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“The oil giants have done well, but we won’t get what we want by taxing them even more” This month has been a good one for the UK’s oil giants. Last week Shell reported 2021 earnings of $19.3bn and this week BP announced its best profit numbers in eight years (see page 13). Add up what these two are making and it comes to real money, says Labour’s Anas Sarwar. Think “£44,710 a minute”. That doesn’t sound fair does it – particularly when all our energy bills are soaring? Luckily there are politicians aplenty with ideas about how to make it fair. Here’s the Lib Dems’ Ed Davey on the matter. “It just cannot be right that these energy companies are making super profits without suffering an extra tax while…

British holidaymaker John Nisill racked up a £192,069 bill on his work mobile phone during a four-day trip to Turkey after being charged exorbitant roaming costs, says The Sun. Nisill says he made 16 minutes of calls and sent a few emails, but was told that he was being charged £80 every 30 seconds and had used 46GB of data. BT says it will waive the charges. Telecoms mogul Mohamed Amersi (pictured) is demanding the return of £200,000 in donations that he made to the Conservative Party after he did not receive perks that he was promised , says The Guardian. Amersi says he had paid £50,000 to be in the “Leader’s Group” donor club, but was not invited to elite events. He also paid £150,000 for auction prizes that…

Gold is “one asset holding up through the early 2022 market turmoil”, says Hardika Singh in The Wall Street Journal. The yellow metal has disappointed since it hit a record of $2,067 per ounce in August 2020. But with geopolitical tensions rising and equities tumbling, gold has held steady around $1,800 this year. Globally, gold-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs)saw net inflows of $2.7bn last month, the highest level since May 2021, says Adam Perlaky of the World Gold Council. Gold bugs will welcome that after a bruising 2021 that saw global outflows of $9.1bn from ETFs. Rising bond yields are bad news for gold: since the metal pays no interest, investors will increasingly be tempted to sell it for low-risk assets that do, such as UK gilts or US treasury bonds.…

Ultra-loose monetary policy has seen the amount of debt with a negative yield – meaning that borrowers are effectively being paid to borrow – soar in recent years. Huge central-bank purchases of bonds issued by governments and blue-chip companies pushed the global stock of negative-yielding debt up to $18trn by the end of 2020. But with central banks now in tightening mode, that figure has since fallen to $4.9trn, the lowest level since December 2015, says Bloomberg. That may mark “the beginning of the end for a mind-boggling anomaly in modern finance – people paying to lend out money”. At the start of the year the German ten-year bund carried a -0.12% yield, but it recently turned positive for the first time since 2019.…

Initial public offerings (IPOs) have got off to a rough start in 2022, says Bloomberg. Just $26.7bn of IPOs have been priced so far this year, down 60% from the same period last year, and more of these deals are being scrapped before making it to market. Rising interest rates, slowing growth and geopolitical tensions are making stocks volatile. Many of last year’s star IPOs are struggling, including electric-truck firm Rivian (down 60%) and online stockbroker Robinhood (down 80%). Thus planned IPOs, including HR platform Justworks, file-transfer site WeTransfer and law firm Mischon de Reya have been cancelled or delayed, as have $4bn of special purpose acquisition companies (Spacs).…

Peleton’s “dwindling fortunes” have “taken a turn for the better” amid speculation that Amazon, Nike and Apple are circling the upmarket fitness-equipment firm, says Dominic Walsh in The Times. The shares had fallen 80% from their peak, but takeover speculation has pushed the price up 20% to around $30 – above their IPO price in 2019, although “still a long way short of the $167 they hit at the start of last year”. Yet a deal might be a bit more unlikely than the market thinks, says Cara Lombardo in The Wall Street Journal. Peloton has a dual-class share structure that lets insiders, including co-founder John Foley, control around 80% of votes and gives them control over any major decisions. The firm has now outlined plans “to replace its chief…

That didn’t last long. Tesco decided last week that competing with Aldi and Lidl at the bottom of the grocery market was a lot harder than it looked and closed the “Jack’s” chain set up only four years ago to take the fight to the German discounters. Named after the founder of the chain, Jack Cohen, Tesco launched its low-cost chain with great fanfare in 2018. The idea was to compete with Aldi and Lidl, discount grocers who were taking an increasing chunk of the British grocery market with their cheap, limited ranges. If Tesco allowed the two newcomers to advance too far into its core customer base it could quickly find itself in big trouble. And with its vast buying power and its expertise in the market, Tesco’s executives…

One aspect of the investment backdrop that has changed very significantly this year is that central banks are no longer taking a relaxed approach to inflation. The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and now even the European Central Bank are either actively raising interest rates or threatening to do so. Given that we’ve been in a world of ultra-low rates and money-printing for so long, this was always bound to have an impact on the broader market. One side-effect – which we’re already seeing – is that assets which are particularly sensitive to changes in interest rates (highly speculative growth stocks, for example) have started to underperform, while those that are less sensitive have been picking up (this is one reason why “value” stocks have rallied). “Central banks are…

Productivity gains will boost US Justin Lahart The Wall Street Journal Worker productivity in the US was up 6.6% in the last quarter of 2021, according to the US Labour Department. This follows a 5.5% decline in the third quarter; nevertheless, it looks as though higher productivity “might be on the way”, says Justin Lahart. The US could do with a boost. When productivity is high, businesses can “sell more, pay workers more and increase profits while leaving prices unchanged”. With investors worrying that rising wages will squeeze profit margins and persistent inflation will lead the Federal Reserve to “slam the brakes on the economy”, such gains would be “more than welcome”. There are grounds for optimism. First, the pandemic changed ways of working; when it eases, these could “pay…

worksinprogress.co The only people who care about plagiarism are “wussies and pussies”, according to Bob Dylan. That was his response to claims that he had stolen lyrics from other sources, says Stuart Ritchie. And his attitude makes sense given that borrowing from the wider culture is “part of the folk tradition”, as Dylan put it. But it’s too much of a leap from there to suggest, as some do, that plagiarism therefore doesn’t matter at all. Their argument is that we all borrow from other sources anyway, consciously or unconsciously, and the creation of a culture is always a collective process – there is no one person to take the credit for the Large Hadron Collider, for example, and the Open Science movement suggests we’d all be better off it…

Towards the end of last year, I wrote about short and leveraged index trackers. These exchange traded products (ETPs) allow you to track an index with upside and downside leverage, usually up to three times the daily return. The word “daily” is very important here – the way that daily leveraged and short returns compound means that market volatility can eat into your returns much more than you’d expect. For example, markets can end up flat over one month, yet be so volatile day-to-day that such an ETP loses a significant amount of money. So these products come with a health warning, but I highlighted them because I felt investors were underestimating their usefulness over the short-to medium-term. A three-times daily returns long product could produce geared upside profits in…

“Social-media use is higher than in any other region in the world” Covid-19 battered Latin America. It killed more people and caused deeper recessions than in any other region. Yet the massive disruption also forced people to solve centuries-old regional economic challenges. This is accelerating a nascent digital revolution that will eventually save more lives and drive more economic growth than was lost in the pandemic. I first tipped Latin America’s tech sector back in August 2012, when I highlighted Mercado Libre, the region’s leading ecommerce platform. If you bought in then, congratulations, as the stock is up more than 1,100% in the last decade. But don’t worry if you missed out, because Latin America’s digital revolution is only just beginning. The region only saw its first unicorn – the…

With no fewer than 18 funds currently raising money – including several managers with more than one on offer – there is no shortage of choice for investors looking for exposure to VCTs. Which you go for will partly depend on whether this is your first VCT investment – in which case a more broad-based generalist fund may make sense – or you already have such holdings and now want to add a more specialist VCT. Performance record is important, but advisers specialising in VCTs also urge investors to look for the most experienced managers. These firms have more experience of selecting potentially profitable portfolio holdings; it is also more likely that they will have access to good “deal flow”, with plenty of interesting businesses coming directly to them looking…

There has been much speculation about the true value of bitcoin in recent months. This hasn’t stopped a growing numbers of businesses from making more use of cryptocurrencies, giving customers more choice about how to pay their bills. A survey by Visa revealed almost half of small and medium enterprises said they thought offering the option of cryptocurrency payments could be a source of competitive advantage. More than a third said customers had asked if they could pay in digital currency. Reasons to sign up Offering a cryptocurrency payment option is simpler than you might imagine. A growing number of specialist technology companies will manage the process on your behalf – leaders in the field include BitPay, Coinbase and NOWPayments. These providers embed their technology in your website or online…

Imagine a technology company run by a 75-year old with a history of multiple bankruptcies, in sectors ranging from airlines to casinos. Let’s also imagine that the individual in question is being investigated by various bodies across the US for everything from questionable tax reporting practices to opaque business dealings. Let’s add to the picture the fact that, far from focusing his mind on the day-to-day running of his business, he will also be spending most of the next two years in an attempt to run for president (again). To top it all off, his new company is entering the market not via a traditional initial public offering (IPO), but via a special purpose acquisition company (Spac), or cash shell – typically speculative financial vehicles set up to engineer instant…

All investors are looking for “value”, but this can be far from easy to find. One approach is to look carefully at individual stocks. Often opportunity is hidden within a complex story where high-quality sections of a business are overlooked, leaving the shares trading below a “sum-of-the-parts” value. Combine this with a strong market position that will attract potential buyers and you can have confidence in finding value regardless of the market environment. Some of our investments at Odyssean excite us for exactly these reasons. The value in cybersecurity “The market is overlooking the value of Euromoney’s pricing-data business” Chemring (LSE: CHG) is a leading provider of countermeasures, sensors and energetics products, used mainly by the defence industry. Chemring has a strong record, but we still see significant value in…

£28, stjohnrestaurant.com, St John outlets in Neal’s Yard Bakery, Seven Dials; Bakery Arch, Druid Street; Borough Corner, Borough High Street; St John Street, Smithfield; and Bread and Wine, Commercial Street, as well as many more fine-wine merchants dotted around the country I tasted more than 350 wines the other day at one of the country’s most important wine importer events, and a cluster of wines from Boulevard Napoléon stayed in my mind for days afterwards. Around the same time, the government announced that we would all go back to our desks at work and leave our sofas behind. While we were at it, we needed to eat as much food in as many restaurants as possible to help them to recover from the devastation wreaked by the pandemic. This week’s…

A miniature model of a stable daubed in red graffiti, made by anonymous street artist Banksy, has sold for £1m, including fees, with Anderson & Garland Auctioneers in Newcastle. The thatched building, complete with a tiny horse, and the words “Go big or go home”, first appeared last summer at Merrivale Model Village in Great Yarmouth, as part of Banksy’s series, the “Great British Spraycation”. It sat there unnoticed among the other models for two days before a visitor pointed it out to the attraction’s owners, Frank and Frances Newsome. Pest Control, Banksy’s authentication service, claimed it as one of its own. Pest Control is not always so obliging with its authentications, says Anny Shaw in The Art Newspaper. Nevertheless, Dutch auctioneer Richard Hessink is set to publish the first…

• Music-streaming service Spotify must be quaking in its boots, says Clemmie Moodie in The Sun. The Sussexes, Harry and Meghan (pictured), have leapt “atop the Covid-19 concern bandwagon” after music legends Neil Young and Joni Mitchell announced they were boycotting Spotify for offering anti-vaxxer material to its listeners. The Sussexes’ spokesman says the couple, who 13 months ago agreed their own £18m deal to produce a series of podcasts for Spotify, have been expressing their concerns since last April, but will nevertheless gamely plough on. So far, they have produced 33 minutes of content, which works out at £545,454 per minute. But if Harry and Meghan have been expressing their concerns since April, that means Spotify has been routinely ignoring them, only bucking into action once the singers complained.…

A reader has noticed that your columnist owns a lot of nonperforming real estate. He guesses, correctly, that they must cost us money, and asks whether we “think about the effects of negative cash flow”. Our reader put it politely, but the gist of his question is: what kind of a fool are you? Not everything we do is intended to make money. And we just like owning property – fixing up old houses and restoring old fields, fences and gardens. As our reader points out, these properties do produce “negative cash flow”, so we have to be careful. But while we do own a lot of “non-performing” farmland, we are also buying performing farmland. And here is where our globetrotting gives us a broader perspective. “Our goal is modest…

Demand for superyachts is outstripping supply, says Bloomberg. Last year saw 887 superyachts change hands worldwide – a 77% rise from 2020 and more than twice the number sold in 2019 – on the back of rising wealth and a growing appetite for solitary recreation during the pandemic. Superyachts take years to build and the surge in buyers who want to take delivery immediately has depleted the secondhand market. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is among those waiting for a new yacht – in his case a 417-foot-long vessel, under construction in the Netherlands – while film director Steven Spielberg also has one on order after putting his old boat, the 282-foot Seven Seas, up for sale last November at a price of $158m.…

Thursday 3 February 2022 could go down “in the annals as the day of the most spectacular stockmarket tumble in history”, says Philippe Escande in Le Monde. Meta Platforms – formerly known as Facebook – saw roughly $230bn wiped off its value following disappointing fourth-quarter results (see page 7). Yet the following day Amazon’s shares leapt, taking its valuation up by a spectacular $190bn following a strong trading update. Investors are becoming more discriminate about which tech stocks they buy. January’s sell-off had been concentrated in the frothiest parts of the market, hitting the likes of bitcoin and Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF, says Katie Martin in the Financial Times. Investors had just started to get over that “wobble”, only for Mark Zuckerberg’s firm to raise new doubts about the…

“Modern central banking is fairly new. Until the 19th century, private banks commonly issued their own currency notes… In the 1870s the Bank of England pioneered the ‘lender of last resort’ concept. British writer Walter Bagehot… summarised the central banks’ job as averting panic by ‘lending freely, to solvent firms, against good collateral, and at high rates’… That isn’t what today’s Federal Reserve does… it doesn’t follow the ‘high rates’ part of Bagehot’s advice… The entire global economy now hinges on a price… determined by a committee… Unlike other prices, it isn’t a function of supply and demand… we have been through multiple bubbles brought about by ever-lower interest rates in an effort to avoid recessions… The Federal Reserve and its peers need to get back to boring, Bagehot-style central…

Three to buy National Grid The Daily Telegraph National Grid (NG) is an “oft-overlooked opportunity to benefit from the energy transition” and it is now “pivoting to electricity assets”. It recently acquired Western Power Distribution, the UK’s largest electricity distribution network operator, and plans to sell a majority stake in its gas grid. Electricity usage is predicted to rise significantly and NG’s “monopoly position” means it could be a simple, low-risk way of capitalising on that growth. The company expects underlying earnings per share to grow 5%-7% between 2021 and 2026. It aims for its dividend at least to keep pace with inflation. 1,077p Porvair Investors’ Chronicle Shares of filtration and environmental technology specialist Porvair “reversed their downward trajectory” after it reported a return to pre-pandemic profitability. Growth in its…

• Dating platform Bumble “made a splash” when it floated last year, says Laura Forman in The Wall Street Journal. But it was “a short-lived love affair”; the shares have since fallen by two-thirds. Now it’s buying Fruitz, one of the fastest-growing dating apps in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Investors will hope this hook-up works out better than rival Match’s purchase of Hyperconnect last year, which has not boosted growth. ”Just don’t say ‘Je t’aime’ too soon.” • Fintech firm Revolut has appointed a “one-year-old shiba inu called Sam as its chief pet officer” to promote its pet insurance, says Bryce Elder in the Financial Times. Yet “joking about lapdog hires is a bold strategy while working through its application for a UK banking licence”. Perhaps it should…

Two years after Australia imposed some of the world’s toughest border controls – it has been almost entirely closed since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 – the country is to allow international travellers to enter once again, say Ben Westcott and Swati Pandey on Bloomberg. The new rules allow tourists and visa holders who have been double vaccinated to enter the country from 21 February. The news will be welcomed by the tourism industry, which contributed around 3% to GDP pre-Covid-19. New Zealand is also loosening up, only less so, says Henry Cooke in The Sydney Morning Herald. Vaccinated travellers will be allowed in, but will still have to isolate at home for ten days. The measure seems aimed at “the Kiwis stuck overseas”, who have…

• Bank of America’s boss Brian Moynihan (pictured) received a 31% pay rise last year, taking his total pay to $32m, says The Wall Street Journal. His pay package consisted of $1.5m in base salary and $30.5m in restricted stock, half of which is tied to the lender’s performance over the next three years. Moynihan’s pay for 2020 was cut to $24.5m due to the effect of the pandemic on the bank’s bottom line. However, Bank of America posted record-high profits of $32bn for last year, due to a flurry of deal-making activity, and the release of reserves that had been set aside to cover loan losses that never arose. • Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk is set to receive stock awards worth at least $35bn over the next year,…

“Duration” is a measure of risk that is typically applied to bonds. It describes how sensitive a given bond is to movements in interest rates. Think of the relationship between bond prices and interest rates as being like a see-saw: when one side goes up, the other goes down. “Modified duration” (which can be found in the fact sheet of most bond funds) tells you the likely percentage change in a bond’s price in response to a one percentage point (100 basis points) change in interest rates. The higher the duration, the higher the “interest-rate risk” of the bond – that is, the larger the change in price for any given change in interest rates. So if a bond has a duration of ten, it indicates that a single percentage…

“When I bought my first property, going abroad, the easyJet, coffee, gym, Netflix lifestyle didn’t exist. I used to walk to work with a sandwich. And on payday I’d go for a pizza, and to a movie, and buy a lipstick.” TV presenter Kirstie Allsop (pictured) suggests youngsters forego luxuries if they want to buy a house, quoted in The Times “MMT proponents, to be consistent, should now be calling for large tax hikes. Would be interested to hear how much they think taxes need to go up to solve the ‘cost of living crisis’?” Jonathan Portes on MMT, the idea that governments can print money at will, keeping a lid on inflation with taxation, on Twitter “Why does the governor of the Bank of England encourage restraint in wage…

psyche.co When faced with a difficult decision, it can be tempting to “take the easy road and procrastinate”, says Joseph Bikart. This is understandable. The word “decision” comes from the Latin caedere, meaning “to cut off” – decisions cut us off from other choices and the possibility of better outcomes. But it is also a mistake, because refusing to make a decision is itself a decision, and one that prolongs the pain, not least because we tend to regret things we haven’t done more than things that lead to a disappointing outcome. When faced with a difficult decision, acknowledge the different parts of yourself that want different things. “The simple act of recognising your own competing desires will help you to think through the decision more effectively.” Then create distance…

Hiromi Yamaji, the head of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), is urging Japanese companies to engage more with activist investors, says Nikkei Asia. Japanese firms have always had an uneasy relationship with activists, often scorning them as short-term profiteers. However, “frank, open discussions” between companies and shareholders can be beneficial in helping firms think harder about growth and profitability, says Yamaji. “You shouldn’t lump all activists together and dismiss them as all bad.” Last month, the TSE announced changes in how firms will qualify for a “prime” listing, which will require them to maintain a free float of more than ¥10bn ($87m). Yamaji hopes the rules will force firms to try to increase their value or face demotion.…

For many years, Mercado Libre (Nasdaq: MELI) was the main way to invest in a Latin American tech success story. It has been highly successful, taking around 30% of the Latin American e-commerce market, and the valuation reflects that. It trades on a price/earnings (p/e) ratio of 650, falling to 120 based on forecast earnings. However, a wave of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the last couple of years has given us a much wider choice. Most are high-growth prospects and are priced accordingly Arco Platform (Nasdaq: ARCE) is a Brazilian online-learning provider. It serves more than 1.3 million children across 5,000 private schools in Brazil and provides live sessions, pre-recorded classes, teacher training and game-like educational programmes for students. Demand for its services rocketed in the pandemic, when many…

In an effort to combat inflation, the Bank of England increased the base interest rate from 0.25% to 0.5% last week. What does that mean for your mortgage? “The one in four mortgage holders who have a standard variable rate (SVR) will see their monthly payments rise almost immediately as banks pass on the 0.25% hike to their default mortgage rates,” says George Nixon in The Times. You need to act fast if you’re looking to remortgage to secure the best rates. Many major lenders have already announced they will be increasing their interest rates in line with the Bank of England’s rise. Barclays, Aldermore, Santander, Halifax, Nationwide and Lloyds have all said their standard variable rates will rise by 0.25% from 1 March. This could affect anyone on a…

• Will the government make a U-turn on its plans for a hike in national insurance contributions in April – including a 1.25% increase in what employers pay? The chancellor insists not, and there is growing concern that many smaller businesses have not planned for the increase. New data from the Federation of Small Businesses suggests small and medium-sized enterprises will face a £5.7bn bill under the current plans, potentially putting 50,000 jobs at risk as firms scramble to reduce their costs. • Firms falling behind on Bounce Back loans may face a tougher approach from lenders, small business advisers warn, amid controversy about the way in which fraud has dogged the Covid-19 emergency loans scheme. Some 1.6 million Covid-19-affected businesses borrowed £47bn from the Bounce Back Loan Scheme, but…

When Donald Trump was president, there was a big debate over whether his social-media communications – and his tweets specifically – contained useful trading signals or not. One 2020 study by Carl Ajjoub, Thomas Walker and Yunfei Zhao at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, found that any negative tweets Trump made about non-media companies did indeed cause their share prices to fall. Another study by Peder Gjerstada, Peter Filip Meyna, Peter, Molnár and Thomas Dowling Naess of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that his tweets, particularly those on trade, also generally pushed the S&P 500 lower, and boosted gold. Trump was indefinitely banned from Twitter in the wake of last year’s riots at Capitol Hill. But there are plenty of other controversial financial tweeters.…

Squinting, grinning, gurning, hunched over with gaping maws, splayed paws and claws, hooked bills and monstrous features, the creatures that emerged from the studio of Victorian potters the Martin Brothers are anything but beautiful. These stoneware pots, jugs and sculptures, known as “Martinware”, are grotesque. So it was with no small irony that, in 2019, the government slapped an export ban on a smirking crab from 1880, citing its “outstanding aesthetic importance”. Then again, there is beauty in the bizarre and this whimsical early example had featured in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890. In 2020, this toothsome crustacean was saved for the nation, when the Box museum, in Plymouth, raised the £217,250 required to give the crab a permanent home on these shores. Dreaming in clay The story of…

$295m The estimated value of the most expensive house in the US, called “The One” by film-producer-turned-property-developer Nile Niami. The property in Bel Air, Los Angeles, sits in eight acres of land and was bought for $28m in 2012. Niami valued it at $500m in 2015, but it is now being auctioned as part of bankruptcy proceedings. £1.1m The average lifetime tax bill for the average household, earning an annual £60,194, in 2020, according to a Taxpayers’ Alliance analysis of official data –equivalent to 18 years of work. The bottom quintile, earning £19,171, takes 24 years to pay almost £500,000 in tax, while the top quintile, with annual income of £138,000, takes 19 years to pay £2.6m. $250,000 The price for a couple of VIP seats at Donald Trump’s “Take…

An anonymous British lottery player has won £109.9m in last Friday’s EuroMillions draw, says The Daily Telegraph. The win is the seventh biggest lottery win in British history. The largest ever was a £170m EuroMillions jackpot in October 2019. Wade Short and Veronica Lisbon have been awarded A$3,100.53 (£1,600) after Australia Post repeatedly failed to deliver parcels to their address following a row with their deliveryman, says The Age. A tribunal in Melbourne heard that the couple had to spend half an hour per week visiting the delivery office from June 2020 to December 2021, and ordered the postal service to pay compensation for inconvenience.…

Naver, which runs South Korea’s number-one internet search portal, is “investing in the right businesses for both short-term and long-term growth”, says The Edge Singapore. Online content, cloud computing and financial technology (fintech) all have good near-term earnings prospects, and e-commerce offers long-term growth. Revenue rose 28.5% last year, including 44.5% growth in fintech driven by a 60% rise in payments. E-commerce was up 34.5% and it has increased its share of the Korean e-commerce market from 7% to 17% in the last five years. Naver has healthy cash flow and is in a net cash position. The shares trade on an earnings yield of 3.1% (equivalent to a price/earnings ratio of 32).…

Meta Platforms, the parent firm of Facebook, saw a “brutal sell-off” last week as its shares plunged by more than 25%, says James Titcomb in the Daily Telegraph. The $230bn (£169bn) fall in its market cap – “the biggest one-day drop in value of any company in Wall Street history” – was prompted by a “dismal set of financial results”. Revenue growth of just 3% in the first quarter was “a dramatic slowdown for a company that has never failed to produce double-digit growth”. Ominously, there was a “never-before-seen drop in Facebook’s daily user numbers”. It’s not just the fact that the total number of users has stalled that suggests that Facebook’s “hitherto unstoppable growth” has hit a brick wall, says John Naughton in The Observer. Its losses are particularly…

The Kremlin slapped down French president Emmanuel Macron’s claims earlier in the week that he had secured agreement from both Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to implement the Minsk II peace agreement – which is “deeply unpopular” in Ukraine – to avert war, say Adam Sage and Roland Oliphant in The Times. In a “further embarrassment for Macron”, Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin official, said that France was a member, not a leader of Nato, implying Moscow would only deal with the US. It is clear Putin is “only just about tolerating a diplomatic discourse with the West” because he thinks there’s a chance he can get what he wants without spilling Russian blood – namely a “Ukrainian government that does what he says” and a Ukraine “firmly outside…

It’s now less than seven months before the midterm election in the US and already markets are starting to appear on the outcome. As well as markets on which party will control the House, and the balance of power in the Senate, Ladbrokes also lets you bet on the outcome of the gubernatorial elections in Texas, Georgia and New York. Betfair doesn’t have any markets on individual contests, but allows you to bet on the range of seats the Democrats and Republicans win in the House and Senate. The most impressive effort, however, is from Smarkets. It has markets not only on control of the House and Senate, but also on no less than five gubernatorial contests (Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas). It has even opened ones on 12…

The global supply-chain crunch has been a disaster for British businesses, says Sam Chambers in The Sunday Times. But for shipping magnates, such as Gianluigi Aponte of Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), the world’s biggest shipping company, it has been a bonanza. Services have remained dismal – for years MSC was disparagingly known as “Maybe Ship Comes”. But that hasn’t stopped the shippers charging vastly inflated prices. The industry raked in $48.1bn of net profit in a single quarter of 2021, nine times the previous year’s haul. The sector made almost 50% more than the tech titans Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google combined over the same period, while the cost of sending a container rose from Asia to Britain rose from $2,000 to $16,500 in just fifteen months. Small wonder that,…

“Many people believe social values or environmental issues are political and woke. I don’t,” says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, discussing his annual letter to CEOs of the companies whose shares are held by BlackRock funds (ie, virtually all of them) with CNBC. But it’s important to engage with companies rather than attack them. For example, on the environment, “society is dependent on hydrocarbons right now”. We have to acknowledge that, then find “fair and just solutions” as to how to reduce this reliance and build a “decarbonised” world. “If we want to just admonish the hydrocarbon companies... and say ‘stop investing, get out of your business’, we’re going to have a very unequal outcome”. As for the broader economy, Fink believes inflation will be stubborn this year. “You have supply-chain…

econlib.org The idea that CEOs earn too much is commonly heard, says Isadore Johnson. When pressed, many claim that it seems impossible that one person could produce something of so much value. The “superstar effect” explains what is going on. The superstar effect is when an individual gets a disproportionate share of the gains from what seem like small differences in ability. In a digital age, the marginal costs of producing an additional unit of a product are small, while the fixed cost of getting started is high. And if two goods cost the same but one is better, people are almost always going to choose the better one. Hence small differences can lead to outsized gains for the talented. It’s easy to see how in this way Kanye West’s…

■ Stephen Yiu, one of the UK’s rising-star fund managers, avoided the dramatic fall in Meta Platforms and PayPal when he sold them shortly before they released poor results last week, says Financial News. Meta – which owns Facebook – reported falling numbers of active users for the first time (see page 4 and page 7). The firm will struggle with competition from TikTok and tighter privacy settings on devices made by Apple, says Yiu. PayPal plummeted 25%, losing $51bn. The digital payments giant got a big boost in users as online shopping grew during the pandemic, but activity is now going back to normal, reckons Yiu. Rumours that the firm was considering a merger with Pinterest also raised questions over its acquisition strategy. Yiu’s £1bn Blue Whale Growth Fund…

• This week the Royal Mint is releasing a new 50p coin to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, which will send many collectors on the hunt. But did you know the humble coin in your pocket could be worth as much as £26,000? The 50p “has a particularly special place in many collectors’ hearts,” says Lauren Almeida in The Daily Telegraph. The most valuable is a Kew Gardens design released in 2009 – only 210,000 were put into circulation. One sold for £26,000 in 2009. “The London 2012 Olympics started the nation’s love affair with the 50p,” says Rebecca Morgan, director of collector services at the Royal Mint. “There were a number of designs and it became a real frenzy across the UK to collect every sport.” These coins are…

Almost half of small businesses provide staff with no training at all on cybersecurity, new research shows. A survey from Software Advice found that while 62% of small and medium-sized enterprises have seen an increase in cyber attacks over the past two years, only 48% have conducted training to alert employees to this risk – and tell them how to mitigate the danger. That’s a real problem, cybersecurity experts say. While there is a perception that cyberattackers are highly sophisticated, deploying complex techniques to hack into businesses’ systems, the reality is often more mundane. Many attacks depend on simple breaches of cybersecurity by employees. For example, staff could be asked to click on a link in an email that downloads malware. Many attacks exploit the failure of employees to use…

The past two weeks have seen four of my five long tips fall in value. Asset manager Rathbones Group declined from 1,866p to 1,858p, supermarket J Sainsbury dipped from 285p to 283p, while telecoms firm Airtel Africa fell from 149p to 140p (see page 32). Transport firm National Express also fell from 264p to 254p. However, construction firm Morgan Sindall rose from 2,150p to 2,238p. Overall, my five long tips are making a profit of £2,497, down on two weeks ago, even after accounting for closing the DR Horton tip. My short tips have been mixed. Two have moved in my favour, but the other two gained in value. Cinema chain AMC fell from $16.64 to $14.44 and Chinese real-estate broker KE Holdings fell from $21.74 to $19.11. However, remote…

Twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (pictured) were born in Southampton, New York, in 1981. After enrolling at Harvard in 2000, they set up social network Harvard Connect (later renamed ConnectU), with Divya Narendra, which went live in May 2004. It failed to make headway due to the success of rival network Facebook, which was set up by Mark Zuckerberg. The twins claimed Zuckerberg had initially agreed to help out with ConnectU and stolen their idea. In 2006 Facebook agreed to settle all claims against it for shares and cash worth $65m in 2008. The twins set up Winklevoss Capital Management (WCM) in 2012 to manage their money. What was the trade? Bitcoin is a digital currency developed in 2008 by a computer programmer going under the name of “Satoshi Nakamoto”…

Going… An “extremely rare and important” Edward III leopard gold coin, from 1344, that was found by a metal detectorist in 2019, and declared treasure by a Norfolk coroner, is heading for auction with Dix Noonan Webb (DNW) in London on 8 and 9 March. The 23-carat coins were hammered at the Tower of London in January 1344, but withdrawn soon after on the advice of Florentine bankers, the foreign-exchange dealers of the time, says Nigel Mills of DNW on BBC News. The coin, depicting a leopard and royal banner, is expected to fetch up to £140,000. Gone… Michael Leigh-Mallory was a lapsed metal detectorist, who returned to his hobby with his children only to find a “fine example” of England’s oldest gold coin – a gold penny from the…