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An oligarch’s son “caught up in the world’s largest divorce case” was ordered to pay £75m to his mother this week after the judge ruled him “a dishonest individual who will do anything to assist his father”, says The Guardian. Temur Akhmedov was found to have been colluding with his father, billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov, to hide “hundreds of millions of pounds” to avoid paying a £453m divorce settlement. London will be the “biggest employment casualty of the pandemic”, says The Daily Telegraph. The end of the furlough scheme coupled with “the impact of the Brexit deal” will cost the capital over 150,000 jobs by the end of the year, with employment dropping 3.9% to 3.7 million. The city has the highest unemployment rate of any UK region, at 7.2%.…

Copper has gained 26% so far this year and this week hit $9,758 a tonne, its highest level since the summer of 2011. Copper got a big boost last year from Chinese infrastructure building. Now the US is following suit, says Myra Saefong for MarketWatch. Joe Biden’s $2.3trn infrastructure package and green energy plans will require massive quantities of copper wiring. The virus also accelerated the advent of the digital economy, says Rob Haworth of U.S. Bank Wealth Management. “Semiconductors, data centres and cellular towers” all need copper. Supply is not rising fast enough to meet demand. Miners have underinvested in new capacity in recent years and developing new mines is a lengthy process. It’s not just copper, says Bloomberg News. Aluminium and iron-ore prices have also been making new…

Global trade in goods rose for nine straight months to March 2021, “the longest uninterrupted expansion in over 20 years”, says Simon MacAdam of Capital Economics. Data from the CPB Netherlands Bureau show that it jumped by 5.4% in February compared with a year earlier. The blockage of the Suez Canal last month had only a limited impact: already congested container ports did see a small rise in waiting times in the wake of the Suez incident, but that problem “seems to have peaked”. While Suez has proved a sideshow, the “big picture” is that global shipping prices have trebled since pre-pandemic levels (see chart) as locked-down consumers buy more things to alleviate their boredom.…

Cybersecurity group Darktrace “opted for a cautious float”, pricing it far below earlier expectations following the “disastrous” flop of Deliveroo, whose “drastically overpriced” shares have collapsed by 40% since its initial public offering (IPO), says Jim Armitage in the Evening Standard. The firm, whose software uses artificial intelligence to learn how organisations work and communicate to discern irregularities and prevent cyberattacks, was expected to price its IPO at £3.6bn at one stage, but is now targeting a valuation of between £1.6bn and £1.9bn. The company plans to sell new shares to raise $200m, while staff are selling $45m of existing shares.…

Shares in Tate & Lyle bounced this week after the 162-year-old company said that it is exploring the sale of a controlling stake in the largest part of the firm, says Hari Govind on Bloomberg. “One of Europe’s leading sugar producers” until it sold that business in 2010, Tate & Lyle has since focused on food ingredients, including sweeteners, with this division generating £1.8bn in sales last year, around 60% of total revenue. Good news, says Lex in the Financial Times. While the production of sweeteners is a “steady cash generator”, demand for them is gradually falling thanks to the growing awareness about their role in obesity. The sweetener business is also obscuring Tate & Lyle’s “fast-growing” food and beverage division, especially its “speciality ingredient” business, which helps food manufacturers…

Things are finally looking up slightly for investors who rely on stocks for income. In the first three months of this year, UK dividends fell at their slowest annual rate since the pandemic began, down 26.7% excluding special dividends according to the latest quarterly figures from shareholder registrar Link. That still sounds painful, but the year-on-year figure disguises an encouraging trend: half of all listed companies resumed, maintained or increased their dividends between January and March, compared with just one third between October and December. “Dividends fell an unprecedented 43.1% in 2020” The bad news is that dividends fell an unprecedented 43.1% – including both regular and special dividends – in 2020. Even though payouts are recovering and we can expect a decent level of special dividends this year, Link…

The costs of working from home Kate Andrews The Daily Telegraph A Deloitte survey finds that more than 20% of workers don’t want to return to the office, says Kate Andrews. The estimated number of people who want to work from home (WFH) permanently (7.5 million) is double the pre-pandemic figure. The “consequences of a two-tier system among white-collar employees will have to be dealt with”. The appeal of WFH, particularly for older workers in the service industries, isn’t hard to see, but it would be naïve for them to think the arrangement will always work in their favour. Pre-Covid-19, home workers earned on average 6.8% less than their office-going colleagues, who were also more likely to get bonuses, promotions and training. This trend may return. Additionally, office-based workers absorb…

capx.co Coverage of Brexit has tended to focus on our relationship with the EU and trade deals, but the bigger question is about what kind of country we want to be now we have taken back control of regulation, says Shanker Singham. That question is in the process of being answered. The government recently consulted on its proposed UK subsidy control regime. This represents an opportunity to reduce anticompetitive distortions that “slant markets in favour of privileged, protected incumbents”. The government should make three key changes. First, to make reducing subsidies the goal of policy. One of the principal ways “large incumbent cronies” benefit at the expense of entrepreneurs is through subsidies. Even those cases where subsidies are “truly justified by some overriding legitimate public policy goal” should be strictly…

“The smaller, the better,” says the London Business School, which has examined the performance of smaller companies since 1955. The compound annual return of the Numis Smaller Companies index, representing the bottom 10% of the UK market, has been 14.7% since then, 3.4% ahead of the All-Share index. The yearly return of the Numis 1000, representing the bottom 2%, has been 16.3%. Excluding investment companies, there are over 100 listed “micro-cap” companies with market values below £100m, but they only account for 0.2% of the total market by value. Another 50 have market values of £100m-£200m, adding 0.4% of total market value, but the inclusion of listings on Aim, the junior market of the London Stock Exchange, trebles the number of stocks. Scouring this mass of tiddlers for bargains are…

Could invoice finance help your business? This form of funding, sometimes known as factoring, has hit the headlines in recent weeks because it was one of the services offered by the collapsed financial-services firm Greensill Capital. But the controversies around the Greensill affair should not put businesses off invoice finance; in the right circumstances it can be a useful alternative to better-known types of funding. Invoice finance is fairly simple. When your business sells a good or service to a customer, it normally has to wait for a period for the invoice to be settled – perhaps 30 days, but often longer. Invoice-finance firms offer to pay you the value of the invoice upfront, minus a fee for their services, with the debt settled once the customer pays up. “One…

Greeting-card retailer Card Factory’s (LSE: CARD) shares have jumped by 118% over the last 12 months, and broker Liberum believes they could triple over the next three years, says Giulia Bottaro on Proactive Investors. The firm is well placed to benefit from reopening: it boasts a “history of strong cash generation” and recorded strong footfall and trading when it was allowed to open between lockdowns last year. This should “help conclude talks with its banks to secure additional funding”. Sales are expected to reach pre-pandemic levels in 2024.…

In 1997 entrepreneur Michael Fenne, who claimed to have previously worked for a variety of employers, including the CIA, the Saudi royal family, Disney and Sony, set up Digital Motion Video (later renamed Pixelon), which claimed to have developed a method of streaming video over the internet in a way that ordinary users with dial-up connections could access. Fenne announced plans to use this technology to set up an internet broadcasting empire with 1,000 channels, and appeared to have some initial success, striking deals with Paramount to distribute a film trailer on the internet. What was the scam? Most of Fenne’s claims about Pixelon’s technology were exaggerated and its supposedly proprietary technology was only a slight reworking of existing Microsoft software. The name “Michael Fenne” was merely an alias for…

In the Thick of It The Private Diaries ofaMinister Alan Duncan William Collins, £25 During his time as an MP, Alan Duncan was well-known for being an “odd mixture of propriety, informality and emotion”, says Salma Shah in The Spectator. He was “never boring”, but had an unfortunate knack for “ending on the wrong side of the winning team”. Duncan’s diaries, which cover the years 2015 to 2019, “when the Brexit wars raged”, reveal “deep thought” about Britain’s long-term foreign-policy objectives, “enlivened by highly amusing recollections”. And his former colleagues do not get off lightly, many of whom – including Boris Johnson, who was his boss at the Foreign Office – he holds in “contempt”. Duncan’s ire for Johnson clearly provides the main impetus for the book, says Max Hastings…

A Spanish aristocratic family is being rocked by a bitter dispute over a painting by Goya, says Isambard Wilkinson in The Times. Diplomat and playwright Íñigo Ramírez de Haro alleges that his elder brother, Fernando (pictured), the 10th Marquess of Villanueva del Duero, and his wife, Esperanza Aguirre, a former senior leader of the conservative Popular Party, did not declare the painting as national heritage “so that its sale for millions of euros would avoid tax and official restrictions”. The brothers sold the work – a portrait of an ancestor painted between 1795 and 1800 – in 2012, after it was valued at €8m by Sotheby’s. The sale was to repay Fernando’s debts, but the couple were to pay Íñigo a share of the €5m they received. Nine years later,…

“India’s problem is the world’s problem”, says Yasmeen Serhan in The Atlantic. Just weeks ago, the country thought it had put the Covid-19 pandemic behind it. Then it reported more than a million new cases and over 8,000 deaths over a three-day period, setting grim new global records in the process. As the virus sweeps through developing countries “the world is on track to record more Covid-19 deaths this year than it did in 2020”. Difficult months ahead India’s tragedy has exposed a fragile medical system, says Michael Safi in The Guardian. It spends just 1% of GDP on its state healthcare service, one of the lowest figures in the world. The country was the world’s biggest vaccine producer heading into the pandemic but vaccinating 1.39 billion people is no…

“The electric vehicle (EV) sector [is]... priced as if... [every single company]... will soon dominate [the] industry... Of course, there will be some winners from the group, which, in addition [to] Tesla, include EV makers Lucid, Rivian, Polestar, Nio, Rad Power, Rimac [and] Sono... Add in the traditional...[vehicle] manufacturers [including] VW, Ford, Toyota and GM, and you have the making of robust competition... But not all of these EV producers can have a dominant market share... While some will win and some will lose, they all cannot be better than average.... when all of the companies in a single sector are priced as if each will [enjoy] stupendous success and overwhelming market share, we end up with [what]... Brad Cornell, a professor at UCLA and at Caltech [calls]... a ‘big…

Three to buy Flutter Entertainment The Times UK regulators might be “tightening their grip” on the sports-betting industry, but “the US is going the other way”. Flutter Entertainment is in “pole position” thanks to its FanDuel brand, which boasts a40% share of the US online sports-betting market. “There are reasons to be cautious”: the firm is in the middle of a legal dispute with Fox Corporation over its purchase of a stake in Flutter. But despite its ongoing spat with the media conglomerate, the outlook is positive. 15,295p Hargreaves Lansdown The Daily Telegraph Investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown managed to attract 220,000 new customers last year, despite tarnishing its reputation by recommending Neil Woodford’s chronically underperforming fund. And “there is every reason to expect more customers to sign up”. With fewer…

• Standard Life Aberdeen’s decision to rebrand as Abrdn has produced “equal parts bafflement and amusement”, says Oliver Barnes in the Financial Times. However, it’s not completely crazy, as a name change “can offer a company the chance of a fresh start” – witness Andersen Consulting’s decision to change its name to Accenture, which paid off after the implosion of its sister company Arthur Andersen. While Standard Life is clearly not facing the same type of problems, “some sort of change was necessary” after the 196-year-old Standard Life brand was sold to the insurance group Phoenix earlier this year. Given that most asset management brands “are all very homogenous and traditional”, the name change could benefit it by presenting the image of a company that is “modernising”. Of course, the…

The Court of Appeal last week reversed “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history” by quashing the convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting of dozens of Post Office workers, says Haroon Siddique and Ben Quinn in The Guardian. Many were sent to prison or lost their livelihood and homes between 2000 and 2014 after the Horizon IT system installed by the Post Office and supplied by Fujitsu “falsely suggested there were cash shortfalls”. Despite evidence of bugs, errors and defects in the system, hundreds of postmasters ended up criminalised by the Post Office. The ruling “opens the door” for civil claims against the Post Office, which has already paid out £58m to 550 workers who won group litigation in 2019, says The Daily Telegraph. The…

From the publishing industry to our home speakers, Amazon has transformed everything, says Tom Knowles in The Times. Now it is turning its attention to hair. The tech giant is opening its first hairdresser in Spitalfields Market in east London, where it plans to experiment with augmented reality (AR), which will allow customers “advance peeks” at what they will look like with different hair cuts and colours “before subjecting themselves to the scissors and dyes”. Customers will also be able to browse beauty products with the company’s “point-and-learn-technology”: sensors next to products on the shelves will be able to detect when someone is pointing at them, and then show details and videos on a screen above. Amazon Fire tablets will be available at every styling station for entertainment, and there…

• Shareholders at US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson have approved the 2020 $29.6m pay plan for chief executive Alex Gorsky (pictured), despite being urged not to by proxy advisers and the Office of the Illinois State Treasurer, says Reuters. Thousands of lawsuits related to the opioid crisis in the US and allegations of asbestos in its talcum baby powder have cost the company $9bn over the past two years. Gorsky’s base salary is unchanged, but his overall pay package is 17% bigger than in 2019 and nearly 50% larger than in 2018. • Just over a third of investors in Domino’s Pizza voted against the executive pay plan for the company’s new CEO, Dominic Paul. Paul, who took over from retired boss David Wild last May after running café…

Many high-profile investment trusts have managed to raise their dividend every year for decades regardless of dividend cuts by companies. The main reason for this is that trusts, unlike open-ended investment funds, don’t have to distribute all the dividends they get each year. They can hold back up to 15% to build up a revenue reserve, which they can then draw on to maintain their own dividends in years when company payouts fall. This can be useful for investors who prefer a steady income from their funds. You could do a similar thing with your own portfolio, by putting aside 10% or 15% of your dividend income to be drawn on only during market crises. However, avoiding dipping into that requires discipline, while having it out of reach inside an…

“Listen, there’s many a McDonald’s both here and in Britain that are more than willing to take on either one or both of them and then they can be truly independent earning their own money.” Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten (pictured), on Prince Harry and Meghan, quoted in The Sunday Times “The capacity to allow great people around him, [something] many [bosses] are afraid of. And he always paid his people better than himself, which I thought was a great example.” António Horta-Osório, CEO of Lloyds Banking Group, on what made legendary Spanish banker Emilio Botín great, quoted in the Financial Times “I had found out that money was like a sixth sense without which you could not make the most of the other five.” Somerset Maugham,…

constine.substack.com Social media has made it easier than ever for creative people to distribute their work and reach an audience, says Josh Constine. Kim Kardashian, for example, possessed of little more than “unapologetic self-confidence”, completely mastered celebrity media. Yet while social-media platforms solved the distribution problem, they “forgot monetisation”. The most popular influencers aside, most creators in the mid-2010s weren’t earning much money. As Patreon creator Jack Conte says, for a while it “kind of felt like: ‘Well, art’s free, that’s just how it is now’”. This started to change with the launch of Gumroad in 2011 and Patreon in 2013, which were launched explicitly to help creators monetise their fan base. The established platforms got scared of customer flight and started introducing their own ways for users to make…

When Yasuo Takeuchi (pictured), chief financial officer at Japan’s Olympus, was told in 2017 that activist investor ValueAct Capital had taken a stake in the company, he felt as if “barbarians were at the gate”, say Makiko Yamazaki and Noriyuki Hirata on Japan Today. But with time he started to see the fund as a “potential catalyst for change at Olympus”, which had suffered an accounting scandal and was “too domestic in its outlook”. Today “a leaner Olympus is on track to double its operating profit margin to 20% by the next financial year”. Olympus is “a notable example of how attitudes” towards activist investors have changed in Japan in recent years.…

In October last year the two biggest equitycrowdfunding platforms in the UK, Seedrs and Crowdcube, announced that they were hoping to merge. At that stage this alternative world of early stage business funding appeared to be in poor shape, especially during the first phase of the pandemic when investors ran for the hills. The merger seemed a solution to these woes: as Seedrs observed in a report, the deal would be “a pro-competitive transaction that, first and foremost, is about the survival and sustainability of an innovative method of equity-finance in a David versus Goliath battle against the established providers of equity funding” for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). And then last month came the news that the competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), had scuppered the deal.…

Is your business eligible for the Restart Grant, the government-backed scheme that provides funding for firms as they emerge from the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions? Some 700,000 businesses in England are in line for the awards, which could be worth as much as £18,000. The money is aimed at companies forced to close during lockdown in England and now reopening. That means non-essential businesses in sectors such as retail, hospitality, accommodation, leisure and personal care. What your business is entitled to will depend on the rateable value of the premises that it occupies, and also its business sector. Firstly, non-essential retailers, which were mostly allowed to reopen for business on 12 April, are entitled to receive up to £6,000 per premises They can claim £2,667 if their premises have a rateable…

Esken (LSE: ESKN), Britain’s only listed airport operator, has “halved the number of airstrips it runs”, says Robert Lea in The Times. It is undergoing a costly shake-up that includes selling its airfield in Carlisle and a small fleet of aircraft. Esken is paying £49m to “rid itself of the assets”; it will get £15m from the sale of Carlisle airfield, which opened in 2019 only to close again when the pandemic hit. The firm will be left with two main operations, running Southend airport and Stobart Energy, which supplies woodchip to biomass-incinerator plants. The stock has fallen by 42% in a year.…

2019 Benedict White, Dveri Pax, Slovenia £9.95, thewinesociety.com  The Wine Society sent over acase of tasting samples the other day entitled “Alpine Wines”. I was delighted to reacquaint myself with an old favourite of mine, 2020 Chignin Vers les Alpes Jean-François Quénard (£10.95), in this box of goodies. I first tasted the wines from Quénard some 30 years ago and I have never forgotten the shiver down my spine brought on by the racy, rapier-sharp Jacquère grape variety. The new 2020 vintage arrives in the country and it is as bright and steely as any wine I have tasted from this famous Juran estate. As the weather warms up and we search for electrifying dry whites to challenge our senses, this wine seems like the perfect antidote to…

• The 93rd Academy Awards, held last Sunday, might as well have been named the “Odd-scars”, says Alison Boshoff in the Daily Mail. London and Paris hosted hubs for the part-virtual £29m awards ceremony, while nominees, including Britain’s Daniel Kaluuya (pictured), who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, attended the main event in Los Angeles. Partying was banned due to Covid-19, but it wasn’t all hair shirts. Nominees still received party bags worth £250,000 each, containing a mixture of the “practical and bizarre” – “acupuncture sessions, aGPS for pets, three nights at a lighthouse in Sweden, a hammer to break out dogs left in hot cars, lifestyle guidance for a year, a treatment at a cosmetic surgery clinic, digital artwork, an at-home vitamin infusion, a ‘Happiness planner’ journal, ‘molecular hydrogen’…

Excess savings, new stimulus cheques to spend, huge deficit spending, more money printing, a successful vaccine, euphoria due to the end of the pandemic – add it all up and commentators everywhere see a boom in the making. Perhaps so, but there is more than one kind of boom. There’s the kind of boom that makes people richer. And there’s the kind of boom that makes them poorer. A further complication is that, in the early stages, it’s hard to tell the two apart. “A fake boom doesn’t add to prosperity – it reduces it” A real boom – based on working, saving, investing, and innovating – makes you richer and better off. The other kind, the fake boom, is another thing altogether. You just print up some money and…

€10,000 The fines demanded by senators in Italy for ice-cream makers caught pumping their product full of air to make it fluffier, says The Times. Artisanal ice creams may contain no more than 30% air, with the percentage rising to 80% for industrial brands. €9,000 The monthly takings of an average restaurant in France in normal times. However, during the pandemic, restaurants have been able to claim up to €10,000 a month from the state to cover lost revenue, meaning that 39.1% fewer went bust last year than in 2019. $48bn How much the global aviation industry expects to lose in 2021 due to a failure to control the spread of Covid-19 and the global vaccine rollout being slower than expected, according to the International Air Transport Association. £50,000 How…

Profits at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, more than doubled after the company heavily invested in digital advertising to reach those “working and playing online” throughout the pandemic, says The Times. Revenues jumped 34% to $55.31bn in a record-breaking first quarter, while profits rose to $17.93bn. The firm makes more money from digital advertising than any other company by selling space on its Google search pages and on YouTube. The Oscars “lacked the usual glitz and glamour” due to coronavirus restrictions’ effects on the guest list, but it was a standout night for “real, jaw-dropping jewellery”, says The Daily Telegraph. Zendaya’s “midriff-baring Valentino dress became truly Oscars worthy” (pictured), thanks to $6m-worth of Bulgari diamonds. Andra Day, Olivia Colman, Regina King and Viola Davis also sported “lashing of white diamond jewellery”…

Amadeus IT will be a key beneficiary of the global rebound in travel, says WirtschaftsWoche. The Madrid-based company owns a computer reservation system, called Amadeus, for hotels and airlines; it takes acut of every transaction. The group is part of an oligopoly of three providers, and with a 40% market share it is the leader. Sales fell by 60% last year, turning 2019’s €1.3bn profit into a loss of €438m. But management raised €750m of capital after the first lockdown in 2020, leaving Amadeus in solid shape and ready to ride the recovery. The stock has bounced, but at €58 has yet to regain its pre-pandemic level of €80. And given the firm’s solid fundamentals, there is no reason why it should stop there.…

Following one of its “worst years on record” oil giant BP is gaining confidence. It plans to boost returns to shareholders after “higher oil prices and strong trading results buoyed its first-quarter earnings”, says Sarah MacFarlane in The Wall Street Journal. It made a profit of $3.32bn in the first three months of 2021, compared with a loss of $628m a year earlier. Having sold assets to cut net debt to $33bn from $39bn in the previous quarter, BP said it would buy back $500m of shares in the second quarter. The reported profits were boosted by a $1bn gain on the sale of a stake in an Omani gas field, says Emily Gosden in The Times. However, even if you remove this gain and other “one-off factors”, underlying profits…

“Only one of the accusations” made by Cummings (see above) has the potential to force Johnson out of office, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times; the one about the flat. Aside from offending almost everyone with the phrase “John Lewis nightmare” (for most people the brand is aspirational), which politician wants to defend someone else’s expensive redecoration? Prime ministers are already entitled to an annual £30,000 grant for work to the flat; Johnson spent nearly £100,000. More importantly, whatever Johnson has done, he has already done. If he paid for it himself, having “merely contemplated another arrangement”, the matter will be a brief embarrassment. If the financing is more complex and a Tory donor stumped up before Johnson changed his mind, that could represent a breach of various rules and…

It’s been a dismal few months for Angela Merkel’s CDU party in Germany. The third wave of the virus and the botched vaccine rollout caused its popularity to fall by more than ten percentage points over the past few weeks. What’s more, its decision to stick with the CDU’s Armin Laschet, rather than its CSU sister party’s more popular Markus Söder, as candidate for chancellor, has led to concerns that they could end up being forced out as the main party in the coalition that emerges after the election in September. At the moment, with £242,095 matched on Betfair, Laschet is currently 1.75 (59.1%) to be the next chancellor. The Green’s candidate Annalena Baerbock (pictured) is now in second place at 3.2 (31.3%). Punters are no longer taking the idea…

The best-paid educational academy chiefs are “pulling even further ahead from the rest”, says Tom Belger for Schools Week. From 2017, the Education and Skills Funding Agency has sent letters to 277 trusts seeking justification for excessive pay. Of those trusts (now numbering 265 due to closures and merges), 55% awarded bosses with pay rises last year, with the 20 highest-paid CEOs the most likely to receive pay increases. Their pay rose by an average 4%, worth £9,694, compared with 1% among all 265 trusts, 98 of whom earned more than the prime minister. The best-paid in England was Dan Moynihan of the Harris Federation, whose pay moved up a £5,000 pay band to at least £455,000, followed by the Thomas Telford School’s executive head, Kevin Satchwell, on at least…

City of London Investment Trust has raised its payout every year for 54 years. Even six months ago, when the outlook for the economy was murkier than it is today, the trust remained confident that it would be able to stretch the record to 55, even if it needed to dip into capital reserves (see box) for the first time. “In most of our scenarios, our revenue reserves would be very sufficient, but it is something we have got in case they weren’t,” manager Job Curtis told Citywire at the time. Its latest half-year report in February implies that step won’t be necessary: a “diverse portfolio, strong cash flow and revenue reserve give the board confidence it will be able to increase the dividend”. Curtis, who has run the trust…

project-syndicate.org The late Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh and husband to the queen, was long celebrated (or parodied) as a man “out of step with the modern world”, say Raj Persaud and Adrian Furnham. He couldn’t understand, for example, why servicemen today would need therapy. Back in World War II, he observed, “we didn’t have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking: ‘Are you all right? Are you sure you don’t have a ghastly problem?’ You just got on with it.” This “stiff upper lip” was a British characteristic at a time when the UK was the world’s leading power. The modern world seems to have less use for such “masculine” attitudes. Being likeable has instead become “the sine qua non of career success”. The world…

■ IPM, one of Sweden’s oldest hedge funds, has closed down. Its “quantitative strategies” failed to cope with the pandemic-induced market turmoil of early 2020, says Love Liman on Bloomberg. Chairman Lars Ericsson rejected the idea that quants — hedge funds that base their trading decisions on algorithmic strategies — “have had their day”, but recognised that the pandemic “was a total surprise for the models”. The fund “started bleeding client money more than a year ago”. Around $4bn of assets under management have flowed out since late 2019, leaving a mere $750m. In 2020 IPM lost 3.8%. It failed to recover from the overwhelming outflows throughout the pandemic, and now “joins a growing list of hedge funds shutting down in recent years”. More hedge funds have closed than started…

You might think that once a person dies their will is set in stone. In fact, it is possible to change someone’s will once they are deceased, and it is becoming increasingly common. Families are using a legal document known as a deed of variation to alter who benefits from a will, with the most common reason being to reduce inheritance tax bills and help younger generations. “The document must be signed by all the executors and beneficiaries” “We have seen a jump in the number of families wanting a deed of variation in the past year,” Paul Campion, a chartered financial planner at Succession Wealth, told The Mail on Sunday. “This is due to an increase in unexpected deaths of older family members” owing to the pandemic. “The deceased…

Stockmarket indices can be a poor reflection of reality. Mega-cap technology stocks in the US have had an overwhelming impact on returns, but this obscures the fact that the average global stock has only recently recovered from a hidden bear market dating back to early 2018. While there is much to like about the US tech giants – deep “moats” (entrenched competitive advantages that fend off potential rivals), high returns on capital, piles of cash and appealing long-term growth potential – there are excellent businesses out there trading at much more attractive valuations. Great investment ideas come in many different shapes and sizes and it always pays to cast a wide net. A top Taiwanese chip maker “An ageing population and higher incomes will fuel growth at health insurers” Taiwan…