This week in Exponential Investor

Find out all the top news from Sam and the team

Find out all the top news from Sam and the team

 

This week's recommendations: • Stalin's pension fund dilemma   • The Doug Indicator   • World wars, pandemics, and the wisdom of the crowd   • The incentives that govern the UK after Brexit and Covid-19   • How does the (new) game play out?   • A departure from the norm

Stalin's pension fund dilemma   I love a good thought experiment.   I love thinking about the nature of risk.   In investment, people drop in the word "risk" like it's one thing.   But it's so many. Some of you might know by now that I've settled on a simple framework in which there are two main risks in investment – losing money, and not making it.   But there are others. Like, not making… enough. Enough to send your children to school, or to have the kind of retirement you want. Read more here

The Doug Indicator   The Nasdaq Composite's record high yesterday was the seventh record high the index has achieved this year.   Those milestones come a month after consumer confidence returned to pre-pandemic levels in the UK.   You can see the complacency outside of new market highs and consumer surveys. Read more here

World wars, pandemics, and the wisdom of the crowd   The numbers are in, and they look grim at first glance…   Less than a month after Professor Ravi Gupta of Cambridge University proclaimed the early days of a third wave, the UK registered over 22,000 new cases on Monday.   The number is partly inflated from a backlog in undercounted cases on Saturday. Even so, the seven-day average has grown from 3,304 new cases on 1 June to over 14,000 today.    But this wave is a little different. And, sure enough, markets are reacting differently too. Read more here

The incentives that govern the UK after Brexit and Covid-19   I expected to write this article about Brexit's risky implications. But it's become about Covid-19 instead. Still, the underlying topic is the same: how will we govern ourselves after 2021?   You see, Brexit in and of itself doesn't change the laws we're governed by. Instead, it merely changes who makes and changes our laws. Whether it's European politicians in Brussels, or British politicians in Westminster – that's all Brexit decided.   Read more here.

How does the (new) game play out?   Southbank Investment Research's editors are, without exception, very interested in financial history.   If you were to ask each of them to identify just one big budget movie that deals with financial markets – and financial excess – the chances are that they would give you the same reply: Wall Street.   Starring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox (with lots of reasonably well-known actors in supporting roles), this classic depiction of the zeitgeist of the 1980s was released at about the same time as the global stock market crash of October 1987. Read more here

A departure from the norm   It's Boaz Shoshan here – I'm normally the one holding the fort over at Exponential Investor's sister publication Capital & Conflict, but due to the present circumstances I'm writing Friday's letter.   Normally on a Friday, you'd be hearing the weekly podcast from my erstwhile colleagues Sam Volkering and Kit Winder. With Sam away on paternity leave, I was planning on standing in as his understudy and discussing the week's market movements with Kit. Sadly however, Kit then got the WuFlu, and then his understudy (the adventurer, Nathan Tipping) got the WuFlu too! Read more here

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