magazine archive
magazine archive
Russ Mould
Assessing the Fed’s policy options
Thursday 24 Jun 2021During the first 200 years of its existence, the US accumulated a cumulative federal debt of $1 trillion, the equivalent of 30% of its GDP (gross domestic product). In the last 40 years, that figure has surged to $28 trillion. The good news is that the US economy has grown too, as annual GDP has...
Reasons why deficits and inflation matter to gold
Thursday 17 Jun 2021Gold bugs get a kick out of telling investors with a heavy weighting toward equities that the precious metal has a better performance record than the S&P 500 index of US shares since the turn of the millennium. The commodity is up by 547% over that period, while the S&P 500 has offered a...
What new floats say about the market’s future direction
Thursday 10 Jun 2021The plunge into bankruptcy of the Softbank-backed, self-styled ‘construction industry disruptor’ Katerra spares investors in US equities the decision over whether to buy into what would have doubtless been an eventual IPO (initial public offering). Katerra had been given ‘Unicorn’ status – a...
Rising pay could be a threat to US equities
Thursday 27 May 2021The news that Amazon is looking to hire 75,000 more workers in the US and Canada is eye-catching enough, even for a firm that employs 1.3 million around the globe, according to its website. But it is the offer of an average $17 an hour starting salary, plus a potential signing-on bonus of $1,000,...
Commodities remain central to the FTSE 100
Thursday 20 May 2021No sooner had this column raised the question as to whether its status as the single-best performer within the FTSE 350 over the last five years meant that the good news was all in the price for the Industrial Metals and Mining sector than the grouping promptly fell out of bed. Sharp share price...
Why heavy metal continues to strike a chord with investors
Thursday 13 May 2021The Federal Reserve continues to insist that inflation is only transitory and will quickly fade as the base for comparison gets tougher from now onwards, especially when it comes to important inputs such as oil. Yet not everyone is convinced. Central banks in Brazil and Russia are now hiking...
How to test the market mood
Thursday 06 May 2021In many ways right now, it looks like business as usual for the financial markets. Blow-out quarterly numbers from Google’s parent Alphabet, Apple and Facebook are taking their share prices to new highs and carrying the Nasdaq index along with it. The FTSE 100 is having another crack at breaking...
Why gold and bonds are rallying
Thursday 29 Apr 2021Some regular readers may think it does not take much to puzzle this column at the best of times and there can be no denying that the big picture right now seems to be full of contradictory eddies and whirls which make it particularly difficult for investors to form a clear-cut view. For instance,...
Where are we in the market cycle?
Thursday 22 Apr 2021As regular readers will know, one of this column’s favourite market sayings comes from fund management legend Sir John Templeton, who once asserted that: ‘Bull markets are founded on pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.’ Applying this test can potentially help...
Why FTSE 100 is warming to economic upturn
Thursday 15 Apr 2021As the UK starts to emerge from its latest lockdown, the FTSE 100 already trades above the levels reached just before the pandemic first made its presence felt in China and Southern Europe in early 2020. There can be no finer example of how financial markets are forward-looking, discounting...