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magazine archive
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Seven stocks for life after coronavirus
Thursday 14 May 2020There are flickers of light at the end of a very long tunnel. Doctors are learning more about Covid-19 every day; how it spreads, which treatments are showing promise, and how to create effective testing methods. Inevitably, after being cooped up during many weeks of lockdown, restrictions are...
Growing backlash against Rightmove could be bad for its share price
Thursday 14 May 2020Once a darling of the stock market, property listings site Rightmove ( RMV ) is losing friends and making enemies. Grumbling among its estate agent clients has exploded into mounting dissent following the company’s apparent tone deaf response to the coronavirus crisis. Despite its strong balance...
Which companies are ‘having a good crisis’?
Thursday 14 May 2020While no firm wants to be seen publicly to be ‘having a good crisis’, given the gravity of the threat to the economy and public health from coronavirus, the fact is some firms are doing rather well despite, or in some cases as a result of, the pandemic. Some have been in the right place at the...
Should we be worried about food security?
Thursday 07 May 2020Food prices are likely to go up as a result of pressure on the food supply chain linked to the coronavirus pandemic. Companies who can get food products to the consumer, either manufacturers supplying retailers or supermarkets being able to provide adequate stocks, could be winners from an...
The big comeback: markets have rallied, so what about the economy?
Thursday 07 May 2020In news reports covering the stock markets, certain phrases seems to be repeated more than anything else: ‘the FTSE rises despite…’, ‘the S&P surges despite…’. There is a whole range of bad economic data to finish those sentences, and yet after hitting a low on 23 March markets have bounced...
What does a rapid build-up of debt mean for economic growth?
Thursday 07 May 2020According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) the total cumulative amount of global liquidity injections, in the form of government spending packages and central bank stimulus measures, adds up to a whopping $14trn. This represents around 17% of the value of global gross domestic product ( GDP...
Nobody wants oil: how the commodity has gone from boom to bust
Thursday 30 Apr 2020WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IN THE OIL MARKET? It’s very strange times for the oil market and there could be further trouble ahead. Unless demand picks up dramatically in the coming weeks then mid to late May could see a repeat of the recent scenario where people had to pay others to take oil off their hands...
Spotting how companies might move the goal posts during the crisis
Thursday 23 Apr 2020Accounting scandals have a tendency to crop-up late into a business cycle, perhaps aided and abetted by looser governance standards and a lack of attention to detail by investors who get lulled into a sense of false security after years of stock market gains. With a long bull market at an end amid...
Don’t turn your back on small caps as markets fall
Thursday 16 Apr 2020As the UK continues to step lightly through the coronavirus pandemic’s social distancing minefield, many investors have turned their back on the small cap space. This is a mistake. We can understand why small caps might not appeal to everyone at the moment, given this space can include unproven...
Healthcare heroes: invest in the companies trying to save the world from coronavirus
Thursday 16 Apr 2020Three of the best performing shares over the last three months are healthcare companies. All of them are at the leading edge, developing testing kits, therapies and vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Realistically, developing a vaccine will likely take at least 12 months, and so the...