An attempt to unearth the impact of advancing artificial intelligence on investment managers.
Trust plays a vital role in sustaining liberal democracy in the west. The authority of long established institutions in America and the UK has come under severe attack by disaffected voters.
Most big public companies profess a keen concern to justify “green” credentials. But we urgently require a more coherent means of testing the reality of corporate commitment to the cause. This piece suggests such a …
Most investors haven’t experienced UK stagflation for close on 50 years. Current economic trends are pointing towards another such period. We could be about to see the UK financial authorities raising interest rates to rein …
A number of countries (including the UK) acknowledge the worth of non-economic factors to people’s wellbeing and many try to measure their scale. None, however, yet appear to have identified national happiness as their central …
When it comes to refreshment of the mind and emotional release, the creative and performing arts play a vital role. Their value is underestimated.
Deprived of audiences and normal sources of income, the arts need …
Pressures from the Virus are reinforcing changes in social priorities. The political class bows in response. Beyond the immediate ghastliness we may find the building blocks of a better future.
Populism now seems to infect political discourse across the Western World. It’s a destructive force. But there is evidence to suggest that traditional values of civility and neighbourliness outlast the appeal of the populist.
Here we consider how technology and the web have hugely changed and speeded up our lives and the efficiency of our businesses. But what do we lose in the rush from cradle to grave? We …
This piece shares our suspicions about the rationale for company takeovers and mergers. For various reasons, there have been a lot of these recently, including some in our own neck of the woods. Not all …
Conflicts of interests have ever nourished the ground of human frailty. But the resulting damage has mounted over recent years. Contrasts can be drawn with standards of probity evident in the early 20th century. Improvement …
Equity markets have shown a surprising resilience over recent months. This piece seeks to identify an explanation. It also discusses the risk(s) to current complacency. These centre on the political and economic impacts of popular …
In our article of July 2000, we talked about the development and implications of the then technology bubble for investors. Here we revisit the theme of technology exploring the impact of social media on our …
Our piece last April referred to the risk posed by ‘nations turning in on themselves’. Despite the danger, that is what seems to be happening. So far, equity markets are ignoring the threat. Recent bond …
In facing current crises, European leaders have had to battle with mounting and widespread mistrust of political posturing.
The UK leader, David Cameron has been faced, in addition, with open rebellion in his own parliamentary …
'Short-termism' reveals nothing new about human appetite. But the damage it inflicts seems to grow by the week. Voters, business customers, and all its other victims are expressing disgust. An alternative way forward must be …
Investment managers have come under fire from analysts and the press on grounds that they overcharge and underachieve. Some of this criticism can be readily justified. However, managers' objectives vary hugely and some may be …
‘Bonus’ incentives had become disproportionate to any value contributed and stakeholders were increasingly intolerant of them. Far the most effective incentive to do one’s best is job satisfaction, not extravagant remuneration.
‘Globalisation’ is the outcome of the growth of global business. The result is a para-State without boundaries. Its workings should be urgently addressed by a global agency.
For some time before our 25th anniversary, kind readers had suggested reassembling these articles in one place. After some hesitation, we decided that publishing them in a book might be a suitable way to mark …
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook must have been one of the most fantastic business stories of the millennium. Maybe the advent of social networking owed much to the loss people felt at the depersonalising of day-to-day private …
Many hoped that the 2010 general election on 6 May would cleanse what they had come to view as the Augean Stables at Westminister.
The election was held beneath a pall of ash spewed over …
One could hardly exaggerate how angry people were in 2009. In Britain, there has never been any shortage of the disaffected. But by summer that year, passions came to the boil and the apparent reasons …
A study in 2008 by a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee suggested that the UK government ‘outsourced’ more of its requirements than virtually any other. But nobody seemed to have …
Changes of investment fashion never arrive in small doses. When the investment hemline goes up, it doesn’t stop at the knees but at the navel. As with dresses at a Paris show, the trend gets …
By 2007, regulation, governance, codes of practice and compliance had created a vast array of consultants feeding on new complexities. Micro-regulation had become an inviting target for brick-bats. Presumably, those most constrained by intrusive bureaucracy …
At social events, family doctors and investment managers make ready prey for the chatty but often slightly informed enquirer. Any manager addressing the inevitable question about ‘market prospects’ needs to know what market the enquirer …
Despite pundits’ gloomy projections at the start of 2004, the year turned out well for equity market investors. Both the UK and US indices had risen appreciably from the depths they reached in 2003 after …
Beguiled by the claims of some financial practitioners, investors seemed repeatedly to be mistaking where investment treasure was to be found.
Regular caricature of the City tipster had no doubt coloured perceptions, but the financial …
Half way through Tony Blair’s 10 year term, disillusionment had set in. Much had been promised and much expected. Failure to meet targets set for public services fed public frustration and fostered mistrust.
An air …
The firm has always counted itself fortunate to be distanced from London and even, dare one admit, from Edinburgh. Financial centres trade on opinions, myths, rumour and chit-chat, and all the other distractions that come …
Andrew Carnegie was a sharp-witted lad out to impress his bosses. He knew the value of the personal touch, the power of personality. He saw how people matter to businesses. Yet the very success of …
Over its life, up to 2002, the firm had spent much time and expense disentangling client investors from unsuitable financial products that had gone wrong. These disasters stemmed from advice tendered usually by product promoters …
In the background to this piece lurks the remarkable fact that, while customers generally exercise reasonable care to inform themselves about the relevant facts when they buy a house or a car, they do not …
By midsummer 2000, technology fever had infected the collective investment wisdom. The atmosphere put one in mind of the great Tokyo property bubble a decade earlier.
If one were searching for the value that can …
Wall Street had been a wonderful place to invest in the 1990s. Our older directors could remember decades past when UK institutions – pension funds, investment trusts, insurance companies – held a significant chunk of …
Sport was one area where the founders of the firm fell out. One, a thoroughly modern man, a realist, harboured no Arcadian dreams about what once was known as the ‘amateur’ ethos: the other, a …
Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs often married noble foreign princesses for strategic purposes. Marriage could extend their sovereignty.
Until the 1990s, most company takeovers had been a domestic matter; mega international deals were rarer and generally …
Even in 1997, consumers’ confidence was recognised in America as a vital ingredient in assessing prospects for the economy. Movements in confidence were recorded on a chart.
Wall Street tried to measure investors’ confidence in …
Continuity matters – to investment clients no less than to the BBC’s Radio Three listeners noted in this piece. That is why, despite service providers’ unceasing efforts to shift tastes towards different and, for them …
Churchill said, ‘if you make ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.’
By November 1995 the cost of wasteful bureaucracy not least for farmers in the UK was virtually incalculable. Without doubt, …
Despite glorious weather throughout the summer of 1995, the public mood had been soured by dark resentment. Executive pay at British Gas had become a lightning rod for malcontents, but a wider underlying concern centred …
Investment managers had only themselves to blame if they were held to be little more than gamblers in a casino.
As the Sage of Omaha has observed, “risk comes from not knowing what you are …
Investment fashion can shift quite as abruptly as forms of artistic expression.
Bond investors had certainly done very well since our piece in 1989 – quite a bit better than equity investors – but in …
World War I put paid to Romanticism as a creative idiom. But post-war Modernism has in no way diminished the affection of music lovers for Elgar and the classical structure which shaped his invention. Structure …
This piece dealt with the puzzling disconnect between a rising UK stock market and the determinedly gloomy forecasts of local analysts. We were trying to explain why the market so often defied these dark expectations.
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By the Spring of 1992, concerns were being aired at meetings of the G7 and other international forums, about the flattening out of economic growth rates and the possibility of renewed recession. Growth in the …
Rather against the odds, John Major had been re-elected at the April 1992 general election. The opposition leader, Neil Kinnock, for all his success in modernising Labour Party policy, had been perceived as shallow and …
Britain joined the EEC in 1973 under the terms of the Treaty of Accession. In a referendum in 1975, the people of Britain voted by a large majority to support the Labour government’s campaign to …
By way of explaining apparently bizarre movements in securities markets, this article pointed to monetary policy and its impact on short-term interest rates as the biggest factor in shifting investors’ confidence.
The UK inflation and …
1990 was the base year of calculation under the Kyoto Protocol for monitoring progress towards the agreed target emission reductions, country by country. As early as 1988, Mrs Thatcher had noted in a seminal speech …
In March 1990, there was a huge anti-‘poll-tax’ riot in Trafalgar Square. Over 100 protestors were injured. The nation looked aghast at the pictures. A mere 2 months after that, Neil Kinnock’s strikingly radical policy …
Sheer power of personality to carry through a stratagem, however harmful, revealed itself as clearly in the political and economic events of 1989 as it had in wartime.
We felt then, as we do now, …
By 1989 the term ‘value’ had become an investment catchword. But investment managers found it difficult to define its ingredients. That was because its characteristics were always bound to be relative qualities not absolute ones. …
During the 1980s, so-called ‘performance’ became a buzz-word for those marketing and analysing financial products and services. By 1988, performance-driven advertising (read exploitation) had persuaded thousands of unit trust investors into purchases at market peaks. …
The Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century adds vivid colour to the history of global stock markets. This article, written by Alan McInroy, explains, rather than anticipates, the market collapse in the autumn of …
Happily (or not), publication of this article preceded by a few days the equity market crash on Monday, October 19th – ‘Black Monday’.
The index of shares on Wall Street had been rising more or …
Here we are with the UK market now in the thirteenth year of a rise that began in 1974. Few investors in Britain have experienced a stronger bull market; many indeed have never seen a …
This article was written by Alan McInroy, the senior of the firm’s founders, to explain the reasons underlying the establishment of the firm.
