This quarter has seen the bulk of the global vaccine rollout beginning with the UK leading the G7 economies with its vaccine program. The evidence currently suggests that the vaccine has been effective at reducing infection rates, allowing countries with high vaccination rates to start to ease restrictions with lower infections than previous easing of […]
Please find below a summary of the Budget for March 2021 Budget Summary March 2021
Can a Negative be Positive? Silvana Tenreyro, a policy maker at the Bank of England, has recently come out in favour of negative interest rates as a method to boost the UK economy out of COVID-19. The Bank of England Base Rate is the amount of interest the Bank of England pays financial institutions who […]
A lot has changed since the United Kingdom initially went into its first lockdown in March. After the initial market turbulence, we continue to ensure our clients investments are well positioned and suit their circumstances. Over the past 3 months the UK stock market has generally been in a slow decline until the positive news […]
Where do we go from here? At the beginning of the year we would have seen opinions ranging from “COVID-19 doesn’t exist” to “The whole world is going to end”. Now with more understanding about the health effects of the virus and how it may impact the economy we can take a more balanced view. […]
Rishi released a ‘Mini Budget’ as we are slowly recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic and I enclose some of the key points for your perusal: Job Retention Bonus. This follows on from the current Job retention scheme. This is a one-off payment of £1,000 to employers that have used the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) […]
Anything you do financially will bear some kind of risk. With ‘risk’ being a very emotive word, it is important that any risk is well defined and quantified. What is Investment Risk? There are a number of investment risks, however, they all have the same principal concern; that your investments will not behave the […]
Why do we invest? For many investors, the aim is to provide returns over the medium to long term that are greater than that available from cash savings. The trade-off for these greater long-term returns is that you no longer get them in a straight line and your investment value could be down in the […]
Comfort in the unknown This week I will discuss a measure which shows that the investment market has become more comfortable with the expected market effects of COVID-19. The VIX index (Chicago Board Options Exchange’s Volatility Index) – you can see why they abbreviated it – is a measure of the stock markets expected volatility […]
One of our investment themes showing its benefit Little has changed since our previous update as we start to see some continuity of expectations. I thought this would be a good opportunity to highlight one of the more specific investment issues that has raised its head as a result of the Coronavirus and how […]
