Innehållsförteckning för Issue 1023 från MoneyWeek

Pop Idol runner-up Gareth Gates revealed to The Sunday Times that he trades currencies, and once lost £250,000 investing with a foreign exchange “expert”. Gates, 36, invested with the trader after wealthy friends reported good initial results. But when the returns dried up after a year, “we... found out he’d blown the account... he obviously didn’t have good risk management in place”. A planned $375,000 deal for a box of collectable Pokémon trading cards ended in a nasty shock for the seller, says Archie Bland in The Guardian. Chris Camillo, host of YouTube channel Dumb Money, arranged to buy the cards from blockchain entrepreneur Jake Greenbaum, who himself had bought the box from a third party. They opened the sealed box live on YouTube – and found the cards were…

Doctor Copper is in fine form, reports Tom Howard in The Times. The red metal hit $7,000 a tonne last week, a 28-month high. Used in everything from “electric vehicles to telecoms to water pipes”, it is a key gauge of the health of the global economy. Copper has gained more than 10% this year. The principal cause has been soaring Chinese demand, says Andy Home on Reuters. Smelters are racing to keep up with a construction and infrastructure boom triggered by a stimulus. By October China had already imported more refined copper than it did during the whole of last year. Bulls are also banking on higher US demand if Biden passes green spending plans, adds Howard. Meanwhile, civil strife in Chile (see page 12) is contributing to supply…

During Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s tenure, between late 2012 and 2020, when the authorities made every effort to reflate the economy, Japan’s broad-market Topix index doubled, says Jonathan Allum in The Blah. Japan-sceptics often point out that Japanese stocks underperformed the rest of the world, but “arguably, Japan did not underperform the world in 2013-2020 – it, like almost everywhere else, underperformed the US”. Strip the US out of the developed world and Japan’s relative performance is strong. This is a reminder of America’s sheer size in global indices. In MSCI’s World index comprising developed countries only, it is worth 66%; in MSCI’s global index of developed and emerging markets, 58%.…

Shares in Malaysia’s biggest home-improvement retailer, Mr D.I.Y. Group, jumped on their first day of trading on Monday after the initial public offering (IPO) was nearly four times oversubscribed, say Tien Hin Chan and Yantoultra Ngui on Bloomberg. The group raised 1.5 billion ringgit ($362m) in the country’s biggest flotation in three years. Shares rose by 12.5% from the offer price of 1.60 ringgit. Mr D.I.Y.’s debut could “provide a further boost” to the Malaysian equity market, which has hosted $477m of listings in 2020, putting it “on track for the busiest year since 2017 when companies raised $1.72bn”. The group will use the proceeds from the IPO to repay bank loans.…

Despite a “once-in-a-lifetime crisis”, Barclays has delivered “forecast-beating profits”, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. That is due to its investment bank, which is “firing on all cylinders”. The shares rose by 7% on the news. With boss Jes Staley pledging to “hang around for several years yet”, it looks as though activist shareholder Ed Bramson’s “hostile” campaign to get rid of Staley and move Barclays away from investment banking has been a “complete failure”. The latest results show the benefit of having a “diversified business model” rather than narrowly focusing on retail banking. Not so fast, says Lex in the Financial Times. Over the past year Barclays’ share price has largely been determined by the performance of the overall European banking sector, which has been hit by fears…

The Bank of England is working out the details of a deal that will allow the retail banks to start giving money to their shareholders again. So long as net lending continues to grow, and capital ratios remain robust, they will be allowed to restore their dividends. That is a significant reversal. At the height of the Covid-19 crisis in the spring, the Prudential Regulation Authority wrote to the main banks asking them to cancel any remaining payouts for 2019 and for the whole of 2020. In recent weeks both Barclays boss Jes Staley and Santander’s Ana Botin have called for an end to the ban in public, and now it looks as if, subject to a few conditions, that will be allowed. HSBC said this week that it was…

Gross domestic product (GDP) is a measure of the size of an economy over a period of time (normally a year). GDP is most often used for discussing individual countries, but may also be calculated for regions (eg, southeast Asia), trading blocs (eg, the European Union), or areas within a country. GDP is calculated in three ways. The production or output approach is the sum of all the value added through producing goods and providing services (ie, the market value of what’s produced minus the costs of producing it). The income approach is the sum of all the income earned by companies and individuals from offering the same goods and services. The expenditure approach is the sum of everything spent on finished goods and services. In theory, all three should…

“You can meet a lot of incredibly obnoxious, entitled people who have no money, but they expect certain things of the world that aren’t reasonable. And I’ve certainly met people with money who are just absolutely lovely…and donate a… fortune to charity every year. So it goes both ways.” Author Emily St John Mandel (pictured) decries fiction writers’ lazy habit of equating villainy with wealth, quoted in the Financial Times “Honey, it’s double the work.” Cristiana Falcone, estranged wife of advertising tycoon Sir Martin Sorrell, warns women who plan to marry rich men, quoted in The Mail on Sunday “Our lawyer in one case, George Carman, did his opening remarks, went outside for a fag and said: ‘How was I?’ I thought: ‘I’m paying you hundreds of thousands of pounds…

When the lockdowns started, you probably didn’t think you would miss the commute, says Lila MacLellan. Who would have guessed that we would miss the “frantic hustle”, the competition for a decent parking spot? Perhaps you longed to have the time back to do something better with it. Six months later, the chances are that the average 4.3 hours per week you’ve saved have been swallowed up by work. It’s time to reclaim the commute as there are real psychological benefits to a ritual that marks the beginning and end of a work day. Having that time to gather your thoughts improves productivity, job satisfaction and lowers stress levels. The walking between connections helped you burn calories without it even seeming like exercises. The chit chat at the coffee shop…

Fund managers are generally not good at running businesses. If they were, they would be in the wrong job. The objectivity and broad perspective of a fund manager is potentially of great value to a company, but requires the discipline of the private-equity specialist to justify the effort. Here, fund managers do add value through “active” involvement in the management of businesses they control, in contrast to the “passive” approach of most professional investors. Setting up shop This makes Odyssean Investment Trust (LSE: OIT) the perfect vehicle for an active approach. Stuart Widdowson, its lead manager, spent five years at HgCapital before joining Strategic Equity Capital, a trust focused on UK smaller companies whose performance he turned around. In 2017, he left to set up Odyssean with Ian Armitage, who…

Monzo is the latest bank to launch a packaged bank account – a current account with added benefits. But instead of shaking up the market, as so many of the challenger bank’s other initiatives did, Monzo Premium is a good example of a bad account. In return for £15 a month, Monzo Premium users get a metal debit card, a1.5% interest rate on balances up to £2,000, travel and phone insurance and discounted access to airport lounges. “Monzo has been forced to imitate rivals with a poor packaged account” Monzo made losses of £113.8m in the 2019-2020 tax year, so it has realised that “while it is cool to be young and disruptive, if you want to make money you have to behave like a grownup. So it finds itself…

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has unveiled a boost to the financial support the state is offering self-employed workers hit by Covid-19, though the latest measures will be less generous than previous ones. Under the new round of the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS), which opens on 1 November, self-employed workers will be able to apply for a grant of up to 40% of their typical three-monthly profits, up to a maximum of £3,750. This is twice the maximum payout of £1,875 initially promised by the chancellor, when he said in October that a third round of grants would be made available to cover the trading period from 1 November to 31 January 2021. But it compares poorly to payouts of up to £7,500 and £6,750 offered during earlier iterations of the…

Given the recent dip in stockmarkets in both Britain and America, it is no surprise that my long tips haven’t done especially well over the last fortnight, with three out of the five stocks declining. Industrial and construction-equipment rentals group United Rentals slid from $199 to $182; cruise-ship operator Carnival fell from $15.21 to $14.03, while homebuilder Bellway slipped from 2,691p to 2,435p. However, both media group ITV and bus company National Express were unchanged at 73p and 152p respectively. As a result, my long tips are making an overall profit of £2,212, down from £3,572 a fortnight ago. The good news, however, is that all my short tips have also declined. Online health insurance firm eHealth has tumbled from $83 to $73 owing to disappointing quarterly earnings figures. Electric…

As the world remains gripped by the pandemic and the presidential election draws near, many investors are struggling to see beyond immediate economic and political uncertainty. Nevertheless, the fundamental long-term outlook for high-quality US large-cap stocks remains positive. Many of the themes that dominated the US market before the pandemic remain evident today: growth is still outperforming value, tech is rallying and financials are being left behind. As stockpickers, we continue to focus on individual quality companies that we think can weather the economic storm, however long it may last. That means looking beyond immediate market noise and having conviction in firms with good management who are committed to strong balance sheets, while also finding opportunities that are out of favour in the current climate. “Amazon is seven times larger…

Silicon Valley is the spiritual home of the start-up “accelerator” – programmes that seek to support and advance early-stage companies. A Silicon Valley start-up has now given us the “spirit accelerator”. Earlier this month, Bespoken Spirits, a Californian company founded by materials scientist Martin Janousek and entrepreneur Stu Aaron, unveiled its proprietary technology, which, the company claims, can reproduce the taste of a barrel-aged whisky, rum or brandy in three to five days. The process involves exposing alcohol to “micro staves” of various woods under pressure, not unlike a “Nespresso machine on an industrial scale”. The results have been contested. Bespoken Spirits has won awards in blind tastings. But as Judith Evans notes in the Financial Times, “not all drinkers are convinced”. One reviewer at the Oregon-based Whiskey Wash publication…

• The British people have been no strangers to the odd shortage during the pandemic, says Robert Hardman in the Daily Mail. But a looming turkey shortage come Christmas could really test our mettle. A lack of skilled migrant labour, mostly from eastern Europe, and more families wanting their own turkey this Christmas instead of going out or meeting up, could mean no birds for some. “We may as well block up the chimney, leave the Christmas tree in the forest and tell the Queen not to bother.” On the Copas family farm in Berkshire, orders are already well ahead compared with the same time last year. “We’ll make it work,” says Tom Copas. “We have to!” • “It’s tricky keeping one’s pecker up in the current circumstances,” says Ulrika…

In the latest of “a long line of bitter quarrels between well-to-do neighbours in southern California’s most expensive neighbourhoods”, Bill Gross, co-founder of giant asset manager Pimco, has been accused of blaring the Gilligan’s Island theme song on a loop to “torment” his neighbour, tech entrepreneur Mark Towfiq, says Laurence Darmiento in The Los Angeles Times. The dispute, over a$1m outdoor sculpture, has escalated into “police calls to their Laguna Beach mansions” and several legal actions. Gross (pictured) bought the sculpture – a 22-foot-long blue glass installation – for his partner in 2019. The problems arose when a large netting structure was installed to protect it, which Towfiq claimed blocked his view. Following a complaint to the city by Towfiq, Gross began blaring music “at all hours” to force his…

The second wave of Covid-19 is buffeting global markets. Soaring case numbers and talk of new lockdowns in Europe resulted in the worst day in a month for America’s S&P 500 on Monday, with the index falling by 1.9%. Germany’s Dax had a shocker, plunging by more than 4% over the first two trading days of the week. This is a Covid-19 “reality check”, say Matt Phillips and Eshe Nelson in The New York Times. With cases also on the rise in America, investors are finally grasping what more lockdowns will mean for earnings, says Matt Maley of asset manager Miller Tabak + Co. The US Senate adjourned this week, all but killing hopes of a pre-election stimulus deal. The Vix index, Wall Street’s “fear” gauge measuring expected volatility, has…

“For several months I’ve been making a weekly homage to the Square Mile… Each time I have been met with tumbleweed… Small and medium-sized firms have all made an effort to get back. They’ve been innovative about making staff feel safe… The big banks, meanwhile, have been advised that the legal risks are too high to [stop] working from home (WFH). You can see why. If 10% of a firm of 100 people gets sick, that’s manageable… If 10% of a firm of 10,000 becomes ill, that looks and feels different… The 1,000 might get it into their heads to sue… Some financial companies are even talking about a permanent WFH model. As understandable as this may be [for now], it seems unbecoming... London’s success... is thanks to its... innovation,…

Three to buy Sirius Real Estate Shares This commercial-property investor owns more than €1bn-worth of sites across major German cities with more than 5,000 individual tenants. Sensible acquisitions and active management boost returns. The focus on the stable German market bolsters resilience: rent collection rates have remained close to normal despite the pandemic. The shares yield 4% and the business has room to extend its record of excellent returns. “Who knew German business parks could be so exciting?” Buy. 77p Yamana Gold The Mail on Sunday Gold miners offer outsized exposure to the yellow metal rally, but many also bring an unpleasant cocktail of operational and political risks. Canadian firm Yamana minimises these issues. Its five operational mines are in mining-friendly parts of the Americas and management remains cost-focused even…

• Luxury jewellery group Tiffany is known as the “go-to purveyor of engagement rings”, but it was at risk of being jilted after French luxury giant LVMH said it would no longer honour its agreement to buy it, says The Daily Telegraph. After LVMH announced its change of mind last month, blaming “French political intervention” and Tiffany’s “dismal” performance during the coronavirus crisis, Tiffany sued, with the case due to go before a Delaware court early in the new year. However, there are now hopes that the deal will go through after all, with the two sides in “indirect talks” to settle the dispute, albeit at a price “slightly lower” than the $16bn (£12.25bn) initially agreed. LVMH hopes that the acquisition will boost its smallest business, the jewellery and watch…

The Chinese government has slapped sanctions on major US defence companies, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing Defense, Space & Security and Raytheon, in retaliation for multibillion-dollar arms sales to Taiwan, says Helen Davidson in The Guardian. The $2.37bn arms deal included a Boeing-made coastal defence system and follows last week’s approval of a $1.8bn sale of missiles and other hardware. Taiwan, which is an independent democracy, but which Beijing regards as a “rogue province”, argues that it needs the arms to “discourage… cross-strait conflict”. China’s “lawless takeover of Hong Kong” shows that its “escalating threats against Taiwan” are no bluff, says The Wall Street Journal. Even the state-run Chinese media are now open about the fact that the recent Chinese combat drills near the Taiwan Straits, as well as the repeated…

The first issue of MoneyWeek came out on 4 November 2000. Back then, the iPhone didn’t exist. No one had heard of shale oil – the biggest energy story looming on the horizon was the threat of “peak oil”. As for bitcoin – we were all still struggling to wrap our heads around the idea of paying for purely digital goods, let alone using a purely digital currency. Britain was thinking of joining the euro, which wasn’t yet in circulation. The Bank of England interest rate was 6% – imagine trying to pay your mortgage at that rate today. Chancellor Gordon Brown was in the process of selling off half of Britain’s gold reserves at an average price of about $275 an ounce – a bargain (for the buyers). Amazon’s…

“We are in a depression – not a recession,” says economist David Rosenberg in the Financial Post. There will be no return to “business as usual” after Covid-19, since depressions lead to a permanent change in peoples’ behaviour. “Classic business cycle recessions are forgotten about within a year after they end. The scars from this one will take years to heal.” Most importantly, the idea that “everybody is aching to go out to eat and drink and gamble and browse the malls… and dying to go back to the office” is not true. Surveys show that around 60% of Americans are nervous about leaving home and “intend to remain locked down on their own until signs emerge that the virus is ‘fully contained’”. Only 33% are comfortable entering shops, 22%…

bloomberg.com/opinion So-called “special-purpose acquisition vehicles”, or Spacs, are the hot new thing on Wall Street – yet research shows that the returns from most Spacs are subpar, says Barry Ritholtz. “But here’s a dirty little secret: most investment products are at best mediocre. They tend to be expensive and underperform” in comparison with a passive, index-tracking fund. This is a special case of Sturgeon’s Law, coined by science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon in the 1950s: “90% of everything is crap”. This is not a “curmudgeonly observation”, but rather a celebration of just “how rare true success is”. Blinded by success The “key reason” for this is that “survivorship bias colours everything”. Investors first learned of this flaw in our thinking by considering fund returns. How come they seem to perform so…

aier.org “The death toll is mounting”, says Brad DeVos – the death of the “third places” in our towns and cities. Third places are those that are not our home (first place) or work (second), but the other places essential for our wellbeing – bookstores, coffee shops, gyms, pubs, churches, playgrounds, and so on. These were already under assault due to suburban sprawl, car culture and city planners. Now, many of them are illegal. The consequences will be “grave”. We depend on these places for our mental health. Sitting in a coffee shop might be our only social interaction of the day. Going to the gym burns off stress. Teenagers go to a concert instead of brooding on dark thoughts. Depression has tripled this year in the US for all…

Activist investor PrimeStone Capital has called for a “broad overhaul” at British wealth manager St. James’s Place (SJP) to improve shareholders’ returns, says Simon Jessop on Reuters. The letter said SJP’s share price “failed to reflect adoubling of client assets over the last five years”, owing to “a bloated organisational structure, excessive hiring, excessive pay and mounting losses in Asia with little prospect of a recovery”. Funds under management have risen by 18% per year since 2015, but the share price has declined by 7% since then and annualised shareholder returns have reached just 2%. PrimeStone said it owns 1.2% of SJP stock, and was publicly highlighting the issues after the board did not address its concerns “head on”.…

With the government’s Job Retention Scheme expiring at the end of October, small-business owners need to make sure they know how to get the best out of the Job Support Scheme that replaces it. The good news is that the new scheme, which comes into force from 1 November, has been made more generous recently. The biggest shift is that while the Job Retention Scheme enabled employers to pay staff for whom they did not have work – furloughed employees – its replacement will, in ordinary circumstances, only support employees working at least some of the time. But importantly, when the Job Support Scheme was announced in September, the government said employees would have to work at least 33% of their usual hours; now this will come down to just…

This year has been a nightmare for the hospitality industry. One company that has seen its share price suffer a particularly brutal beating owing to Covid-19 is Mitchells & Butlers (LSE: MAB). When the stockmarket collapsed in mid-March, Mitchells &Butlers’ (M&B) shares fell to less than a quarter of the level they had reached at the start of the year. Although they rallied strongly over the next few months, they have now started to fall again owing to the return of strict social-distancing measures and regional lockdowns. M&B’s share price is now two-thirds below its level of 1 January. Still, there are some reasons to think that things aren’t as bad as the price would imply. The government’s furlough scheme has allowed M&B to cut costs drastically during the time…

Markets are nervous now that a second wave of Covid-19 is sweeping across much of the world and US technology stocks, which have spearheaded the rally, are trading at eye-watering valuations. Tesla, for instance, is on a 2020 price/ earnings (p/e) ratio of 240, which assumes everything will go right for a very long time. In this environment, it is sensible to consider market-leading companies with reasonable valuations and rising dividends. “The group pioneered diabetes care 85 years ago” Novo Nordisk (Copenhagen: NOVOB), the market leader in diabetes treatments, is a good example of this type of stock. Diabetes is the world’s fastest-growing major disease. There were 108 million people in the world with diabetes in 1980 but the figure had jumped to 422 million in 2014; by 2040 it…

Online betting and gambling operator 888 (LSE: 888) has enjoyed rising demand amid the “structural shift” to online services, says Giulia Bottaro on Proactive Investors. Full-year earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) are expected to be “significantly” above previous estimates in 2020. Average daily revenue was 56% higher year-on-year between 1 July and 28 September as people looked for ways to remain occupied indoors. Sales rose 27% in the six months to 30 June. A special dividend has been declared. The stock is up by 60.3% in a year.…

In 1775 the Gurney family of Norwich founded Gurney & Co, which grew to become one of the most successful banks in East Anglia. In 1807 the family bought London bill broker Richardson, Overend & Company – a business that bought and sold bills of discount (effectively short-term business debts). The merged firm became Overend, Gurney & Company. From around 1859 the bank, then the largest bill broker in England, expanded by making more general business loans to a variety of enterprises. What went wrong? Overend Gurney’s bill-brokerage business was profitable, but its forays into more general business loans proved disastrous, and it lost around £500,000 a year from 1860 onwards. By 1865 it was hopelessly insolvent. To protect the bank the partners decided to sell the business to a…

Now’s an auspicious time to be bringing out a new whisky (see main story). After all, “drinkable investment asset classes have always done well in a downturn, perhaps as their owners have looked to drown their sorrows”, notes Andrew Shirley in the October update of Knight Frank’s The Wealth Report. “Both rare whisky and wine have shown reasonable gains over the past 12 months.” Rare whisky as a collectable asset, in particular, has appreciated by 12% in the 12 months to July. That was the second best of any collectable except for handbags, which have risen by a fifth in value, according to the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index. Over the decade, whisky is still well out in front of the other sub-indices, with a 535% increase compared with 115%…

This column has spent much time criticising Donald Trump over the years. This week, we consider the alternative – Joe Biden. Would he be better? How? Not wanting to keep you in suspense, our conclusion is this: if the goal of Mother Nature is to cut great empires down to size, as history suggests, then Biden is her man. “Biden will get behind every claptrap idea that comes down the pike” His policy notions are even worse than those of Trump. And Biden’s advisers and probable apparatchiks are more competent than those of Trump (for whom loyalty was more important than competence), and therefore, perhaps, more likely to succeed in implementing his policies. But competence is not always a benefit. If your ten-year-old tries to build a bomb in the…

British cyclist Tao Geoghegan Hart (pictured) secured a cash prize of €115,668 after winning the Giro d’Italia in Milan, says Michelle Arthurs-Brennan on Cycling Weekly. The 25-year old is the second British man to win the race, adds the BBC. Chris Froome previously won the Giro in 2018, aged 33. Publisher Bloomsbury has said that people have “rediscovered the pleasure of reading” during lockdown, as it reported “its best half-year profits since 2008”, reports the BBC. Earnings rose by 60% to £4m between February and August as book sales soared. Recent Bloomsbury bestsellers included Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race and Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood.…

Few firms have done as well out of Covid-19 as Germany’s Gerresheimer, says WirtschaftsWoche. It specialises in glass and plastic containers for the drug and cosmetics industries. Pharma firms are frantically ordering injection vials for doses of the forthcoming Covid-19 vaccine and the group expects to make around a billion of the two or three billion vials likely to be needed in the next two years. Beyond the fillip from the pandemic, the outlook remains auspicious. Around 80% of sales stem from the pharma and healthcare industries; the cosmetics and food sectors account for the rest. With cosmetics recovering from the pandemic, the 156-year-old group is on track for a record quarter.…

Digital-payments giant Ant Group is poised for the “largest stockmarket flotation of all time” next week, says James Dean in The Times. It is set to raise “at least $34.4bn” from a dual listing on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges. This would not only be more than the $29.4bn raised by Saudi Aramco last December, but could also see the firm valued at $313bn, around the same as JP Morgan. The flotation will also turn Alibaba founder Jack Ma into the world’s 11th richest person, with a fortune of $72bn, thanks to his controlling interest of 8.8% in Ant. The “frenzy of interest” has been so great that the book for the Hong Kong listing was oversubscribed an hour after the launch on Monday, says Hannah Boland in…

Covid-19 infections are rising rapidly, notably in the US, India and Europe, including in Britain, says Helen Sullivan in The Guardian. The French president Emmanuel Macron is considering a month-long lockdown to “stop the surge”, Italy has introduced new restrictions and Germany’s Angela Merkel is pushing for a “lockdown light”. Last Thursday, Ireland became the first European country to return to national lockdown. The “sweeping national rules” now being imposed suggest a “growing belief” that regional restrictions aren’t enough, says Ruby Mellen in The Washington Post. While increased testing partly explains the recent surge, hospitalisations –though not deaths –are on the rise. In Belgium, hospital occupancy increased 87% last week. In Paris, 70% of critical-care beds are occupied by Covid-19 patients. A glimpse of the “bleak reality” confronting political leaders,…

As the US presidential election looms (see main story), £202m has already been matched on the main Betfair market, more than was the case four years ago, even if you count the large sums that were matched on election night. However, challenger Joe Biden (pictured) remains the firm favourite, with his odds tightening slightly to 1.51 (66.2%). President Donald Trump’s odds have drifted out slightly to 2.96 (33.7%). The spreads on Biden’s expected electoral college votes have increased slightly to 307-313 on Sporting Index and 311-319 on Spreadex. Having already made a record number of tips on this election, I’m not going to recommend any more. Instead, I’m going to turn my attention to the trade negotiations between Britain and the US. Smarkets is currently  running a market on whether…

This week’s anti-lockdown protests in Italy and Spain may be an early warning of the long-term risks of the Covid-19 crisis. I remain sceptical about the idea that our behaviour is going to change as much as some analysts think (see right). But the impact on the economic and political environment in which we live – and the consequences for investors – could be far greater. “Spanish flu was followed by the Roaring Twenties” At present, many people clearly overestimate the risk that Covid-19 poses to the average healthy adult. This fear, combined with the onerous restrictions on many areas of life, is having a huge impact on their willingness to do things that were once considered anormal part of everyday life. My view is that they will begin to…

We need our pubs to thrive Matthew Syed The Times In the 1970s, it was the tech sector in Massachusetts that looked set to dominate, says Matthew Syed. Yet by 2000, most of those firms had gone bust, while Silicon Valley’s start-ups had “changed the planet”. Sociologist AnnaLee Saxenian attributes this to the “bars, clubs and noodle joints” that sprang up in the Valley. For these were the “hubs that hosted encounters between engineers, thinkers, entrepreneurs and financiers”, allowing a “cross pollination of ideas” and playing a key role in innovation, just as the social clubs of the Scottish Enlightenment and the coffee houses of 19th-century Vienna did before them. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts firms failed not because of the “quality of the people”, but because of an “impoverished ecosystem”, with…

capx.co Governments have been “talking a good game” on social mobility for years, says Zakiy Manji. They have promised to put the goal at the heart of education policy and to work with businesses and civil society to promote it. Apprenticeships and “T-levels”, technical qualifications analogous to A-levels, have been introduced. Reports have shown that these fixes have achieved little – and besides, tend to ignore whole sectors that require academic qualifications. The failure is not all that surprising. Governments can legislate and enforce, or offer incentives, but it’s difficult to centrally plan apackage that is viable across all sectors and regions of the UK, each of which faces unique challenges. The good news is that there is a “genuine willingness” among businesses and third-sector leaders to improve. TipStart, of…

■“The pitch by active managers is that while they might underperform in bull markets, they prove their mettle in times of volatility,” says Madison Darbyshire in the Financial Times. But the data doesn’t back them up. Since January, 45% of actively-managed UK equity funds have underperformed the S&P UK BMI index, with 49% of them lagging the benchmark over the past 12 months, according to an S&P report. Over a decade, around two-thirds of active funds failed to outperform. No wonder investors are increasingly choosing to “vote with their precious investment capital and move into tracker funds”, as Ben Johnson of market-data firm Morningstar points out. Half of euro-denominated global equity funds have also underperformed the global index over the past year. ■ It’s hard to deny Terry Smith’s (pictured)…

Small businesses in areas of the country officially deemed at higher risk of a rapid spread of Covid-19 may be able to claim extra financial support to help them cope with additional restrictions. Firstly, there are new grants for those business hit by Tier 2 restrictions, which mean only people from the same household can meet up in leisure, tourism and hospitality settings such as pubs, coffee shops and restaurants. Businesses suffering financially as a result will be able to claim grants of up to £2,100 a month, backdated to August. Local authorities will administer the grants and set many of the precise rules about who is eligible. How much businesses can claim is linked to the rateable value of their premises. Those with a rateable value of £15,000 or…

The US election is only a few days away and traders and investors are wondering how the outcome will affect the US stockmarket. However, given that the dollar remains the world’s de-facto reserve currency, the election’s impact on the greenback is arguably more important to global financial markets. While there is no consensus on how presidential elections affect the S&P 500, all the evidence suggests that, whatever happens, the very fact that the election has taken place is generally good for the dollar, whatever the outcome. Using Federal Reserve data, Richard Falkenhäll, a strategist at the Swedish corporate bank SEB AB, has looked at how the dollar has performed against abasket of currencies weighted by their trade with the United States. He found that in nine of the last ten…

Shaftesbury (LSE: SHB) is a British real-estate investment trust. It owns 16 acres of London’s West End, which has been deserted in the pandemic. The company is aiming to raise almost £300m by issuing new shares to alleviate the damage, says George Hammond in the Financial Times. The virus has “hollowed out” the vast majority of central London. Shaftesbury collected only 41% of the rent it was owed for the six months to 30 September as the vast majority of the 611 venues on its estate closed for the lockdown period. The shares have declined by 56% in 12 months.…

2019 Cedro do Noval, Vinho Branco, Noval, Douro, Portugal £19.95, secretbottleshop.co.uk This wine is a genuine star of the small screen. If all goes to plan, last night on Amazon Prime the first episode of series three of The Wine Show aired, and Cedro Branco stole the show. There was a cast of superstars, but I only had eyes for this epic white wine, which hits the shelves today. There is very limited stock in the UK and I am told that Cambridge Wine Merchants, South Downs Cellars, Carruthers & Kent and Clarion Wines are all groupies hanging around the stage door expecting stock to come their way, but for now the only website lucky enough to have stock is Secret! Quinta do Noval is a legendary property, making legendary wines,…

Going… One of the world’s great collections of James Bond books is heading for online auction with Sotheby’s in London. An edition of From Russia with Love, inscribed to author Ian Fleming’s wife Ann, carries an estimate of up to £35,000. An edition of Live and Let Die presented to Winston Churchill with the acknowledgement “from whom I stole some words” is valued at up to £70,000. A copy of Diamonds are Forever, which was presented to real-life spy and Bond inspiration Biffy Dunderdale, is expected to fetch up to £20,000. And a first edition of the first Bond book, Casino Royale, from 1953, could make up to £30,000. From next Friday, the books, watches, film posters, and an Aston Martin DB5, are on display at the auction house. Gone……

$7.5bn The cost of the damage from a violent thunderstorm (as opposed to a hurricane) that hit the American Corn Belt on 10 August, making it the most expensive in history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. £7m The bill for rebranding Highways England as National Highways. The government-owned company had already been renamed from Highways Agency in April 2015, says This Is Money. The rebrand comes with a multimillion-pound burden in terms of updated road signs and infrastructure and so on. £. 7bn How much is needed in extra funding every year to prevent the social care system in England from collapsing, a report by MPs has found. “Budget cuts have meant that local authorities restrict funding to those in the most severe need, leaving others to…