Paraphrasing T. S. Eliot’s lines from The Wasteland: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain’. The poet believed the season gave false hope of what […]

For a nation which prides itself on prudence, saving and balancing the government budget, they are furious at the ECB’s never-ending ‘quantative easing’ and now a minus 50 basis point key ‘lending’ rate. Data published by the Bundesbank, and a very interesting article in the Financial Times, this week show that of the 220 lenders surveyed at the end of last month (September 2019) 58 per cent of banks were levying negative interest rates on some corporate deposits, and 23 per cent doing the same for retail deposits.

FTMoney, one of the sections of the Weekend Financial Times, has guest contributors writing on a regular basis. On Saturday 10th November City legend Terry Smith posed the question above, and the article was so very good I urge you […]

The Financial Times newspaper, well known for its anti-Brexit stance and often deriding technical analysis, might have subtly changed its tune.  Not a volte-face, mind you, but at least contemplating publishing views from the other side.  This was the case […]

So wrote Merryn Somerset Webb in her Investing column in the FT Money section of the latest Weekend Financial Times.  I attach the chart she used for the article, and am tempted to change the title of my piece to: […]

Since the great financial crisis started a decade ago the Bank of England has slashed its key Bank Rate to a record low 25 basis points.  To keep people on their toes all along they have been promising that any […]

This month my focus has been on sovereign bonds.  I am not alone here and one of the salient and frightening things is just how few people understand this investment vehicle.  Because of this most retail investors have missed out […]

Fairly recently the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street took to Twitter with @bankofengland.  Describing itself as a forum for staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies, opinions are clearly labelled as those of the […]

As has been the case for the last few years, January’s monthly STA meeting takes a panel discussion format – where we continue to encourage audience participation.  Seeing as they were getting three speakers for the price of one, the […]

Rather than the usual monthly format of guest speaker presentation followed by a handful of questions, January’s get together encourages audience participation and debate between the speakers themselves. The STA was lucky to have a panel of three very different […]

Did you know that there are an awful lot of market professionals out there who are not technical analysts – yet they use charts all the time. As a technical analyst you might well believe that you have little to […]

Once upon a time life was easy. If you were a ‘good’ person you saved money, deposited at a bank that you trusted, it would earn interest and then, with a bit of luck, you could buy the big-ticket item […]

Trading the wholesale markets for the last 35 years, I have been thinking about the changes I have seen.

Most obvious of course is technology, the advent of computing power revolutionising the way we technical analysts work, the quantity of data we can deal with, and the choices we have available to us. Not forgetting search engines so that we can quickly double-check details we have forgotten and theories we are a bit flaky on. I find Wikipedia and StockCharts.com invaluable when unsure of which parameter is the default for a particular analysis – and so on.