Innehållsförteckning för 1151 från MoneyWeek

“The stockmarket has predicted nine out of the last five recessions”, we are always told. Conversely, it often marches onwards and upwards for no good reason. This looks like one of those occasions. The first quarter saw a vigorous recovery in equities, led by US technology stocks. But the market’s rebound was not as solid as it looked (see page 4) and the pervasive belief that America will avoid a recession may soon be tested. There are almost enough straws in the wind to produce a small haystack. Peter Warburton points out in the Halkin Letter that there were 111 bankruptcy filings in January and February 2023, compared with 49 in the same two months last year (and 384 in the whole of 2022). Momentum in the labour market, hitherto…

“Use of social media and messaging apps, which spread information at lightning pace... marks a break from past crises. Meanwhile, new digital-finance tools let nervous depositors withdraw funds as soon as the notion strikes them [without needing to go to a physical bank branch]... Historically, banks have benefited from high transaction costs and the low financial literacy of customers, which together have kept depositors from moving too much money. Today... the investing populace is both more aware of the alternatives to bank deposits and has more opportunity to invest in them... [All this] innovation has sped up sudden market wobbles, truncating panics that would have taken months in the 19th century to weeks... [With their customers gaining the upper hand], the profits banks have enjoyed for decades – or centuries…

Next’s shares slid sharply last week as the retailer reiterated that profit and sales are likely to fall this year, says Katie Linsell on Bloomberg. Simon Wolfson, CEO of the company that is “considered a bellwether for the British retail sector”, said that “the combination of inflation in our cost base” and the fact that top-line sales “are likely to edge backwards is uncomfortable”. With the latest British Retail Consortium data suggesting that shop price inflation hit a record 8.9% this month and has yet to peak, it seems shoppers are “finding their money going on necessities rather than fashion”. Don’t panic, says Alistair Osborne in the Times. Wolfson “is renowned for kicking off the new financial year with conservative guidance — and then going on to beat it”, so…

Donald Trump faces the first-ever criminal case brought against a former US president, says Joe Miller in the Financial Times. He has been indicted and formally charged in connection with payments he allegedly made to buy the silence of adult-film actress Stormy Daniels while running for the White House in 2016. Prosecutors say that Trump paid her $130,000 via his lawyer to cover up an affair she claims she had with Trump years earlier. This indictment is more than a mistake, says Will Lloyd in The Times: it is “stick-a-fork-in-the-mains-socket stupid”. Trump was yesterday’s man, holed up in Mar-a-Lago, miserable, lonely and playing golf. His opponents still think they can get revenge through procedure. What they never learn is that all Trump craves is attention, and they keep giving it.…

Most of the investment factors that seem to be reliably associated with higher long-term returns are easy to understand. For example, value stocks – ie, companies with comparatively low price/earnings or price/book ratios, or higher dividend yields – will include many troubled businesses. If they weren’t, investors would be willing to pay more for them. So if they are (in hindsight) priced to deliver higher average returns than the market, that makes sense: investors who hold them are being rewarded for taking greater risk on each individual stock. Similarly, smaller companies are generally riskier than larger ones, so it makes sense that they are also priced to deliver higher returns on average. Still, there’s one well-documented anomaly that is hard to justify. Stocks with less volatile share prices seem to…

Big Tech’s battle for AI supremacy Editorial The Economist The AI “frenzy” is in “full swing”, says The Economist. Microsoft has implanted AI into almost all its productivity software, including Word and Excel. Google has done likewise with Gmail and Sheets. OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, has launched a new version of its powerful chatbot. Apple, Amazon and Meta are all busy with new products, too. Big Tech, worried about becoming the next Kodak, is rising to the challenge of this “platform shift” with a “deluge of investments”. In 2022, the big five tech firms poured $223bn into research and development, up from $109bn in 2019. That was on top of $161bn in capital spending, a figure that has doubled in three years. A fifth of the companies’ combined acquisitions…

branko2f7.substack.com Policies that seek to increase equality are based on implausible economic reasoning and models, says Branko Milanovic. These assume that taking wealth from one person and redistributing it to another will lead to a greater sum of happiness in society, but there is no way of knowing this or of measuring it. Yet it is possible to reject the ideological basis for pro-equality policies and still remain concerned about income inequality. We should be concerned with it for three main reasons: high inequality depresses levels of economic growth; it has poisonous political effects as the wealthy come to dominate political power; and because high levels of inequality are simply repugnant on moral grounds as it denies individuals the opportunity to lead good and pleasant lives. That last point feeds…

Electricity currently accounts for roughly 20% of global energy use, but targets to decarbonise the global economy imply that figure will have to rise to more than 50% by 2050. Most investors have tended to jump on the obvious driver of demand – more batteries, in cars, homes, and connected to the grid. Thus over the past few years we’ve seen a profusion of funds targeting the battery value chain. But diversifying your exposure is crucial. The energy transition will require significant amounts of critical minerals – eg, lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements (REEs) – used in wind turbines, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries and electrolysers. It’s by no means certain that we will have enough of all the refined metals and minerals needed, considering the scale of…

Stand-up comedy teaches you lots of things. How to stand on stage in front of a bunch of strangers. How to present yourself. How to entertain people. How to cope with pressure. How to deal with difficult situations and difficult people. How to think on your feet. Communication. Clarity. These are all useful life skills that you might call upon in any number of other situations. Everyone should be a stand-up for a bit. But there is a lot more to being a stand-up than what you see on stage. Behind the scenes, every comic is running a small business. Every day you are pursuing gigs. You’re sending out emails, making phone calls, posting on social media, all with the aim of promoting your brand and getting better work. You’re…

There are generally two ways companies will report NAV values. There’s the IFRS NAV, which uses total shareholder equity as defined by International Financial Reporting Standards accounting standards, and there’s also EPRA NAV, which uses guidelines set out by the European Public Real Estate body. EPRA NAVs are becoming increasingly universal as Reits try to streamline their reporting and appeal to investors. Whatever figure is quoted, the logic behind any NAV is simple enough. It is designed to give investors an idea of how much the property the company owns is worth, minus any liabilities such as debt. To arrive at a NAV, the company takes the total value of all property assets, minus any liabilities, and divides that number by the total share count. For example, if a Reit…

At first sight, pension providers’ “lifestyle” funds look eminently sensible. The principle of these funds is that as savers close in on the date at which they will cash in their pensions, they can no longer afford the risk of exposure to assets such as shares, which tend to be more volatile. If such assets plunge in value, there may not be time for recovery. Lifestyle funds therefore automatically shift pension savers’ money into assets that are more stable, typically over the five to ten years before their expected retirement date. Unfortunately, this approach has proved disastrous for savers reaching retirement in recent months. Most lifestyle funds depend heavily on fixed-income assets: gilts and other bonds. And while historically such assets have been far less volatile than equities, that has…

New medication has emerged to fight obesity, and the evidence suggests it is by far the best yet. Those who took it in clinical trials lost a significant 22.5% of their body weight on average, 50% more than the nearest rival. These game-changing results have attracted so much interest that analysts think US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) may be sitting on what could be the biggest-selling drug ever. Branded Mounjaro, the medicine is already approved for treating type-2 diabetes. It is taken to cut blood glucose (blood sugar) alongside a regimen of diet and exercise. Investors now expect US health regulators at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow the drug to be used against obesity, too. The path to sign-off has already been fast-tracked by the…

You can divide traders into those who focus on momentum, buying shares that have recently done well in the hope that they will keep soaring, and “contrarians”, who target poor performers in the expectation that they will bounce back. While most traders fall into the former camp, the big question is how to gauge whether a share has momentum. One popular way to do this is through the use of moving averages. The idea is to measure a share’s current price against its average over an extended period, usually the past 50, 100 or 200 days, though some use an exponential moving average which gives greater weight to recent prices. If the share is trading above the moving average then this is a buy signal; if it is trading below…

2018 Barolo, Comune di Verduno, Fratelli Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy (£262.07 for a case of six bottles, justerinis.com) The Justerini & Brooks annual Piedmont tasting is one of the finest focused events in the wine calendar. This year there were many pre-released wines to enjoy, and I will be writing all of these wines up in my annual report, which I will publish in the summer. But a handful of wines are already available in the UK, and I have picked five beauties for you this week. My featured Barolo was the most delicious of the young estate offerings, and with expressive, generously fruity nebbiolo flavours, it is dangerously close to drinking, too. With a sub-£50 price tag, this beautifully perfumed, sensual red is the perfect Piedmont ambassador for this…

Going… A pair of Rolex Daytona watches that belonged to Paul Newman, and found in a box on his desk by the late actor’s daughter, are expected to sell above their $1m upper estimates with Sotheby’s in June, says Jacob Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. The first is an inscribed 1993 Rolex reference 16520 “Zenith” Daytona with a pearly white dial that had been awarded to Newman, a keen racing driver, in 1995 when his racing team won the 24 Hours of Daytona Race in Daytona Beach, Florida. Newman auctioned the watch in aid of his charity in 1999, when it sold for $39,000, and at some point, he or a family member bought it back. The other is an inscribed 2006 white-gold reference 116519 Daytona, one of three…

Councils have spent “a staggering” £23.4m on consultants to help them bid against each other for money from the state’s £4.8bn Levelling Up fund, say David Dubas-Fisher and Rob Parsons in the Daily Mirror. Worse, most of the money did not yield results, including £2.7m spent on second-round bids, which were “doomed” from the start because the councils had already received funds in the first round, according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by The Northern Agenda, a politics newsletter. Durham County Council spent the most on consultants of the 334 out of 389 local authorities that responded, with £1.3m. It was successful in its bid for £20m of funding. A total of 283 councils made 532 bids for £9.2bn, of which only £2.9bn has been awarded. Critics have compared…

Silicon Valley venture capitalists care about profits again, says The Economist. The venture capital (VC) sector, which provides investment and industry know-how to unlisted start-up firms, boomed in the era of low interest rates. “Hedge funds and sovereign-wealth investors” piled into VC in search of returns. In 2021 the amount of money flowing to start-ups doubled to $640bn. But last year the music stopped, with private start-up valuations plunging by an annual 56% in the fourth quarter of 2022. The downturn has prompted VCs to ditch speculative loss-makers in favour of start-ups that show they can generate cash. Governance is also a new priority after the wrongdoing of VC-backed crypto exchange FTX last year. VC “prospered in a… decade that placed a premium value on storytelling — perhaps because the…

The “British curse” of chronically high inflation is back, says Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph. Price pressures appear to be ebbing in the US and much of Europe. But in the UK inflation rose to 10.4% in February. “Structurally, the British economy seems to be particularly vulnerable to external shocks,” as shown by the disproportionately large effects of the financial crisis and the pandemic on UK output and the public finances. One critical vulnerability is energy dependence: amid rising prices, “gas and oil together account for 76% of total UK energy consumption in 2019, compared with a European average of just 57%”. With wage increases still strong, the “inflationary genie” will be hard to put back in the bottle, “especially in Britain”.…

Shares in the Chinese e-commerce firm JD.com bounced last week after it unveiled plans to spin off its property and industrial divisions and list them in Hong Kong, says Iris Ouyang in the South China Morning Post. While JD will keep more than 50% of the two units, it is hoped the move will “enhance efficiency and help the subsidiaries realise their potential”. Rival technology company Alibaba has also said it will restructure into six autonomous entities covering everything from e-commerce to digital media and entertainment. Each unit could be floated on the stock exchange. The decision of JD and Alibaba to split themselves into separate companies “accomplishes Beijing’s broader aim of carving up tech titans and diminishing their influence over swathes of the economy”, says Bloomberg. However, it has…

Despite a small Conservative uptick in the opinion polls, punters still believe that Labour is firmly on course to win the next general election. With £1.1m matched on Betfair, Labour is the strong favourite to get most seats at 1.27 (78.7%), with the Conservatives at 4.7 (21.2%) and the Liberal Democrats at 190 (0.05%). The betting markets also think Labour will get an outright majority, with the odds at 1.76 (56.8%). No overall majority is at 3.1 (32.2%) and a Conservative majority at 8.4 (11.9%). One interesting market is on Labour’s vote share (excluding Northern Ireland). With £12,412 matched on Smarkets, punters put the odds of Labour getting more than 40% at 2.16 (46.3%). They also think the odds of Labour getting between 35%-40% of the vote are 3.55 (28.2%).…

There is no question that March was a sobering month for the banking industry. The collapse in confidence was sudden and dramatic. It started with Silicon Valley Bank in the US, spread very quickly to this side of the Atlantic with a final collapse of confidence in Credit Suisse, and then Deutsche Bank came under such a sustained attack on the stockmarket that the German government had to rush out a statement saying it was confident it was not about to collapse – not usually a good sign for any financial institution. We will see over the next few weeks whether that is the end of it, or whether it represents the start of something larger and a lot more worrying. An interesting point, though, is that, so far, the…

The Sortino ratio is a method of measuring the risk-adjusted return of an investment or a portfolio – ie, the amount of return you get for each unit of risk that you are taking. There are several ways of measuring risk and consequently there are a number of different metrics used to assess risk-adjusted returns, which can produce different conclusions. Perhaps the best-known measure is the Sharpe ratio. This is calculated by dividing the excess return on an investment (ie, the difference between the return on the investment and the return from a risk-free asset such as a government bond) by the standard deviation of the returns (ie, how much the returns vary over time). The Sharpe ratio by definition treats all volatility alike, whether it’s the result of the…

“After I won the Oscar, my salary doubled, my friends tripled, my children became more popular at school, my butcher made a pass at me and my maid hit me up for a raise.” Actress Shirley Jones (pictured), who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress in Elmer Gantry (1961), quoted on Facebook “Get married, start a family and set up a business.” Traditionalist philosopher Roger Scruton on what people should do to further the cause of conservatism, quoted in The Critic “Starting salaries have gone crazy. My firm pays £170,000 to our newly qualified associates (after two years of training) and we also pay for them to go to law school — almost £60,000 a year for the two years they’re training. Giving £170,000 to a 24-year-old is…

thefp.com Rainn Wilson, the actor most famous for playing the dweeb in the US version of The Office, has complained about the “anti-Christian bias” in Hollywood. As soon as the David character in The Last of Us started reading from the Bible, you just knew he was going to be a horrible villain, he says. “Could there be a Biblereading preacher on a show who is actually loving and kind?” The answer now is yes, says Olivia Reingold. Jesus Revolution, based on the true story of a 1970s movement that turned its back on hippy culture for God, has been a surprise hit. The film earned back its $15m budget the weekend it opened. By comparison, 65, a sci-fi flick with a $91m budget, made just $12.3m. Since its release…

The number of Korean companies targeted by activists has risen sixfold in three years as investors try to improve weak corporate governance standards, says the Financial Times. Tobacco firm KT&G is the latest to come under pressure. Activist fund Flashlight, which holds a 1% stake, wants it to spin off its ginseng unit and add two independent directors to the board. Last year, K-pop agency SM Entertainment bowed to pressure from Align, another activist, to add an independent auditor to its board and ended unprofitable deals with its founder. Its shares have now nearly doubled since last year’s low. “There are so many undervalued companies due to poor governance. We are just targeting low-hanging fruits first,” says Changhwan Lee of Align.…

Interest rates on fixed-rate mortgages rose to a peak of 6.65% in the aftermath of the mini-Budget last September. Dearer credit lowered demand for property, sending the post-pandemic housing boom into reverse. And while the market has since stabilised, rates are still far higher than they were this time last year. The average rate for a two-year fixed rate product is now 5.29%, according to Moneyfacts, while the rate for a five-year fixed-rate mortgage is 4.95%. At the beginning of 2022, both were around 2%. However, more offers are coming onto the market and mortgage rates are not expected to rise much further because additional interest rate hikes by the Bank of England have been priced in. Meanwhile, the rates on standard variable mortgages (SVR) have now eclipsed 7%, a…

Lifetime individual savings accounts (Lisas), introduced in April 2017, are a halfway-house between saving for a property and for old age. Contributions to the tax-free plans get a state top-up. But you can only withdraw penalty-free if you are using the money to buy a first home or you are aged 60 or over. Some experts think Lisas, have a valuable role to play. The fund manager Fidelity has just launched a Lisa for members of workplace pension schemes it runs. It argues the plans give savers additional flexibility on top of conventional pensions. On the other hand, investment platform Interactive Investor suggests abolishing Lisas, saying they confuse savers. Lisas can only be opened by savers aged between 18 and 39, although you can keep contributing until 50. You can…

Four of my long tips rose over the past fortnight and three fell. Luxury clothing retailer Burberry rose from 2,349p to 2,572p, estate-agent Savills advanced from 966p to 982p and online retailer Asos increased from 747p to 827p. Discount chain B&M also went up, from 473p to 482p. But retailer Dunelm dipped from 1,131p to 1,106p, Telecoms group Gamma Communications declined from 1,105p to 1,095p and builder DR Horton slid from $96.84 to $96.64. My seven long tips are making a net profit of £2,400. My short tips haven’t fared well, with five of the seven moving against me. Electric-car charging firm EVgo increased from $5.24 to $7.79, ticketing group Live Nation went up from $68.18 to $70.15 and videogames retailer GameStop rose from $16.62 to $22.64. Solarenergy company Sunrun…

Robert Wilson was born in Detroit in 1926 and graduated from Amherst College in 1946 with a degree in economics. He then went to law school for two years before dropping out and getting a job at First Boston. He later moved to the National Bank of Detroit where he worked in the trust division. In 1958 he moved to New York and started trading on his own account. By 1968 he had quit his job to set up his own hedge fund. What was the trade? Wilson’s strategy involved taking short positions in companies he felt were overvalued – in other words, he would place a bet on their price falling. Most of his short trades were extremely successful, but he is most often remembered today for his disastrous…

Pink is also very much on display at Christie’s in London. The auction house in alliance with designers Jane Schulak and David Stark has revamped its “The Collector” biannual series of online sales. From this week, the usual array of English and European furniture, artworks, ceramics, silver and gold boxes are presented in “dynamic settings of all periods” for the first time in London, New York and Paris. Bidding on the individual lots closes sequentially on 18, 19 and 20 April in those three cities. Arranging them in a visually striking display shines a “spotlight on historic objects that are a direct path from the 18th century to the 21st century, recontextualising them as surprisingly contemporary”, say Schulak and Stark. The designers have assigned a fluorescent colour to each city…

Is the technology boom back? US tech shares have enjoyed their best quarter since 2020 as traders bet that US interest-rate hikes are coming to an end. The Nasdaq Composite index gained 16.8% between January and March 2023, its strongest showing since the second quarter of 2020, when the pandemic sent Silicon Valley stocks soaring. The wider S&P 500 index finished the quarter with a 7.4% gain. The pan-European Stoxx 600 rose by 6.7%, while Japan’s Topix gained 7.3%. The FTSE 100 was left behind by the renewed tech rally, finishing up by 1% for the quarter. Equities have had a “wild” start to the year, says Akane Otani in The Wall Street Journal. A strong January was followed by a sell-off in February, as “hot” economic data suggested that…

Richard Branson’s rocket company Virgin Orbit, founded in 2017, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US after failing to secure enough money to keep going, says Thomas Kingsley in the Independent. The move, which the group says is designed to secure “an efficient and value-maximising sale”, comes just days after the California-based satellite-launch company said it would axe 85% of its 750 staff and stop operating “for the foreseeable future”, an announcement that wiped another 50% off the stock. This is all a far cry from the start of 2022 when Virgin Orbit, spun off from Branson’s Virgin Galactic sub-orbital space tourism group in 2017, went public in January last year with a valuation of $3.7bn, says Callum Jones in The Times. The company had “promised to…

● BAE Systems was “caught napping” in 2021 when CEO Charles Woodburn (pictured) almost left to join Rio Tinto, says Francesca Washtell in The Mail on Sunday. The defence giant had to offer him a “golden handcuffs” deal with a £2m bonus if he stays at BAE for three years. That showed the difficulties of succession planning “for a job that requires exceptional experience and ultra-deep vetting”. To make the problem even greater, pay at US defence firms is even higher – hence BAE has revealed in its annual report that it had to hike the performance-linked bonus for the boss of its US unit to a maximum of 440% of salary. That’s “far larger than the deal for Brits”, but even so “Woodburn is hardly a pauper”. He bagged…

An era of “virtually unlimited low-cost capital” came to an end last year, with significant consequences for markets, says Seth Klarman, the value-focused US hedge-fund manager who oversees around $32bn through his firm, Baupost. “A boom based on easy-money policies will inevitably contain the seeds of its own destruction,” he wrote in his latest annual letter to investors, according to the Financial Times. The sharp rise in interest rates last year was “kryptonite” for the “everything bubble” that grew in the pandemic and had pushed up assets with little inherent value. “These included scores of profitless early-stage companies that could have come public only in a bubble, a staggering volume of bonds that sported cartoonishly low yields, most of the absurd ‘meme stocks’, and stocks such as Tesla – intensely…

fee.org Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which went bankrupt last month, was fully “woke”, says Jon Miltimore. It pledged at least $5bn to green investments and donated $73m to Black Lives Matter and other causes. Was this the cause of the bank’s demise? Some say no, pointing out that macroeconomic factors had “triggered financial chaos” across the world. This lets the bank off the hook too easily. It did make “rookie mistakes”, failing to diversify its investments and manage risk. But why was it so negligent? One of the dangers in “wokeism” is that it is hostile to concepts such as individual merit. So little surprise that the board of directors was rather thin on investment banking experience. Board member Elizabeth Burr scorned the idea of focusing on the numbers in…

■ Crowdcube, the UK’s largest crowdfunding platform, has moved into venture capital trusts (VCTs), says the Financial Times. The firm has partnered with Octopus Investments, the biggest VCT manager, to offer Octopus VCTs to a wider range of small investors. Clients will be able to invest from £500 in the VCTs, compared with a usual minimum of £3,000-£5,000. However, in an awkwardly timed development, Clim8, an investment platform that raised £6.6m from Crowdcube users in 2020 and 2021, said it would close customer accounts at the end of May after failing to raise more capital. While Clim8 remains solvent, crowdfunding backers – who hold 15% of its shares – are not certain to get back their investment. While the Octopus VCT funds are not invested in Clim8, critics say this…

● It pays to be an “early-bird” individual savings account (Isa) investor, says Laith Khalaf of AJ Bell. The investment platform has compared two hypothetical investors. One put £3,000 in a global equity fund on the first day of every tax year since 1999-2000 (with the calculation repeated starting in 2008-2009) while the other one waited until the last day before paying in the same sum. The early-bird starting in 1999-2000 would now have £200,373; the last-minute investor has £191,000. Repeat the experiment starting in the middle of the global financial crisis, 6 April 2008, and the early-bird still comes out on top, with £94,443 compared to the last-minute portfolio’s £88,044. “It’s not just the performance in the first year that matters in the long run.” The initial stake may…

● Delaying an increase in the state pension age by seven years will cost taxpayers more than £60bn, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Ministers had been expected to announce plans to raise the state pension age to 68 by 2039, but last week said this decision would be postponed until after the election. The current arrangements, with the increase not completed until 2046, therefore remain in place. ● People who have gaps in their state pension savings records will now have three additional months in which to take full advantage of rules that allow them to boost their retirement incomes. The deadline for making voluntary national insurance contributions to cover gaps going all the way back to 2006 had been set for 30 April. But the Department for…

Housing markets across the world are losing steam, with prices falling from Sweden to San Francisco. After a long boom during the final part of the pandemic, higher interest rates and the rising cost of living mean that most markets are now correcting. The UK is no exception, with prices already declining and leading estate agents forecasting a further 10% drop. Still, there are signs that the worst may be over; witness the recent rise in mortgage approvals. There is also a structural shortage of housing, with growing political pressure to build more houses. Some firms should therefore benefit from any recovery. One company that could do well from a rebound is Leicester-based Ibstock (LSE: IBST). Ibstock doesn’t build houses itself, but it makes many of the components that go…

“Last year Blancco Technology’s software erased 52.8 million devices” Responsible investing is integral to everything we stand for and do. Our framework for appraising any individual company includes ten positive investment themes in order to identify its contribution to specific social and environmental aims. Responsible business practices, along with sustainable products and services, can produce better long-term investment returns. We seek to harness the potential of smaller British companies by investing in businesses that are financially sound, have a sustainable competitive advantage, and can grow over the long term. Despite the short-term challenges, we think smaller companies can offer attractive returns to long-term investors. The key attributes of faster growth potential and a tendency to be overlooked by investors still apply. Investing in smaller companies also supports our aim to…

It’s not only in the blossoming cherry trees that Hong Kong has come out in pink. Sotheby’s this week exhibited The Eternal Pink diamond in the city to celebrate its 50th year in Asia. After 7 April, the gem will go on a tour of the region, Dubai and Geneva before arriving at its final destination in New York, for Sotheby’s Magnificent Jewels auction on 8 June. The Eternal Pink is a 10.57-carat Fancy Vivid Purplish Pink diamond that was cut from a 23.78-carat rough unearthed by De Beers at the Damtshaa mine in Botswana four years ago. It has been fashioned into a rectangular “cushion cut” with rounded edges. Carat and cut are two of the four Cs of coloured diamond valuation. As for its clarity, the diamond is…