My “Millennial’s Manifesto” is up as an audio essay on Apple Podcast. Go have a listen! Also consider subscribing to the podcast channel. The cadence of these audio essays is slow, one essay every one or two months, so you won’t be overwhelmed by content. I know many people prefer to listen to their content rather than reading (more about that below), and my decision to start publishing audio essays is my attempt to cater for that. Thanks again for reading and listening.
Read MoreThis is the question everyone wants an answer to after another week where bonds have been beaten to a pulp, a trend which is now starting to bleed into equities. More specifically, the real question is whether US inflation is accelerating? It is too soon to tell, and for the record, we don’t think so. But for now, markets are being fed with headline macro data signalling that the US economy is more resilient than previously anticipated, as well as vulnerable to upside inflation risks. As a result, investors have kept buying the dollar and selling treasuries at the start of 2024. The latter, in turn, has spilled over into indiscriminate selling of bonds in other jurisdictions.
Read MoreI’ve recently spent ten days on the lovely Adriatic coast on Croatia. It is the second time I have holidayed in the country, and I wasn’t disappointed. Its inviting coastline—especially between Split and Dubrovnik—is as good a retreat for sun and relaxation as anywhere in southern Europe’s other more well-known holiday spots. Holiday tends to mean audiobook binging, and on this occasion I listened to John Banville’s Snow, narrated by Stanley Townsend in the Audible version. This was a bit of a risk. My wife recently bought Banville’s The Singularities, and struggled to get traction with it. I then had a go, and while I found the prose mysteriously hypnotic, I struggled to follow the plot, and eventually put it down, having reached only a bit further than my wife. I later realised that this was partly because The Singularities presumes knowledge of Banville’s earlier works.
Read MoreI use three indicators in my work and analysis on the blog to describe the global business cycle; a weighted average of growth in global industrial production and trade, compiled by CPB, the global composite PMI, and a diffusion index of OECD’s leading indicators. Strictly speaking, the CPB data in this context are a coincident indicator, while the PMI and OECD LEIs are short-leading indicators. What’s the difference? At the moment the CPB data, updated through February, provide a guide of what happened at the start of 2024 and perhaps an early read on the Q1 GDP numbers, which have just started to trickle out. By contrast, the PMI and OECD LEIs are supposed to offer an early indication of what will happen in Q2. The distinctive lines between these definitions are fuzzy, so I tend to see these three as separate gauges of where global economic activity—with a weight towards developed markets—is right now.
But how do these indicators relate to the equity market? Let’s try to find out.
Read More