropped the ball. The winemakers knew it, too. Their time had come and the air crackled with as much energy as the vitality displayed in their wines. I have a battery of recommendations for you, but rather than trotting out a shopping list I have narrowed down my selection to just two wines from one winemaker. Jessica Saurwein’s creations summed up the mood at this ground-breaking event and my featured ’18 Chi Riesling (and the…

The best insights most often come not from company reports, analyst ratios or “information” on the internet. Instead, you find them in the distilled wisdom of old-timers and in old wives’ tales. Here’s one. “That which gets out of whack is likely to get back into whack, sooner or later.” If stock prices look unreasonable, out-of-balance, then you have better than even odds that they’ll “revert to the mean” eventually. In 1980, you could buy all 30 Dow stocks for less than two ounces of gold. By 1999, it took 40 ounces. Measured in time, the move was less dramatic – but it told the same story. The average worker had to work about 100 hours to buy the Dow stocks in 1980. By 1999, he had to put in…