Stock market

When Croatian movie director Dario Jurican ran in the country’s presidential election in 2019, his campaign slogan, ‘corruption for everybody’, promised that normal people would also be able to profit from cronyism. The people reacted with enthusiasm although they knew it was a joke. A similar dynamic is present on the WallStreetBets subreddit, which subverts the financial system by over-identifying with it or, rather, by universalizing it and thereby revealing its in-built absurdity. The story is well-known already, but let’s briefly recap. Wallstreetbets is an online group in which millions of participants discuss stock and options trading. It is notable for its profane nature and promotion of aggressive trading strategies.

‘This Article shall not apply with respect to financial services.’ That’s what it says on page 92 of the EU-UK Trade Co-operation Agreement, and my search engine has found nothing else in the monster document offering any comfort to the sector, which contributes £130 billion to the UK economy and provides more than a million jobs. That’s in marked contrast to fishing — £1.4 billion, 24,000 jobs — which gets a compromise settlement (pages 919-925, if you’re keen) accounting for every last haddock, hake and horse mackerel. No great surprise in a Brexit process in which political symbolism trumped economic sense at every turn: but does it mean our bankers

There cannot be many positive aspects to the coronavirus outbreak, but I wonder if it carries one for stock markets.  We had been told repeatedly, before all this, that the markets badly needed a ‘correction’ after their uniquely long bull run. If they were now sliding because of a banking or commercial event, confidence might collapse. If, however, they are falling because of a disease, will it also mean that confidence will recover more quickly once the disease is contained? This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, available in this week’s magazine.

The current stock-market correction has been steaming down the track since August and I claim no wisdom for having predicted it: the FTSE100 dipped below 7,000 at the start of the week, having shed all of the 10 per cent it had gained since it began to surge in April. Weaker UK growth forecasts from the EY Item Club, reflecting the impact of the Brexit impasse on business and consumer confidence, are just one factor in the autumnal mood. But let’s cheer ourselves up with a round of applause for our veteran investor Robin Andrews, whose ‘Faangs to Banngs’ trading idea I offered you on 1 September. His proposition was

It is always a pleasure to spend time in the company of Messrs Neil, Nelson and Forsyth. True to form, an evening of lively dialogue, in a packed auditorium at the Royal Institute of British Architects, discussing the implications of the chancellor’s spring statement last week, did not disappoint. Prior to the event I have to admit to being a tad gloomy. This had less to do with the cold I was nursing, and more to do with a call I received recently from a broker friend of mine. He told me that one of his clients, running a multi-billion dollar global equity fund out of New York, had just

All in all, this is an odd moment for an outburst of high spirits: not from me — I’m as phlegmatic as ever — but from commodity investors. The price of a barrel of oil has rallied from $27 to $40 after talks between Saudi Arabia and Russia about restricting supply; one pundit called that ‘meaningless theatre’ but others expect a climb back to $50. In a similar mood, copper prices have risen by almost a fifth — reflecting producer cutbacks combined with a belief that the Chinese downturn in demand might not be so severe as was first feared. Likewise iron ore, which surged so fast at the beginning

All this talk of a new financial apocalypse, so soon after the last one, is starting to annoy me. Partly because investors as a crowd are so irrational; -partly because so much that governments and central banks have done to contribute to the current market mayhem seems to work against the sensible efforts of ordinary folk to build a bottom-up recovery. Markets first. We’ve had hissy fits about China, even though connections between the Chinese and UK economies are so marginal. We’ve had near-hysteria about the prospect of (and in the US, the start of) rising interest rates. Now there’s a panic about European banks, because Deutsche Bank, midway through

Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, we’ve just been savaged by a bear but we’ll probably survive. Leading UK-listed stocks have fallen 20 per cent from last April’s peak after a six-year climb, and the FTSE100 chart has taken on a saw-toothed downward trajectory that suggests, to those who rely on such indicators, that there are further falls to come. The end of quantitative easing and the US Federal Reserve’s first interest-rate rise in almost a decade set the direction of travel. The sinking oil price, combined with worries about a global debt build-up, darkened the mood. Repeated bouts of mayhem on the Shanghai bourse, though little or nothing to

Not that I was much of a boy racer, but the sexiest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco with the lines of a paper dart and the cornering of a cheetah. I once drove it overnight from the City to Tuscany with a blind date who barely uttered a word, en route or afterwards. In an era when British factories could make nothing better than a laughable Allegro or a downmarket Escort, everyone coveted a German car — the top choice for twenty-somethings being the VW Golf convertible (Sciroccos were rarer) whose quality came as a revelation after years of broken fanbelts and burst radiators on unreliable