Featured and Latest Posts
When the Essentials Became a Luxury: The Rise of Intergenerational Inequality
Streaming, smartphones, and cheap flights make it easy to believe we’ve never had it so good. But beneath the surface, younger generations are struggling with something far more serious: the essentials have become unaffordable.
For Millennials and Gen Z, owning a home, raising a family, or saving for retirement is harder than it was for their parents—despite higher qualifications and greater workforce participation. Whilst consumer goods have become cheaper, the building blocks of a stable life have slipped further out of reach.
This post explores how that happened—and why the odds feel stacked against the young.
Private Equity and Private Credit: The Private Markets Mirage?
Private equity and private credit have long promised higher returns, exclusivity, and access to opportunities beyond the public markets. But once fees, illiquidity, and access barriers are factored in, the reality is often far less compelling. Whilst gross returns may shine, net returns frequently disappoint. This post explores the data, challenges the hype, and asks whether recent policy moves—like the Mansion House reforms—risk putting pension savers on the hook for complex, costly strategies that may benefit fund managers more than investors.
Should You Hedge Currency Risk in Your Portfolio?
Currency risk is often overlooked, but for UK investors with global portfolios, it matters — especially in bonds.
For fixed income, hedging is essential. Currency volatility adds equity-like risk to what should be a stable part of your portfolio. And there’s no long-term reward for taking it.
Equities are different. Currency moves and stock returns are weakly correlated, and equity volatility typically dominates. Hedging equity exposure often adds complexity with little benefit.
Rule of thumb? Hedge your bonds, not your equities.
Strategic and Tactical Asset Allocation: A Recipe for Underperformance
Strategic and tactical asset allocation may sound sophisticated, but often leads to sub-optimal investment outcomes—particularly when used by in-house investment managers at financial advisory firms. These strategies hinge on predicting market movements—a near impossible task. Worse yet, they can sometimes be a convenient way to justify unnecessary fund switches and rack up extra fees. The smarter approach? Stick to evidence-based strategies like market cap weighting and systematic factor investing. These are methods grounded in research rather than speculation.
Good financial decisions aren’t about predicting the future—they’re about following a sound process today.
In investing, outcomes are noisy. Short-term performance often reflects randomness, not skill. Yet fund managers continue to pitch five-year track records as if they prove anything. They don’t.
As Ken French puts it, a five-year chart ‘tells you nothing’. The real skill lies in filtering out the noise—evaluating strategy, incentives, costs, and behavioural fit.
Don’t chase what worked recently. Stick with what works reliably.