Reading Time: 6 minutes How many ideas are you exposed to each year – dozens certainly. Hundreds? Maybe even thousands. But how many do you really remember once you’ve left the room or closed the phone? let alone a week or month later. But some ideas do stick. They burrow into your brain somehow and manage to take up … More Ideas that stuck 2023
Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s all anyone’s talking about right now as the dust settles on the chancellor’s Mansion House speech… I want to try and challenge three of the accepted wisdoms here: – That the U.K. pensions system is a big and significant investment force – That private markets make for great investments and – That channeling U.K. … More Investing for Growth in the UK
Reading Time: 5 minutes If you dive into any of Warren Buffett’s many shareholder letters (and you absolutely should – they are a master class of communication style as well as an awesome throwback to the late-90’s early-internet-chic design style) the apparent lessons to take away is that the route to investment success is to buy a small number … More The Real Lessons of Buffett
Reading Time: 5 minutes tl;dr: niche strategy allocations to private markets can be great and good managers have opportunities, but be wary of the mounting received wisdom that all private markets are inherently great investments. One of the clear trends in asset allocation this past decade has been into private markets. You don’t have to look much further than … More Beware the Private Markets pedestal
Reading Time: 3 minutes For potential fans of a 4-day work week a big study just dropped- but realistically what does it tell us? Sky News covered it as a “Major Breakthrough”, but was it? The bbc went with the more mundane observation that most firms were planning to continue the pilot. A few thoughts: Must have been a … More Who wants a 4-day work week?
Reading Time: 5 minutes The curious case of the stock market, the pension funds, in the library with the lead piping … It wasn’t the pension funds wotdunnit! It’s becoming a national obsession to lament the demise of the London stock market … there seems to have been a spate of articles recently such as this one in the … More No, it wasn’t the pension funds that killed the London stock market
Reading Time: 8 minutes Edit: updated for stats from Credit Suisse yearbook Tl:dr Prediction is difficult … especially about the future. Take them seriously not literally. I do love a well put-together set of expected returns, and it’s been great to see asset managers getting more comfortable sharing their own in recent years (in a previous post I said … More Tour d’Expected returns
Reading Time: 6 minutes How many ideas are you exposed to each year – dozens certainly. Hundreds? Maybe even thousands. But how many do you really remember once you’ve left the room or closed the phone? let alone a week or month later. But some ideas do stick. They burrow into your brain somehow and manage to take up … More Eleven ideas that stuck in 2022
Reading Time: 6 minutes Ok so I listen to a lot of podcasts. Each year for the last few years I’ve put together a list of the best. The ones that made me think different, unearthed a tonne of insight or just forced me to hit rewind and listen again. 2019’s is here, 2020 is here & 2021 is … More Top podcasts of 2022
Reading Time: 7 minutes It’s that time of year. I’m pretty skeptical of market outlooks, generally they either end up being a nowcast, or get thrown out before the ink has dried (see: 2022 forecasts), or they reiterate a bland consensus which isn’t useful or they are too vague or they tell you more about the forecaster than anything … More Not another 2023 outlook …
