Great Scott!! – It’s the week of ‘Back To The Future Day’, the date in the second movie that they travel to in the Doc’s DeLorean – which, incidentally, doubles as the perfect retirement planning tool as he spends much…
I was going to write about peer-to-peer loans this week, but instead I am going to concentrate on another new type of investment that offers high headline rates of interest. They are known as CoCos and this week the Financial…
Most of the posts in this series have been aimed at making you more informed about investment in general. And I take a rather different approach than just putting some charts and tables in front of you that all contain…
In the first of these two blog posts, I highlighted how good and bad economic events are much more likely than you might expect. And this is partly due to the way the economic world is wired. There is a…
This is the first of two blogs that will show you why it is a small world after all. The world and its economy is far more connected that you might imagine. And while that does have some negative consequences,…
If I said to you the word ‘Vix’, chances are you would be thinking that I was talking about ‘Vaporub’. However, in this case I am referring to one way in which we measure how ‘fearful’ financial markets are. Not…
On a trip to the coast a fortnight ago, I went inside a café to order a couple of ice-cream cones. Ahead of me in the queue was a father, who was looking a little stressed. He was waiting for…
In 2004, the book The (Mis)behaviour of Markets by Benoit Mandlebrot was published – well ahead of the financial mess in 2008. And it’s a shame more financiers didn’t read it. In it Mandelbrot lays out the history of his…
In recent months I have, hopefully, shown you how different investing lessons can be learned from activities as diverse as eating marshmallows, buying trousers and assembling Ikea furniture. This week, I am looking at one man’s approach to problem solving…
I am not sure quite what constitutes a ‘No1 International Bestseller’, but the non-fiction author and financial journalist Michael Lewis has one with his latest book ‘Flash Boys’ – an account of the impact of ‘high-frequency trading’ on the US…