magazine archive
magazine archive
Editor's View
The argument for gold prices to move yet higher
Thursday 22 May 2025In a recent edition of Shares we posited the idea that gold might move towards $4,000 per ounce. Initially, the precious metal continued its year-to-date charge in the wake of this article and reached the $3,500 mark but a fragile recovery in risk appetite has put gold back around the $3,200 level...
Are we past the peak of uncertainty or is this just the beginning?
Thursday 15 May 2025Bulls of the US market and technology stocks will be rubbing their hands this week after the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite spiked, taking them further above their early-April levels and putting the Liberation Day sell-off firmly behind them. The indices may not be back at their all-time...
Could BP and Shell really be about to merge?
Thursday 08 May 2025If speculation about a BP (BP.) and Shell (SHEL) merger were a bowl of rice it would surely give you a monster bout of food poisoning given the number of times it has been reheated. But BP has rarely looked so vulnerable, so it’s not a huge surprise to see rumours of Shell swooping in gather a head...
Can market calm last and why haven’t European stocks done better?
Thursday 01 May 2025The market has started to get over the initial shock created by Donald Trump’s announcement of punishing reciprocal tariffs on 2 April and regained some equilibrium. As we write, an important proviso in the current times, the Trump administration has, by its standards, been a touch quieter,...
Markets on fast forward as gold continues to shine
Thursday 24 Apr 2025Is it really less than 100 days since the Trump administration took office? The symbolically significant 100th day actually comes next week on 30 April but such has been the speed at which it has moved that it feels like the whole world has been on fast forward ever since. Nowhere has this been...
What if you had missed the market's worst days?
Thursday 17 Apr 2025It’s probably the least of all our worries and this is written without the expectation of any sympathy but it’s not easy putting a weekly magazine together in the Trump 2.0 era. No sooner had we put last week’s issue to bed then the US administration announced a 90-day delay on most of its...
Why selling in a panic has always proved a mistake
Thursday 10 Apr 2025Since I started writing about markets nearly 20 years ago there have been two really big sell-offs, the first early on in my fledgling career as the global financial crisis hit in 2007 and the second a little over five years ago as the Covid pandemic struck. In between, there have been periods of...
The first-quarter market winners and losers
Thursday 03 Apr 2025We have reached the end of a tumultuous first quarter for global markets, from which the key takeaway has been the extremely weak showing of previously all-conquering US stocks. Martin Gamble looks at the latest developments from across the Atlantic in this issue . As the table shows, there have...
The big story of 2025 isn’t the one you thought it was
Thursday 27 Mar 2025The conventional wisdom was that 2025 was going to be the year of the US market and the dollar as President Trump pushed ahead with his ‘America First’ policy. The promise of tax cuts and deregulation won the support of the business community, while investors bought into the concept of ‘US...
QinetiQ fails to live up to the hype around the defence sector
Thursday 20 Mar 2025As companies on the stock market go, QinetiQ (QQ.) has a particularly engaging backstory. Emerging out of the Ministry of Defence arm believed to be the inspiration for James Bond’s gadget-man Q, these origins even tell you something about the company today given its focus on tech-driven areas of...