Innehållsförteckning för Issue 1252 från MoneyWeek

“I always worry about gold when everyone is talking about it,” says Max King. We have been gold bugs since the long-term uptrend began in 2001, at around $250 an ounce, and there was great excitement in the office when gold eclipsed $300 in 2002. But one of the most striking things about the long ascent to $3,000 (see page 4) was how little attention was paid to it. It was a stealth bull market. Asset managers and investment banks have largely ignored it, as their perma-bullish marketing has no room for an asset that thrives on bad news. Very few analysts saw the need to insure portfolios with a “barbarous relic”, even though the structural deficiencies of the heavily indebted global economy, a result of central banks’ serial bubble-blowing,…

Shares in model train maker Hornby plunged by 25% after it announced that it had reached the “end of the line” as a public company after 40 years, says Harry Wise for This is Money. The group will cancel its listing on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) and go private. This marks “another setback for the City”, as London “struggles to attract initial public offerings while suffering an exodus as companies leave or are taken over”. Hornby, in the midst of a “major transformation” with the backing of Sports Direct tycoon Mike Ashley, blamed “the regulatory burden and cost of maintaining the public quotation”. Calm down, says AJ Bell’s Russ Mould. Hornby’s decision “is not a damning criticism of the UK stockmarket”, but a reflection of the fact that, when…

The stock of the ride-hailing group Uber has been “stuck in neutral” since October, says Barron’s. There are fears that Uber will get pushed out of the market by Tesla’s robotaxis. Concern over the economy and tariffs has hardly helped. But Uber should be seen as “a partner, not a victim, of autonomous vehicles”, as it already works with Alphabet’s Waymo. The global self-driving taxi market could grow to more than $2trn over the next decade. Uber’s app is on over 171 million phones, and it has a diverse business with food delivery and advertising; it is a “free-cash-flow machine”. Uber could become a “super app” for rides, food, and booking travel.…

The main outcome of Vladimir Putin’s 90-minute phone call with Donald Trump on Tuesday was Putin’s rejection of a full 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, which Volodymyr Zelensky signed up to last week, and an agreement to “pause attacks” on energy and infrastructure, says David Blair in The Telegraph. This is “thin gruel”. The US “read-out” of the call contains “not a hint of pressure”; rather speaks “enthusiastically” of the “huge upside” of an “improved bilateral relationship” between the US and Russia, including “enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability”. The read-out produced by Russia was friendly but unyielding on Putin’s basic demands, says The Economist. For a 30-day ceasefire to be effective, the Kremlin said Ukraine had to halt mobilisation and re-armament and the US had to stop providing it with…

Service-sector businesses in Japan are investing in robots that can work with people, rather than replace them, to address a serious labour shortage and a rapidly ageing population, say Erica Yokoyama and Momoka Yokoyama on Bloomberg. These robots also assist older or foreign workers by giving physical assistance and easing language barriers. Skylark, the country’s largest restaurant chain, uses about 3,000 cat-themed robots with big blue eyes (pictured) that have 3D sensors and dozens of facial expressions to deliver food from orders taken via tablets. The company has saved around ¥5bn (£26m) in annual labour costs. The robots are also increasingly being used in Japan’s elderly care sector due to a shortfall in carers, although, naturally, there are limits to what they can do. Japan’s service robot market is expected…

● Shares in pest control and hygiene group Rentokil slumped 10% after its latest update, says Ian Conway in Shares. Weakness in North America dragged down sales, while operating profits and free cash flow declined. “The outlook brought little comfort either.” Investors sense more weakness in North America and the decision to ditch a target of £200m in cost savings from the pricey acquisition of Terminix in 2022 “went down particularly poorly no matter how management tried to spin it”. Overall, the gulf between Rentokil’s performance and US rival Rollins “suggests investors… are being short-changed”. ● After ten years running construction firm Balfour Beatty, CEO Leo Quinn is “hanging up his hard hat just when things are really looking up”, says Alistair Osborne in The Times. When he took charge…

The growing dominance of passive index funds is “a very big distortion” that has pushed large-cap US equities to artificially high valuations, says Terry Smith, manager of the giant Fundsmith Equity fund. “That’s what we’ve been battling against for the last year or two, and we might continue battling against it for some time to come.” “We are going through a rather difficult time,” Smith acknowledged to investors at his fund’s annual general meeting. Fundsmith lagged behind its benchmark last year, for the fourth year in a row, and investors withdrew £3.4bn in the last 12 months. Still, active investing will make a comeback, he insisted. “The dream of any active manager that’s worth their salt is to be the last active manager left.” Fundsmith is underweight in US tech…

■ Shares in Harmony Energy Income jumped by 20% after renewables specialist Foresight made an 84p per share takeover offer for the struggling battery storage fund. The bid is at a 29% premium to the previous closing price, although still at a discount of 9% to the latest NAV. Harmony said in May that it would sell its assets, and this bid for its entire portfolio from Foresight – which runs Foresight Environmental Infrastructure and Foresight Solar – may have implications for other renewables trusts on deep discounts. At an implied valuation of £810,000 per megawatt, the offer is twice the price that Gresham House Energy Storage and Gore Street Storage trade on, say analysts at Peel Hunt. ■ Schroders Capital Global Innovation – the former Woodford Patient Capital trust…

thecritic.co.uk Everyone knows by now that Britain is in deep trouble, says Sebastian Milbank. But some of our problems are “self-inflicted and freely chosen” and could be dealt with very quickly if the political will were there. We have three “millstones” hanging around our necks. First, “Treasury brain”. The government department’s obsession with balancing the books has strangled public investment and hence industry for decades. Labour should drop the “absurd” fiscal rules holding back investment in our “crumbling” infrastructure. Second, net zero. Britain’s “fanatical” rush to go green will not save the planet, but is killing off industry with soaring energy prices. Instead, we should get busy extracting our own oil and gas in the short term – and putting the profits in a sovereign wealth fund that could back…

Small-business owners and sole traders could be in line for compensation payments worth thousands of pounds as financial regulators step up their investigation into car-finance mis-selling. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s chief city watchdog, has just announced plans for an industry-wide redress scheme that will require banks and other lenders to contact anyone who meets set mis-selling criteria. The car-finance row has now been rumbling on for a decade, with a series of legal cases over practices in the industry. The argument centres on whether people taking out finance packages when buying a vehicle were given clear information about the commissions earned by brokers and dealers on such arrangements. Without such disclosures, mis-selling may have occurred. Importantly, a redress scheme would be likely to cover many small firms,…

Only nine months ago Labour was celebrating an election that gave it the largest number of seats gained in nearly seven decades, with a majority only slightly lower than in its landslide victories of 1997 and 2001. Today, its polling ratings languish above 20%, with the party falling behind Reform in many surveys. No wonder then that Ladbrokes is running a market on whether Keir Starmer will be prime minister at the next election. It is offering 4/5 (55.6%) on Starmer being PM, and 1/1 (50%) on him not being PM on election day. Despite Labour’s current woes, I think the odds on him still being PM look good value. Even if Labour’s poll ratings don’t improve, the Labour party doesn’t have a history of forcing its leaders out of…

The backlash against buying US products by consumers in Mexico and Canada – angered by US president Donald Trump’s trade policies against those countries – has been well documented, says Peter Beaumont in The Guardian. The boycott movement is now spreading to Scandinavia, Britain and beyond. In Sweden, a Facebook group promoting a boycott – including, ironically, of Facebook itself – has attracted 70,000 users, while the Salling group of grocery stores in Denmark – reacting to widespread anger at Trump’s threats against Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory – will mark European-made products with a black star to distinguish them from US ones. Haltbakk, Norway’s biggest oil-bunkering operation, has said it will no longer serve the US Navy. Takeshi Niinami, CEO of Japanese drinks group Suntory, which owns US brands,…

America’s technology giants have flailed this year, but small-caps are failing to offer much protection. Investors piled into small US stocks last summer when the tech mega-caps first stumbled, says Sarah Hansen for Morningstar. But that bet on a “rotation” of market leadership away from giants towards smaller, cheaper firms proved a “head fake”, with growth stocks like Nvidia soon reasserting their leadership. Small-cap enthusiasm reached a peak after Donald Trump’s election victory in November as investors bet on a US boom, says Investopedia’s Colin Laidley. But instead of tax cuts and deregulation, markets have got tariffs and talk of recession from Trump. “Stubborn inflation” is a particular problem for small caps. They tend to have less pricing power than big firms, forcing them to cut profit margins when prices…

Green energy shares have gone from boom to bust, says Rachel Millard in the Financial Times. The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition index, which tracks major green players such as Danish wind firm Vestas and Spanish renewables utility Iberdrola, has fallen 64% since 2021. High interest rates have undermined the financial logic of breaking ground on big energy projects, which require lots of up-front capital investment. Meanwhile a political backlash has been gathering pace against Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) investing, as the Trump administration cuts green investment budgets, US fund managers scale back support and green energy targets are brought into question in parts of Europe.…

Qinetiq, which specialises in everything from defence robotics to surveillance and cybersecurity, has rattled the markets with a trading update, says Sylvia Pfeifer in the Financial Times. The defence contractor warned that full-year growth to 31 March “will be lower than expected amid contract delays and difficult trading conditions”, with organic revenue growth of 2%, down from previous guidance of “high single-digit” growth. Margins are also expected to be about 10%, down from the previous indication that they would reach 12%. Some of this “disappointing” update was due to factors that were specific to Qinetiq, says Hargreaves Lansdown’s Susannah Streeter. For example, Qinetiq has been “beset with contract delays, not just for its US arm, but also its UK intelligence business”. Given it is undergoing a “re-evaluation and restructuring of…

Klarna has filed to float in the US, putting the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company on course for an initial public offering (IPO) by April with a valuation of about $15bn, says the Financial Times. The listing would test investors’ appetite for the financial technology (fintech) sector amid plunging share prices in the US. Klarna became emblematic of the fintech market’s boom-and-bust cycle when its valuation dropped from $46bn in 2021 (making it Europe’s most valuable start-up) to $6.7bn within a year. The group reported a net profit of $21m for 2024, up from a loss of $244m the previous year. Revenue rose 24% to $2.81bn. Klarna was co-founded in 2005 by CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski.…

Germany’s parliament has approved Friedrich Merz’s plans to inject up to €1trn into military and infrastructure, “a move that could revive Europe’s biggest economy and boost the EU’s rearmament efforts”, says Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in the Financial Times. In an emergency session of the outgoing Bundestag on Tuesday, the “chancellor-in-waiting” narrowly won the two-thirds majority required for constitutional changes. The Christian Democrat (CDU) party and its probable coalition partners, the Social Democrats (SPD), are planning a €500bn infrastructure fund and unlimited borrowing for defence. Merz justified his U-turn on the debt brake, which limits the structural budget deficit to 0.35% of GDP, by the “deteriorating transatlantic relationship and the growing threat from Russia”. He had to act fast because the far-right AfD party and the far-left Die Linke had the numbers…

What’s the scale of the problem? The number of working-age people receiving long-term sickness or disability benefits has risen sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic, up from 2.8 million to four million people in England and Wales – or from one in 13 of the working-age population to one in ten. Fiscally, that rise is unsustainable in an era of stagnant growth and where there is a pressing need to boost spending in other areas, not least defence. Overall, the Office for Budget Responsibility says the UK spends 11% of GDP on all social security and welfare. And since some of this spending – the pension triple lock – is apparently politically untouchable (if fiscally incoherent), the Labour government has announced plans to cut spending on disability payments and health-related top-ups…

One of the best strategies during the last market regime was to buy quality large caps, as epitomised by Terry Smith (see right). Quality is rather a flexible concept in investment – most people prefer to say they hold good businesses rather than trash – but broadly this meant companies with high return on equity, low leverage, steady earnings that produce reliable cash flows and strong global growth prospects. A decade ago, quality investors favoured areas such as consumer staples – often developed-market firms with exposure to emerging markets. Later, some of these stocks started to struggle amid slower emerging-market growth and the return of inflation after the pandemic, while the tech sector began to lead markets. So quality investors shifted a little towards software or data services, where the…

The performance of Mid Wynd International Investment Trust (LSE: MWY) since it moved from Artemis to Lazard in late 2023 has been disappointing. Its investment return of 11.9% in 2024 was just half that of the MSCI ACWI index of global stocks and it remains well behind the benchmark this year. The shares still trade at a modest discount to net asset value (NAV) of 3%, but that is likely to widen significantly unless performance improves greatly. The change was necessitated by the retirement of Simon Edelsten, the lead fund manager at Artemis. And at the time, Lazard seemed a good choice for this £370m global trust. So what has gone wrong? The thesis of “buying great businesses with sustainably high returns on capital and the ability to reinvest to…

Uncertainty bedevils US economy Edward Chancellor Breakingviews In the public’s mind, Donald Trump and Franklin Roosevelt “could scarcely be more different”, says Edward Chancellor. But if their approach differs greatly, both presidencies are characterised by economic disruption and policy uncertainty. Like Trump, Roosevelt was a “political showman” with pet hates, who fell out with his advisers and enacted a “hodgepodge” of sometimes conflicting policies. Ultimately, his New Deal reforms of the 1930s failed because his “wayward economic policies” discouraged firms from making investments. There is a strong negative relationship between capital investment and uncertainty about the direction of travel. Over the past week, the US Economic Policy Uncertainty index has “soared to an all-time peak”. Outsiders struggle to discern the rationale for tariffs, which countries and industries the White House…

project-syndicate.org Donald Trump may have ridden to office on a wave of public hostility against elites, but his “enablers” are themselves leading figures in the establishment and plutocracy, says Dani Rodrik. His clique of Republicans, wealthy businessmen, Wall Street financiers and economic nationalists, has this time been joined by Silicon Valley technologists. All are united in their belief that Trump will advance their agendas. But the different camps “embody very different visions of America”. The economic nationalists want to return to a “mythical past marked by American industrial glory”. The tech camp “envisions an AI-administered utopian future”. The former is populist and wants to stop immigration; the latter elitist and welcoming to skilled newcomers. One wants to break up Silicon Valley; the other to empower it. It is “typical of…

Obesity is a growing global problem and a real threat to the health of individuals. It is not just an aesthetic issue, but also a serious health concern – it is, to be blunt, very hard to be overweight and healthy, says Ali Khavandi, consultant interventional cardiologist at the Royal United Hospital Bath. In the US more than 40% of adults are classified as obese, which has created a “health crisis” as a result of rising healthcare costs and reduced productivity in the workforce. Obesity is even affecting military recruitment, making it a “pressing issue” for governments, says John Plassard, senior investment specialist at Mirabaud Group. There is good news, however. Governments are trying to encourage healthy eating. And the latest generation of weight-loss drugs seem to be highly effective.…

Over the past decade, the US has become one of the most influential countries in the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market. From producing virtually nothing in the early 2010s, in 2022 the country became the world’s largest LNG exporter. By the end of the decade, almost one in every three tankers carrying the fuel will originate in the US, according to BloombergNEF. Production capacity from the country is expected to grow by 60% in the next three years. Companies such as Cheniere Energy (NYSE: LNG) and Venture Global (NYSE: VG) have powered the sector’s growth, investing tens of billions of dollars in the infrastructure required to turn natural gas into the supercooled liquid for export. Vast LNG facilities – which chill natural gas down to-160˚C, transforming it into a…

● One in five small businesses are still using analogue phone systems, telecoms giant BT warns, with time beginning to run out for them to transfer to digital technologies. The UK’s legacy copper phone-line system will be switched off on 31 January 2027, potentially leaving companies without key telecom services. The phase-out has already been delayed once to give businesses and consumers more time to switch, but a further reprieve looks unlikely. ● Looking for debt to expand your business? If so, your preferred option is increasingly likely to be a challenger or specialist bank, rather than one of the large high-street banks that have traditionally dominated lending to smaller businesses. New data from the British Business Bank reveals these lenders accounted for 60% of gross lending to small businesses…

A fortnight ago I said that I was contemplating culling some of my long tips. As it transpired, the fall in the market made the decision for me: in the past two weeks, five of my seven long tips declined. What’s more, Marks & Spencer was closed out at the stop-loss level of 325p, at a loss of £196; United Airlines was closed out at $80, yielding a profit of £819; and ticketing company Trainline was closed out at 275p, leaving me £774 in the red. As far as the other tips are concerned, food packager Hilton Foods decreased from 854p to 839p, while Corpay fell from $368 to $347. The only bright spots were property developer Harworth, which rose from 162p to 166p, and Domino’s Pizza Group, which appreciated…

When Paolo Fresia inherited tens of millions of pounds after his mother’s death, he didn’t know what to do, says Charlotte Lytton in The Telegraph. At first he pretended it hadn’t happened. He watched on in dismay as other members of his family who received similar amounts wasted their money, corrupting their lifestyles and mental health in the process. Things came to a head when Fresia (pictured) reached his mid-20s and he decided he’d have to do something – “come out” as wealthy, and do something positive with the money. To that end he joined Patriotic Millionaires UK, a group that advocates for higher taxes on the rich. Fresia, now 36, says that among his age group the wealthy can feel “really guilty” about their money, especially if it has…

2023 Tbilvino, Saperavi, Kakheti, Georgia £13.99, reduced to £11.99 in a Mix Six, majestic.co.uk As I reach my 1,000th column in MoneyWeek, I thought it appropriate to write up a wine from a country that, to my shame, I have never covered. It is not for want of trying, but this is the first Georgian wine to make the grade, and if a couple of other wines from the Tbilvino portfolio had docked in the UK, I might have three to sing about. So, keep your eyes peeled for the ravishing, mountain-fresh, nerve-tingling white 2023 Tbilvino Rkatsiteli, which will appear later this year. In the meantime, this spectacular saperavi will keep you occupied with its eye-catching packaging, stunning flavours and unbelievable price. The saperavi grape is an odd one. If…

During World War II, the British government handed watchmakers a very special mission. They were tasked with producing highly accurate wristwatches that were also waterproof and shockproof. Watchmakers Buren, Cyma, Eterna, Grana, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Lemania, Longines, IWC, Omega, Record, Timor and Vertex answered the call, designing a set of 12 timepieces that have come to be known among collectors as the “Dirty Dozen”. Henry Cavill’s character in last year’s Guy Ritchie action film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare wears two – a Cyma and a Jaeger-LeCoultre. All 12 watches sport a black dial with Arabic numbers, and a luminous minute and hour hand. The timepieces also had to have a railroad minute track (referring to the arrangement of the numbers around the dial), with a shatterproof crystal and stainless steel case,…

“I’ve been in the investment business for 35 years, and I can tell you that corrections are healthy. They’re normal. What’s not healthy is straight up… that’s how you get a financial crisis,” US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent tells NBC News. The former hedge-fund manager is putting a brave face on a market tantrum about US tariff policies. Last week Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 index entered a correction, defined as a 10% fall from a recent peak. The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite is off 13% since its December high. The White House’s “constant flip-flopping” on tariff policy is making it “very difficult to make earnings forecasts with any conviction”, leaving US investors “flying blind”, says Katie Martin in the Financial Times. Falling stockmarkets hit the wealthy particularly hard – that’s…

“In 2024 alone, 89 companies left London’s junior market [and] the headline performance of the Aim All-Share index in recent years has been less than stellar. However… numerous high-performing companies… have been acquired and so lost to Aim… The government… has a golden opportunity… to transform Aim into a genuine high-growth market – in effect, a European equivalent of Nasdaq…[by] demerging Aim to give it its own identity… The LSE could spin out Aim… inviting other stakeholders to invest. The government could even retain a ‘golden share’ to ensure that the market is not acquired by foreign competition… there have already [been] reports that a group of investors are looking at acquiring Aim and relaunching it as the Global Growth Exchange… any initiative that provides enhanced autonomy and identity will…

Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump has done little for the car company he founded, says NBC’s Rob Wile. Last week, Tesla’s shares suffered their worst day in five years. The stock has now plummeted 41% since the start of this year, with “growing distaste” for Musk and his role in the White House causing sales in the US to fall by 11% year on year in January. What’s more, boycotts in Europe have caused sales in the EU to fall by more than half in the same period. President Trump has responded to Tesla’s woes by hosting an event at the White House promoting Tesla and promising to buy one of its vehicles in a “show of support”, say Aime Williams and Stephen Morris in the Financial Times. But…

Five to buy easyJet The Telegraph The budget airline is well placed to weather pressure on disposable incomes in the coming months. It has an £18m net cash position, access to £5bn of liquidity, and may benefit from consumers trading down to cheaper package-holiday alternatives. Its valuation is “unjustifiably” low as earnings are set to grow over the next two years. The firm’s discounted share price offers a wide margin of safety and scope for significant capital gains. 485p Breedon The Times Breedon is one of Britain’s biggest building-materials groups. The firm is expanding in the US with two acquisitions; its US arm is expected to contribute a fifth of profits by 2026. Breedon’s markets are benefiting from population growth, boosting demand for housing and infrastructure. Analysts expect higher earnings…

Under the hapless leadership of the former high-flying civil servant Sharon White, John Lewis looked to be in terminal decline. In the case of both the department stores and its upmarket grocery chain Waitrose, the retail chain had too many shops, selling the wrong products in the wrong places. At one point, it even looked as if it might have to abandon its treasured workers’ control model and bring in an outside shareholder with the capital necessary to keep it afloat. Last week it became clear that all it in fact needed was some tough management by an experienced retail boss. Under its new chairman Jason Tarry, a veteran Tesco executive, it announced a 73% rise in profits to £97m for the last year and, although there is no sign…

A factor is a characteristic of a share (or other asset) that has been shown to contribute to market outperformance. Research into factors was driven by academics trying to figure out why some stocks generated higher returns than theories about efficient markets would have predicted. For example, widely accepted factors include size (the observations that small companies tend to beat large firms over time); value (cheap companies beat expensive ones); yield (high-yielding stocks do better than low-yielding ones); and momentum (stocks that go up just keep on going up). To be clear, these factors will not always beat the market over any given time period. However, looking at historical data, they have generated superior returns in many different markets across the globe over the long run. “Smart beta” is one…

US consumer health giant Kenvue has agreed to give the CEO of activist fund Starboard a seat on its board after the hedge fund launched a campaign to get four of its nominees elected as directors. Kenvue has struggled since it was spun out of Johnson & Johnson in 2023 – sales growth has missed expectations and the shares are down by 11% since listing. In October, Starboard, which owns a 1.1% stake in Kenvue, blamed the firm’s skin-health and beauty unit for the weak growth and urged it to improve its marketing strategy. In addition to Starboard’s boss Jeffrey Smith, Kenvue will add two new directors with consumer health and e-commerce backgrounds who weren’t on Starboard’s list of candidates, while Starboard will withdraw the rest of its nominees.…

“I never had any money advice from my folks, other than my dad saying, don’t go anywhere near the entertainment business because it’s a waste of time and you won’t make any money. I think he was aghast that I was willing to work for nothing.“ Bafta-award-winning filmmaker Nick Hamm (pictured), quoted in The Telegraph “Confronted with a challenge to distil the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto: margin of safety.” Legendary investor Benjamin Graham, quoted on X “The proverb says: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ When they don’t, lawyers make good money.” Columnist Libby Purves in The Times “The trick of successful investors is to sell when they want to, not when they have to.” US hedge-fund manager Seth Klarman, quoted on X “If…

unherd.com A spectre is haunting the British workplace, says Charlie Colenutt: the “Fear of the Great Mistake”. This is the feeling that your career is always but “seconds away from some imagined disaster”. This fear has become institutionalised and manifests in many ways: overly cautious and bureaucratic work practices, a planning system that won’t let us build anything for fear we will build the wrong thing, plodding investment portfolios because we fear losing money, and so on. On an individual level, it keeps us trapped in jobs we hate. We keep the ones we have for fear of what might happen, even if that means living in misery. In fact, big career moves “only ever seem to happen in response to some crisis, such as redundancy, a breakdown, or the…

Most of the funds focused on anti-obesity drugs invest in the drugs themselves. A way to benefit more broadly from changes in consumers’ tastes is to buy an exchange-traded fund (ETF), such as the VanEck Sustainable Future of Food UCITS ETF A USD Acc (LSE: VEGI). The fund aims to provide “relatively diversified access to companies at the forefront of sustainable and innovative food solutions” by tracking the MVIS Global Future of Food ESG index, says Houwer. Major holdings include Danone (Paris: BN), which is the third-largest holding. As Hazeley points out in the main story above, the tendency of anti-obesity drugs to produce stomach discomfort in some users is leading to an increase in demand for Danone’s yoghurts. The firm trades at 17.5 times 2026 earnings and on a…

Higher ethical and environmental standards can drive improved financial performance, says B Lab UK, the organisation that awards B-Corp status. B-Corp-certified businesses in the UK reported a 23.2% average increase in revenues last year, compared with only 16.8% from other businesses. Moreover, B-Corp firms increased their headcount by 9.6%, while others trimmed their workforces. B Lab UK, the British arm of the international B Lab organisation, celebrates its tenth anniversary this month and has so far awarded B-Corp status to more than 2,400 businesses in the UK. Mostly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), these firms meet minimum standards across five areas of their business. To apply for the certification, B-Corp firms must provide data on around 200 questions about their governance, workplace culture, environmental performance, community engagement and relationships with…

With many AI stocks having fallen substantially from their recent highs, investors have been seeking the next big technology that can deliver large investment returns. Many people think that quantum computing – using quantum mechanics to enable computers to perform calculations deemed too complex for conventional computer technology – could fit the bill. However, while quantum computing does hold out the promise of exponentially increasing the speed at which computers can carry out tasks, this doesn’t mean that every company in this area is worth buying. One firm longer on hype than on substance is IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), a quantum computing hardware and software company based in Maryland. Its shares quintupled over the last three months of 2024 thanks to promising recent developments in quantum computing at both Microsoft and…

Asia is poised to drive global economic growth and is expected to account for more than half of the world’s GDP growth by 2025. There are major demographic dividends in Asia yet to be fully realised, led by giants such as China and India, while dynamic Southeast Asian economies, including Indonesia and Thailand, are also growing rapidly. The focus on dividends is increasing across corporate Asia: 50% of the Asia-Pacific ex-Japan region is now yielding more than 2.5%. We believe the risk of dividend cuts is low in Asia owing to robust earnings and strong balance sheets, which provide good support for growing dividends. We look for high-quality and dividend-paying companies in Asia that operate in growing industries and have a sustainable competitive advantage. We are actively investing in the…

Going… Noonans Mayfair is selling a rare gem-set medieval bishop’s ring (pictured) on 26 March. The ring, dated to the late 12th/early 13th century, had been found in 2019 by a metal detectorist in a field in Shipdham, Norfolk. In the 13th century, the Bishop of Ely had built a manor house in Shipdham and there was also a royal deer park, owned by the See of Ely, during the medieval period. It is a “form of medieval ring, with a principal cabochon [polished but uncut] stone, usually a sapphire, surrounded by smaller collet set satellite stones”, says Laura Smith, a jewellery expert at Noonans. The ring is expected to fetch £15,000-£18,000. Gone… A tiny but “exceptionally rare” 1930s pin brooch from Cartier’s Tutti Frutti range that had been discovered…