Innehållsförteckning för Issue 1026 från MoneyWeek

A gym owner was fined £67,000 after he refused to close during the second lockdown despite the police’s efforts to shut his premises, reports Jordan King in Metro. Andreas Michli, 34, refused to close Zone Gym in north London, citing its “low infection rates”. The council has also ordered Michli to pay £7,300 in legal costs and £3,000 for the cost of sending more than 30 officers to barricade the gym. An art expert has claimed that aportrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie displayed in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is not authentic, says Alice Walker in The Scottish Sun. Robin Nicholson, an expert on Jacobite art, believes the painting could be by “lesser artist” Cosmo Alexander, which would reduce its worth from an estimated £1m to under £200,000.…

Turkish shares have rallied on hopes that a period of monetary misrule is coming to an end. Inflation is at 12%, but strongman leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes in the “bizarre” idea that higher interest rates cause inflation rather than curb it, says The Economist. The central bank has thus resisted desperately needed rate hikes this year, instead “squandering more than $100bn” in currency reserves in a forlorn attempt to defend the currency over the summer. The Turkish lira has lost more than 60% of its value against the dollar over the past five years owing to poor monetary policy. Yet this month has seen the replacement of both the central bank governor and finance minister. The lira has rallied on hopes that they will usher in a period of…

Silver has slipped from its seven-year high of $28 an ounce reached in August. But its run looks far from over. Encouraging progress with vaccines has eroded some of the metal’s appeal as a safe haven, but monetary policy remains extremely loose and interest rates historically low (silver has no yield, so low real interest rates bolster its relative appeal). Government stimulus programmes also point towards higher eventual inflation, while there is scope for silver to profit from the economic recovery they will help stoke: it is an industrial as well as a monetary metal. Solar energy comprises 10% of overall demand for silver, says Callum Keown in Barron’s, so it bodes well that the global drive to boost infrastructure is skewed towards solar energy.…

DoorDash became the “go-to [food] delivery choice for millions of people” in the US forced to stay indoors during the pandemic, says Eric Eldon on TechCrunch. It is one of several start-ups expected to float on the stockmarket before the year ends . Its latest funding round was in June, when it raised $400m and was valued at $16bn. Sales jumped from $291m in 2018 to $885m in 2019, and from $587m in the first nine months of 2019 to $1.92bn for the same period of 2020. It has started to turn a profit on an adjusted-Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) basis, notes Alex Wilhelm, also on TechCrunch. This “makes one wonder why Uber is struggling to accomplish the same task with [its] Uber Eats”.…

JD Sports has emerged as a “serious contender” to rescue Debenhams, reports Oliver Gill in the Daily Telegraph. The move would “significantly escalate” its “long-running” rivalry with Mike Ashley, who controls Sports Direct and the department store House of Fraser. Ashley, whose previous £125m bid for Debenhams was rejected, has so far failed to find partners who can help him improve his offer. The interest from JD Sports will raise “fresh hopes” among Debenhams’ 12,000 staff, who have suffered “years of uncertainty”. Not so fast, says Jim Armitage in the Evening Standard. While it is “anyone’s guess” who ends up with Debenhams, it is certain that “nobody will want all 124 stores”. It may be that nobody “will want any Debenhamsbranded stores at all”, since it is hard to see…

Nearly a fortnight after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the US presidential election, Donald Trump still refuses to fully admit defeat, says The Daily Telegraph. He continues to allege voter fraud and pursue legal challenges, raising fears that he will impede the formation of a new Biden government. Indeed, Trump has refused to allow the usual transition process to go ahead, whereby outgoing officials work with the president-elect’s team to hand over the reins of power. The White House argues that it is only following the precedent of 2000, in which a disputed election delayed the start of a transition until December, says The Economist. That election, however, hinged on just 537 votes in a single state; Trump’s claims involve five states where Biden’s margins range from 11,000…

• The Hut Group founder Matthew Moulding (pictured) is to receive £830m in shares, one of the biggest payouts in British corporate history, after valuation targets were hit following the online shopping company’s successful £4.5bn initial public offering in September, says the Mailonline. The group’s valuation has since risen from £5.4bn to nearly £6.3bn. Should it reach £7.3bn within three years, Moulding’s total payout from the reward scheme would be worth £1bn. Moulding still owns a fifth of the business. • Conservative MP Philip Davies has been accused of cronyism after it emerged that two of his former aides, Sophie Dean and Grainne Hurst, now oversee safer gambling at Ladbrokes owner GVC, the betting firm that paid Davies £400 an hour this summer for advice ahead of a government review,…

“Carried interest” or “carry” is a perk enjoyed mainly by private equity executives. In short, it’s a performance fee. The managers typically take a 20% share of the profits of a fund (on top of management fees) with the idea that this aligns their interests more closely with the investors. Note that the name “carried interest” has nothing to do with the interest you might get paid on your savings. The term originates with trade voyages in the 16th century, where captains of ships sailing from Europe to Asia or America would take a 20% share of the profit. You might question why a performance fee would make an investment manager try harder to make good investments, but that’s not the most controversial thing about carried interest. The real issue…

“I know what Twitter is, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near it if you paid me, frankly.” Princess Anne (pictured), quoted in The Times “I probably wouldn’t have done that had I known what was around the corner [the pandemic], but I’m not a downsizing type of person. Bigger hats, bigger houses.” Pop star Boy George on buying the house next door to his mansion in Hampstead to increase his living space, quoted in The Times “Ambition. Being naturally gifted is a wonderful thing. But people who aren’t naturally gifted seem to work harder.” Musician Nile Rodgers on whether ambition or talent matters more to success, quoted in the Financial Times “It was about the price of a spare bedroom in New York City.” Author Lee Child on buying a…

firstround.com The first rule of management is that it is a different skill than leadership, says Molly Graham. Leadership is about setting a vision and aligning the work around it. True management is, rather, about bringing out the best in the people. This isn’t easy: “Management is one of the hardest jobs in the world.” Successful management involves recognising that you’re not working with robots and trying to micromanage them. Teams are made up of humans independently trying to work towards a goal. So don’t try to manage how they work, but focus instead on whether they are achieving those goals. Spend more time than you think you need to with your high performers. It’s easy to think they are doing well and leave them to it, but they are…

The simplest way to buy into the German economy is to invest in an exchange traded fund (ETF) such as the Vanguard Germany All Cap UCITS ETF (LSE: VGER). This ETF follows the FTSE Germany All Cap index, which aims to mimic the overall German stockmarket. The largest holdings are software company SAP, engineering firm Siemens and financial services company Allianz. The ten largest holdings account for roughly half the fund. The ongoing charge is only 0.1%, and the fund trades at a price/earnings (p/e) ratio of 15.4, with a dividend yield of 3%. If you want to invest in smaller German companies, consider the Xtrackers Germany Mittelstand & MidCap UCITS ETF (Germany: XDGM). This focuses on the German market, but excludes the 30 largest companies (these make up the…

■ South Korea’s status as a financial hub is being threatened after an investigation into South Korean hedge funds whose investments have lost billions of dollars has turned into a political scandal, says Song Jung-a in the Financial Times. Lime Asset Management and Optimus Asset Management, two big South Korean hedge funds, have been accused of misappropriation and embezzlement after they froze withdrawals owing to liquidity problems and have been under investigation since June. This has raised wider concerns over governance in South Korea, where some politicians and regulators have been accused of taking bribes. Private investment funds in the country have “boomed” since 2015, when the minimum investment amount was cut from Won500m (£341,400) to Won100m. But lax supervision has resulted in several scams and cases of mis-selling: thousands…

■ “The government’s plan to insulate England’s draughty homes isfaltering because builders and installers are failing to sign up, leaving thousands of households unable to access the £3bn green home grants,” says Fiona Harvey in the Guardian. The plan was for the Green Home Grants to help people cut their gas and electricity bills while reducing carbon emissions. But since September only 1,174 installers have signed up to the scheme, while over 36,000 householders have applied for the grants. “Households wanting to take advantage of the green home grant must find an accredited installer to do the work, but many are reluctant to invest the time and money needed to gain accreditation.” ■ Personal debt defaults have almost doubled in a month, making “the sharpest rise in missed payments since…

Online pension dashboards, first unveiled by the government in 2016, are unlikely to be available until 2023, the Department for Work and Pensions has warned. The initiative was supposed to enable savers to see all their pension schemes – including workplace pensions and individual plans – on a single screen, but the launch of the dashboards has been repeatedly delayed by technical problems and arguments about how they should operate. Pension experts have expressed dismay at the latest delay. There is widespread concern that many savers have little idea of what their overall pension position is, and that many are losing track of small pots of cash. The typical Briton now pays into around a dozen pensions during their career, starting a new plan with each new employer. That makes…

Computacenter (LSE: CCC) has supplied both public and private-sector employees working from home with computers and software this year. It entered the fourth quarter with a “strong backlog of orders”, says Giulia Bottaro on Proactive investors. The firm recently acquired a Canadian IT company, which should give it a significant fillip next year. In the first half of 2020 Computacenter’s profits rose to £72.4m, up from £50.8m in the same period of 2019, says Emily Nicolle on City AM. The stock has gained 59.2% in a year.…

John MacGregor was born in Drynie in the Western Isles of Scotland in 1797 and emigrated to Canada with his family in 1803. After a brief involvement in local politics, he moved back to Liverpool in 1827, then briefly worked as a businessman before spending the next two decades in increasingly senior civil-service roles at the Board of Trade. He was elected to Parliament as a Liberal for Glasgow in 1847. He also helped found the Royal British Bank, with businessmen John Menzies and Edward Mullins, and would become its chairman after it was granted a royal charter in 1849. What was the scam? From the moment it was set up, the bank was brought low by a combination of bad business loans, including to a Welsh ironworks, and large…

Scoff A History of Food and Class in Britain Pen Vogler Atlantic Books, £20 We may think we live in a democratic age, but food and class remain as “inextricably mixed” today as they were “when medieval barons dined ‘above the salt’, putting the lower orders in their place”, says Tony Rennell in the Daily Mail. “What and how we eat, what we call our meals — tea, dinner, supper? — and where we take them — at a table, in front of the telly? —are indicators of where we stand (or, better still, sit) in the social order.” Indeed, we have always expended more time and energy on judging people for what they eat and the way they eat it than on judging the quality of the food itself.…

• Watching I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! on TV is a pleasure, says Karren Brady (pictured) in The Sun on Sunday. There are the contestants’ personal journeys and, for some, it is a last-ditch attempt to breathe life into a flagging career. No doubt for others, the fees are a factor. “I have been invited ten times or more to participate in one or other of the celebrity shows, from the TV jungle to Strictly and from Dragons’ Den to Bake Off. But I can tell you now that there is no fee large enough to get me to sign up… I don’t consider myself a celebrity, and nor do I want to be one”. Any celebrity status isa side product of the passion that goes into…

Hooray! A vaccine! The relief column is finally in sight! And soon, it will run off the fiendish Covid-19, releasing the world from months of fear, loathing, death and siege. In the US, we are told, millions still cower in their homes. Millions are still unemployed. And people are sore afraid. But the virus was never like the Black Plague. It was never any threat at all to the nation. And for individuals, it was never as big a threat as heart disease, cancer and the other big killers. The virus focused its most lethal attacks on the weakest part of the population – those in nursing homes. And from them, it stole little of their lives, simply because they had little left to steal. “The trouble with the conservatives…

$10m How much actor Johnny Depp (pictured) will be paid (ie, his full fee) for working on Fantastic Beasts 3, despite filming only one scene, due to a “pay-to-play” provision in his contract, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Depp was asked to resign from the film after losing his high-profile court battle against The Sun this month. The role is to be recast. $68bn How much the world’s five richest billionaires added to their fortunes in one day last week, according to Bloomberg. The world’s top five billionaires are each worth at least $100bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault joined the club after last week’s stockmarket surge. $133.3bn The combined reported income of the highest-earning 1% of New Yorkers in 2018, according to…

Princess Camilla Crociani de Bourbon des Deux Siciles (pictured) faces a fine of “millions” for contempt of court if she refuses to reveal the location of a £50m Gauguin painting that has been caught in the crossfire of a family feud, says Jessica Carpani in The Daily Telegraph. The warning came in the latest hearing of a “bitter ten-year dispute” at the Royal Court on Jersey. The dispute began in 2010 when Camilla’s mother, Italian actress Edoarda Crociani, transferred £100m of art and investments into her own name from a trust fund set up for her daughters, Camilla and Cristiana. In 2011, Cristiana went to court, worried that she was being blocked from her inheritance. In 2017, the Royal Court ordered Edoarda to rebuild the fund, and told Camilla to…

“Two vaccines are better than one,” says Tara Lachapelle on Bloomberg. This week brought positive news about trials of Moderna’s vaccine for Covid-19 (see page 9). The update gave global markets a profitable start to the week, with America’s S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index both hitting record highs on Monday. The FTSE 100 rose to its highest level since June and has gained more than 13% so far this month. A global bull market The rally took a break the following day but, arguably, markets should be even more upbeat, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The Moderna vaccine is easier to store and transport than the Pfizer jab that made the headlines last week. That could speed up the daunting logistical challenges of rollout. For “airlines, events…

“Most of us wore Clarks shoes as children... So you may have been glad to hear that Clarks is to be rescued... by a £100m capital injection from LionRock Capital, a Hong Kong private-equity firm, which will acquire a majority holding while... the Clark dynasty — descendants of the brothers Cyrus and James Clark who began making sheepskin slippers in 1828 — retain a minority. [Part]of the deal, however, is a ‘company voluntary arrangement’ that will force the landlords of Clarks’ 320 shops... to accept a percentage of revenues rather than a fixed rent. For 60 of the shops, this apparently means nil rent. Is that... equitable? Landlords are often labelled ‘greedy’ when tenants are struggling to survive, but... this [time] I find my sympathies leaning the other way. Cyrus…

Six to buy Morgan Stanley Investors Chronicle There are plenty of reasons to dodge the banking sector: rock bottom interest rates and economic weakness will weigh on profitability over the coming years. An “ever-shifting” regulatory backdrop means investment banks are no haven, but Morgan Stanley is better placed than most. Its growing wealth-management and investment-management divisions provide valuable diversification, and the bank has little exposure to the rickety consumer credit and mortgage markets. On a price/earnings (p/e) ratio of 9.5 the shares have room to close a valuation gap with peers. $51.70 Saga Interactive Investor Shares in this over-50s insurer and cruise operator have jumped on hopes for the vaccines in development. The insurance side has broken even this year thanks to lower vehicle claims as lockdowns keep more people…

• National Grid’s high dividend looks attractive, especially to investors who are “hungry for income”, says Russ Mould in The Daily Telegraph. However, it faces a potentially “stiff new regulatory regime” under a proposed Ofgem framework that will run from 2021 to 2025. This could halve the regulated returns that the power-transmission giant is permitted to make. Even worse, the government is now reportedly looking at a breakup as part of its plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. While “neither threat is certain to crystallise”, there is too much risk here for investors to take on given the “dangers... to profits, cash flow and ultimately the dividend payments that form the bedrock of the investment case”. Investors should “pull the plug” on National Grid. • Amid the controversy…

The amount of money wagered on the US presidential election still continues to climb, with £730m matched on the main market alone. The odds for Joe Biden (pictured) have now shrunk to 1.05 (95.2%), but they still seem much longer than is justified given the minuscule chances of the result being overturned. This raises an interesting question about the best approach to betting at short odds. The proper definition of a short-odds situation is when the potential return from a winning bet is worse than even money (50%). This means that you will get back a total of less than double your stake from a win. In contrast, long odds are those where the punter is offered better than even money, presumably because the event is seen as unlikely. The…

Former Labour minister David Miliband’s charity has hired several of his close political aides for senior positions on hefty salaries, says Ian Birrell in The Mail on Sunday. Miliband is paid around $1m to run the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which gets £50m from British taxpayers. Madlin Sadler, his former special adviser, pocketed more than £300,000 last year from the charity as senior vice-president. Her salary has gone up by almost £57,000 in four years. Other senior employees with ties to Miliband include Laura Kyrke-Smith, who leads the charity’s British arm and was a speechwriter under Miliband; Ollie Money, now global communications director and a former researcher before joining the IRC in 2013; and Matthew Doyle, currently director of communications for Europe and a former special adviser to Miliband’s mentor,…

The prospect of one or more vaccines for Covid-19 has sent markets soaring. But certain stocks are set to do a lot better than others, as billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller points out. “You’ve had a bunch of equities benefiting greatly from work from home. A lot of money has rotated into them. They are overvalued,” the hedge fund manager tells CNBC. “But then you’ve got a whole other sector of the market that has struggled mightily because of Covid-19. They’re selling at undervalue relative to... a three-to-five-year outlook. So the rotation into that would seem entirely rational.” Another legacy of the coronavirus pandemic will be less welcome to many investors. Druckenmiller reckons that inflation is likely to rise in the coming years, due primarily to the actions taken by central…

cato.org/blog The news of Pfizer’s promising trial results for its Covid-19 vaccine holds a useful political lesson, says Ryan Bourne. Although governments have “greased the wheels” of vaccine development by committing to buy doses, Pfizer chose not to become part of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed programme, which funds vaccine development. Why not? Pfizer CEO Dr Albert Bourla says that the reason was that he wanted to “liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy. When you get money from someone that always comes with strings. They want to see how we are going to progress… They want reports. I didn’t want to have any of that… basically I gave [our scientists] an open chequebook so that they only had to worry about scientific challenges, not anything else.” There’s a “libertarian…

What looks like a bargain often turns out to be anything but. With interest rates and bond yields at rock-bottom levels in recent years, many investors have poured money into equities offering not just a high yield but also the prospect of capital gains. Widespread dividend cuts earlier this year tore these hopes apart, providing an expensive lesson that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. High-yielding shares have hidden risks but there are exceptions, especially when, as now, investors are cautious. Many funds in the property sector, for instance, weren’t getting the benefit of the doubt, yet the decision by ICG Longbow (LSE: LBOW) to commence an orderly wind-up, resulting in a 16% jump in the share price, shows that the market isn’t always right.…

With interest rates close to zero, finding a decent return on your savings is nearly impossible.“A decade ago... the average instant-access savings account paid 0.79%,” says Laura Shannon in The Mail on Sunday. “Today, high-street banks are disgracefully paying just 0.01% on such accounts – equivalent to a tenth of the Bank of England’s base rate of 0.1%.” However, there are better rates available. “Don’t deposit your money with high-street banks – there are better rate elsewhere. Although you might need to choose a brand name you’ve not heard of before, you can do so safely,” says Anna Bowes, co-founder of Savings Champion. For example, the best one-year bonds pay 1% or more and are offered by Tandem, Zopa Bank, OakNorth Bank and United Trust Bank. You can earn 1%…

C&C Group (LSE: CCR) is a drinks company that manufactures and distributes beer, cider, wine and spirits across the UK. It has been under severe pressure this year as pubs, bars and restaurants have been forced to close, says David Madden on CMC Markets. Sales plummeted by over 55% year-on-year to €386.4m in the six months to the end of August, and cash flow plunged to -€28.4m this year. As restrictions endure in the UK and Europe, “the outlook is likely to remain subdued in the next couple of quarters”. The shares have slipped by 50% in 12 months.…

Marc and Alexandre Bachelet made their first wines in the 2005 vintage and I have bought and also written up their wines every year since. Their modern outlook and boundless energy coupled with their innate respect for their special terroirs have meant that, from a standing start, they are now regarded as one of the most accomplished domaines in the region. Their wines usually sell out during en primeur season each year (this wine was sold as a “future” in January 2016) and so it is very exciting to find this parcel of brilliant wine at a highly advantageous price. The 2014s were slow to emerge from their shells and, without the sweet fruit associated with a warmer vintage, many were quick to dismiss them as rigid and blunt, and…

Fashion aficionados rejoice: retailers left with “dead stock” due to pandemic-enforced closures are selling their past-season clothes on eBay, often at a discount, say Louise Eccles and Sam Chambers in The Sunday Times. Since the first lockdown in March, “eBay has begun to resemble a virtual high street” as chains such as Wallis, Dorothy Perkins and Jack Wills launch “shops” on the website. Cycling commuters could see the cost of a new “e-bike” cut by up to a third under government plans to subsidise a “sweat-free” alternative to regular bicycles, says Graeme Paton in The Times. A taxpayer-backed scheme looks set to be launched in spring, aimed at those riding in business outfits and the less fit, to increase the number of people using battery-assisted bikes.…

People are increasingly enjoying the convenience of ordering takeaway meals. The pandemic has further fuelled this trend as people have become concerned about contracting Covid-19 at restaurants, says Wirtschaftswoche. At the same time, packaging laws are getting tougher: the EU, for instance, will ban single-use plastics from 2021. All this is excellent news for Finland’s Huhtamäki, a specialist in compostable or recyclable food packaging. Products include the small cardboard containers for portions of chips at burger giant McDonald’s and coffee cups for Starbucks. The long-term growth of the global economy is another tailwind for the sector. The stock yields almost 2%.…

Biotechnology firm Moderna is celebrating after “tremendously exciting” preliminary results from late-stage trials of its Covid-19 vaccine, says Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. So far, only five people in the trial who received the jab have contracted the virus, compared with 90 who received a placebo, implying that it is nearly 95%-effective in preventing infection. That would make it “even more effective than either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Russian jab”. The trials suggest that it can even protect “the elderly and vulnerable who are most at risk”, with no one who has received the jab developing severe Covid-19 yet (compared with 11 from the placebo group). Moderna’s success is “stunning”, says Robert Cyran on Breakingviews. Not only is it highly effective, but side effects are also “moderate”. More importantly, it…

This week saw the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), an unwieldy name for a vast new trading bloc that will cover 15 countries, including China, South Korea, Australia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Between them those countries account for a third of the world’s population, and 30% of global GDP. It will be the biggest single trade bloc in the world. How deep that integration turns out to be, and how much it will be dominated by China, and how much it boosts trade, remains to be seen. But there can be no question that it is a huge step towards dismantling trade barriers. A blossoming of blocs It is not alone. Over the course of the coming year the African Continental Free Trade Area will come into effect…

“Buy on the sound of cannons, sell on the sound of trumpets.” So runs the old investment adage, apocryphally attributed to a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty. The idea – that you should invest when everyone is panicking and assets are cheap, and sell when everyone is jubilant, and assets are expensive – makes perfect contrarian sense. Investing in March this year, when fear of coronavirus and its impact was at a peak, certainly took alot of nerve, but the level of panic was unmistakable. Today the question is: as vaccine news sends many markets to new highs, is this the “trumpet” moment? “Is the vaccine news a ‘trumpet’ moment for markets?” Not yet, perhaps – but we might be getting close. One sentiment survey that I like to…

Footloose workers get nailed down Lionel Laurent Bloomberg Digital nomads, a new species of globe-trotting white-collar workers, are taking the opportunity presented by Covid-19 to settle in spots without coronavirus restrictions, and countries of a “sunny disposition, from tax havens to tourist traps, are competing hard” to attract them, says Lionel Laurent. However, while the idea of paying $2,000 for a year’s remote working rights on Barbados may sound appealing, digital wanderers are likely to stumble upon “some uncomfortable truths”. First, increasing travel bans and immigration restrictions will make their wanderings harder. Second, given the scale of pandemic-driven recessions, this privileged group of workers will attract the attention of the tax authorities. Brits escaping to places like St. Tropez have already been told to “come back or face a change…

mises.org The Covid-19 lockdowns have accelerated the implementation of “long-held plans to establish a new world order”, says Antony Mueller. Under the auspices of the World Economic Forum, global policymakers are advocating a “Great Reset” with the intent of creating a global technocracy. The intent is utopian, with programmes including aguaranteed minimum income and healthcare for all; the reality will be a world of “digital tyranny”, modelled on China’s social credit system, whereby individuals and corporations are monitored for correct behaviour and punished with exclusion for non-compliance. The aim of the Great Reset is, in short, social engineering. The end result will be different from the totalitarianisms of earlier times, relying more on behavioural “nudges” than brute force, but the intent will still be to “make the individual submit to…

St James’s Place (SJP) has been “blasted” by an activist investor over its excessive executive pay and “disappointing” share price performance, says Lucy White in the Daily Mail. Primestone Capital has the UK’s biggest wealth manager “in its crosshairs”. It wants SJP to address its “bloated” organisational structure and “excessive hiring”. Primestone is stepping in after several years of criticism of the incentives SJP offers to its partners, “including luxury holidays and white-gold cufflinks”. Over 25% of its employees earn over £89,000, a “staggering statistic”. Even though the amount of money under management has more than doubled since 2015, profitability has declined by 20% and the shares have barely budged: they have gained a mere 2%.…

Many of us worry about inheritance tax (IHT) and how we can minimise how much of our estate goes to the taxman. One way to reduce his take and significantly improve the finances of the younger generation is to give away your money while you are still alive. Nearly £1trn will be inherited over the next decade. However, says Steve Webb in The Times, “there is a problem: the average age of inheritance is rising and for many people these windfalls... come too late in life.” Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that the average person born in the 1960s will be 58 when their last surviving parent dies. For those of us born in the 1980s the figure rises to 64. “The average person born in…

Equity-release specialists report a surge in demand from homeowners in their sixties forced to stop work earlier than expected or concerned about the impact of Covid-19 on their finances. More people than ever before are turning to their homes to bolster their income. For the cash-strapped, equity release has never looked more appealing. Not only have house prices hit record highs, but interest rates are also historically low. The most competitive equity-release plans now carry annual rates of less than 2.5%. But even at these lower rates, the cost of equity-release plans builds up over time, potentially leaving borrowers with little or no property wealth to pass on to children. The younger the borrower when they take out the equity-release plan, the higher the costs are likely to be. Plan…

While the US election may still be disputed at the presidential level, there is no doubt that the medical cannabis sector was a winner. Ballot initiatives to legalise medical and/or recreational cannabis were passed in five states. Most significantly, New Jersey legalised cannabis for recreational use (it already permits the drug for medical purposes); this is expected to create a domino effect in neighbouring states on the heavily populated eastern seaboard. As the sector gathers momentum in the US, the stage is set for the rest of the world to follow it on the path of legalising medical cannabis. Share prices have reacted positively to these developments but there is still tremendous upside. Supplying the greenhouse “GW Pharmaceuticals is well placed to be a leader in several pot-based drugs” Hydroponics…