Capital & Conflict – brought to you by Fortune & Freedom HYDE PARK, LONDON – I have some bad news. Actually, it’s not that bad. It’s just a change. But it is something you should be aware of as a…

MARYFIELD, DUNDEE – Named “Fundee” by some, and “Scumdee” by others, the bonny city of Dundee has a polarising nature. I used to come here quite often when I was younger to visit friends who were studying at the universities…

SOMEWHERE ON THE ABERDEEN-LONDON LINE – I hope you had a good Easter. With the Ides of March now over and the re-opening now imminent (hopefully), we wonder what delights await investors in the second quarter of 2021. A couple…

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – Who would you trust more? A bond investor telling you they feel something is off… or a stock investor telling you everything is hunky-dory? You’ll often hear it said that “bond guys are smarter that stock guys”…

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – A short note from me today -there’s a project I’m working on behind the scenes that demands much of my attention. We’re keeping it under wraps at the moment, but I’m looking forward to sharing it with…

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – You won’t come across something like this every day. Of that, I’m almost certain. Here at Southbank Investment Research, the editorial team like to do a lot of reading – especially on fringe financial subjects which may…

Selling is the dark art of investing. Whether you’re watching CNBC, reading the financial news, or listening to your broker, you’ll hear about what you should buy. Buy this stock, buy that market, buy, buy, buy. But you almost never…

Earlier this year I spotted that in 2020, solar and wind generated more electricity in Texas than coal. Since 2015, the amount of wind-generated electricity has more than doubled in Texas, and last year 23% of the state’s power came…

When Steve Morrow came across an online auction advertising the “urgent sale” of a hen for the poultry sum of NZ$1.50 (£0.78), he thought he’d found himself a bargain. It wasn’t until he received a message from the seller asking…

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – They’re calling it “The Capital Riot”. Over the pond, millennial militias are on the prowl. It’s patriotism run amok. They’re hunting down, brutalising and bankrupting all those suspected of committing the most anti-American activity of them all……

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – A reader writes in: I read your posts and you are often on the mark – thank you! I wonder if you have written about Tesla. To me this appears to be the greatest bubble of them…

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – “One of the greatest risks in investing is crowding. Where there is hype, there is danger. That’s not just for bitcoin, but true for financial markets. Turn that idea on its head, and the contrarian starts hunting…

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – Anybody bought a new car recently? I don’t know anybody who’s used the lockdowns as an auto-shopping opportunity, but there’s gotta be some out there… I was struck by a statistic published recently that car sales fell…

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the stock market.” If you’d looked at only the value of the S&P 500 last year, you wouldn’t have thought the country was in…

I hope you’ve been enjoying some of our festive content while our office is shut for the holidays. Rest assured, normal service shall resume in January – but for today, I’d just like to wish you a very happy Hogmanay….

I hope this email finds you enjoying the festivities in good health. I won’t distract you long ­– just a quick note from me to wish you a very Merry Christmas. This year has been eventful to say the least,…

So it turns out worldwide lockdowns are pretty bad for the economy. Who knew? Bearing the brunt of this, of course, are commodity prices. For them, 2020 has been a bloodbath. Oil briefly dipped below 0USD per barrel for the…

SODERMALM, STOCKHOLM – Could this be a punter’s paradise? Goldman Sachs thinks we’re in one. Its list of stocks loved by the everyman is up nearly 70% since May, which would suggest that the “little guy” is having a big…

SODERMALM, STOCKHOLM – Not a mask in sight. The pubs and restaurants are busy – often full. But the teetotaller lobby in government has a monopoly on the sale of all booze above 3.5% ABV, and taxes it to high…

And the results are in! Sort of. If, like me, you’ve been endlessly refreshing the news since Tuesday night, then you’re probably pretty keen to see the final results of what has been an extraordinary election. Votes are still being…

TERMINAL 1, MANCHESTER AIRPORT – Remember, remember, the fifth of November… or don’t. Her Majesty’s government certainly seems to be having trouble with it. It’s ironic that tomorrow’s lockdown across England kicks off on Guy Fawkes Day. Especially now that…

ECCLESHALL, STAFFORDSHIRE – Prior to his presidency, way back in 2015, Donald Trump tweeted – amongst many other things – that it is “often to your advantage to be underestimated”. (Not “misunderestimated” of course – you’d have to ask George…

THE ROYAL OAK, STAFFORDSHIRE – “A Tory MP, a Labour MP and an SNP MP go into a pub. And shut it down.” – Tim Price Once more into the pubs dear friends, once more. They need the business, the…

ECCLESHALL, STAFFORDSHIRE – “Donald Trump has desecrated the values that make America a beacon to the world. Joe Biden is a good man who would restore steadiness and civility to the White House. If The Economist had a vote, it…

ECCLESHALL, STAFFORDSHIRE – A nice chart to start us off with today. While it’s no surprise where investors have placed their money in the stockmarket this year, the sheer degree to which they have shunned everything except tech stocks is…

THE ROYAL OAK, STAFFORDSHIRE – “Sunshine, on my shoulders, makes me happy…” I doubt John Denver would be very chuffed were he living in the UK these days (or ever), given our weather. But the great musician’s music is likely…

THE KINGS ARMS, STAFFORDSHIRE – “Whenever I tweet, some call it a tirade. Totally dishonest!” – Donald Trump, 11 November 2012 (punctuation adjusted) To some, it is a tirade. To others it is a lullaby, a constant reassurance that a…

THE RUTLAND ARMS, DERBYSHIRE – “I feel like Adam” reads a message from a friend. “I live in the garden of Eden, but I cannot partake of the fruits…” The fella in question is a university student in Edinburgh –…

THE OLD SMITHY, STAFFORDSHIRE – “Something very important, and indeed society changing, may come out of the Ebola epidemic that will be a very good thing: NO SHAKING HANDS!” – Donald Trump, 4 October 2014 He was ahead of his…

THE ROYAL OAK, STAFFORDSHIRE – “The country is already a powder keg, and now we’ve lost Christmas.” As Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins plays over the pub speakers, Tim Price’s grim email hits all the harder. It’s not a sunny…

THE JUNCTION INN, STAFFORDSHIRE – Once more into the pub dear friends, once more! While we still can… I’m glad I’m not in London at the moment as the new anti-WuFlu measures come into force. Or Scotland for that matter,…

You’ve got to admire the deity who decided the 2020 election needed a twist like this. When news broke Friday that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died, battle lines immediately started being drawn in the fight for her…

THE ROYAL OAK, STAFFORDSHIRE – “Are they going to the Bermuda Triangle?” “Bitchcraft”, a (presumably) pseudonymous Twitter user in Brazil, asks a fair question. With a chart like this, you have to wonder exactly where Singapore Airlines is flying people…

THE KINGS ARMS, STAFFORDSHIRE – “It’s like he’s consistently lucky. Which means there’s something we’re not getting…” So remarked our energy analyst Kit Winder to me the other day (via text). He was describing the performance of Sam Curran, a…

Yesterday was another grim day for markets, with tech tumbling for the third day in a row. Apple lost 6%… each of the other FAANGs lost at least 3%… and Tesla even lost 21% in trading yesterday. The misery spilled…

It’s Kit Winder here. As Will mentioned yesterday, Boaz is away this week so I’m covering for him today and Thursday. Today I want to take a look at one of the key arguments for why gold is rising. I’m…

Happy hump day, dear reader. I told you yesterday this poll was coming… Who do you reckon will win the US election? I want to know what the Capital & Conflict readership thinks. I’m not asking who will win the…

Well dear reader, the results are in. This week, we’ve been exploring the prospect of another nationwide lockdown brought about by a second wave of WuFlu. It’s a heavily consequential matter for our lives, let alone our investment portfolios. And…

An old buddy of mine in Aberdeen was formally diagnosed with the WuFlu yesterday. He’s the only person I know to have actually tested positive, and not just exhibited symptoms which led them to conclude they had it. While several…

I must confess dear reader, I had not heard of the band named Spandau Ballet until this week. It was only after I received the rather… cryptic series of texts above that I discovered the group and its 1983 hit…

Ouch. The ol’ business of banking is taking a beating. HSBC is in the process of cutting 35,000 jobs and setting aside $8-$12 billion to absorb losses from WuFlu-related defaults. The popular portfolio holding has now fallen beneath the level…

August already huh, dear reader? The year feels like it’s flying by… and yet the days before lockdown, from January through to March, feel like forever ago. Strange times. I wonder how we’ll look back on 2020 in a few…

“Our founders would not bow before a king. Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.” – David Cicilline, US congressman for Rhode Island The emperors of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon appeared before the US House…

Kodak has joined the growing list of companies with spiking stock prices and is perhaps the most surprising of all. What these companies share is a good story, not a great business. In this episode, Boaz Shoshan, Kit Winder and…

Dear reader, I- Hmmm. So, uh… you remember that company that used to make cameras when you were a kid? Kodak? Apparently it uh… makes drugs now. Got three-quarters of a billion dollars as a loan from the US government…

I was thinking about how it’s a shame we don’t have a new North America to discover. We could send the Royal Navy off to colonise it and then sell it off like John Law did, thereby solving the problem of the national debt. And then it hit me. The world does have such a place…

With Boaz Shoshan otherwise occupied, Southbank’s tech expert Sam Volkering and macro-strategist Nickolai Hubble talked about the news this week. UK GDP plunged by a quarter, before bouncing back less than expected. But what does that really mean? Will gold’s…

What made Russell Napier so interesting is that he stuck with his prediction of prolonged deflation in the face of QE1, QE2, QE3 and so on and so forth. While many financial analysts were worrying about hyperinflation, let alone inflation, Napier said we’d see a lack of inflation. And he was right.

Back in early April when lockdown was stretching out before us like a vast expanse, I noted in this letter just how good it would finally be to have a freshly poured pint at a pub. With the pubs now…

Happy hump day, Reader, And what a hump it is that we’re cresting. Charlie Morris, who had billions of pounds under his management when he was head of absolute returns at HSBC, described Tuesday to be “a memorable day in…

The year of our Lord two thousand and twenty just keeps on delivering the goods. Remember this chart of Tesla I showed you a month ago (A Looney Tune you don’t want to miss – 10 June)? Source: me, on…

A buddy of mine has had enough – he’s getting out of here. It was the first time we’d seen each other since the lockdown began. I could tell he was somewhat different when I met him, and not just…

A few weeks back on our market broadcasts we discussed how the cybersecurity sector was booming amid the lockdown. I use interest in the $HACK ETF to gauge interest in the sector, and it’s now reached all-time highs, up over…

Is this what a market top looks like? Source: Hao Hong, on Twitter When watching the market becomes not just a recreational, but a relaxing activity… you have to assume that the market must have moved in a direction which…

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season…

It felt odd going back to the pub after three months of drinking in private. But it got much weirder after a stranger began speaking to me about my hat. I was standing in the queue outside with my girlfriend….

Guess when this magazine cover was printed: Any ideas? Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek at the end of 2009, and the design is clearly quite dated… but pretty much all of those stories could be written today. Billions are flowing into index…

Presumably you are older now than you were in the 70s… Well, in today’s podcast, we explore what a return to inflation would mean – whether its effects on your life would differ to the last bout Britain went through….

Two more days. Just two more days until the pubs open. Anticipation keeps building for a return to pub life. But when the doors finally do open on Independence Day… how expensive will a pint be? During the lockdown, we’ve…

Happy hump day, reader, To the reader who is asking, I am indeed in need of a shave. But back to that in a minute. I always enjoy looking through my mailbox to read your feedback on my scribblings (for…

We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, ‘Can you hear all those…

The pubs beckon. Independence Day awaits. Just a few more days… but a busy few, that’s for sure. And as I mentioned last week, we’re about to publish the monthly issue of The Fleet Street Letter Monthly Alert on the…

We’ve been writing about inflation this week. About that brutally destructive force, the bane of savers and investors alike, but especially cruel to the poorest in our society. It’s currently being administered to the everyman in a dose that’s just…

Most of those in political office, quite understandably, are firmly against inflation and firmly in favor of policies producing it. (This schizophrenia hasn’t caused them to lose touch with reality, however; Congressmen have made sure that their pensions – unlike…

1963. The decade that would be remembered as the swinging 60s had begun to earn its namesake. ‘63 saw the release of The Beatles’ first album (Please, Please Me), The Rolling Stones’ first single (a cover of Chuck Berry’s Come…

Make way, dear reader, make way! Make way… For King Benjamin Franklin! Behold, there he strides, in all his greenbacked glory… The US attracts all manner of international condemnation these days – criticism of its culture, of its endless wars…

As lockdown has dragged on and on, some folks have been hankering for a big ol’ fireworks display when it’s finally over. It’s quite understandable, especially for those in high-pressure jobs. Stuck alone indoors breathing stagnant air, you couldn’t really…

My colleague Nickolai Hubble has always told me one of the joys he has in his role in publishing his research is seeing his predictions play out in the news months later. It’s something I expect James Allen has been…

A new week begins, full of central bank announcements from the Bank of England to the Bank of Japan. Right on time too, as volatility appears to be returning to the stockmarket with a vengeance… In today’s episode, Nickolai and…

There’s a lot of trash in the European banks. A lot of loans that shouldn’t have been made. Loans where there hasn’t been a payment of interest or principal for… well, a while. Best not dwell on that. Let’s just…

Why have bankrupt companies become some of the biggest performers in the stockmarket in recent weeks? Could Robinhood, the trading app popular amongst kids in the States, be swooping in to save the day with a bailout of millennial capital?…

“I know this defies the law of gravity, but I never studied law!” – Bugs Bunny in High Diving Hare (1945) You might think that when a company starts exploring the possibility of declaring bankruptcy, that its share price would…

“I do love the beginning of the summer hols,” said Julian. “They always seem to stretch out ahead for ages and ages.” “They go so nice and slowly at first,” said Anne, his little sister. “Then they start to gallop.”…

A quick heads up: our broadcast schedule is changing slightly from this week forwards – we’re shifting from a daily broadcast to three per week. With a more streamlined schedule, we hope to provide you with more incisive content going…

Another week of chaos begins… With any luck, we’ll be able to go to the pub again soon – provided we identify as protestors first, of course. How times change. It wasn’t long ago that self-righteous moralists declared that flouting…

“Gold. Gold beyond measure, beyond sorrow and grief… Behold, the great treasure hoard of Thrór! the global ETF market!” – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014, script slightly altered) I wasn’t a big fan of the The…

“We are the good guys. We are on the side of angels.” – Jeff Skilling, slightly less than three years prior to his arrest 2020 just keeps on getting better… Jeff Skilling, the former CEO of Enron who was released…

I’m back at the helm of Capital & Conflict and our daily market broadcasts. It’s been good to take a couple days off and get burned to hell by the impressively strong London sun, and indeed to give you a…

It wasn’t all that long ago that the price of a gold sovereign felt stuck around the £250 mark. Some days it’d be cheaper, some days it’d be more expensive… but between mid-2016 until May last year, the market’s idea…

In the meantime, I’d like to show you a note Akhil Patel recently wrote for his subscribers over at Cycles, Trends and Forecasts. It’s about the historical “war cycle” we discussed on Friday’s market broadcast, a topic both fascinating and…

Well there we have it. As we wrote in Tuesday’s note (The Bond girl, the Cuban icon, and the man from Dixieland), we were watching the dollar for its next move. If it broke higher in value, it’d be bad…

Imagine if the Bank of England started taking to Twitter to make sure we knew what the word recession means – outside of a recession. You might find it strange – ominous, even – that such an institution would suddenly…

Has the storm passed? Are happy days here again? The fella from Cuba with a machete at his waist says so. The Bond girl lounging nearby agrees. But the fella from Dixieland… he’s still got a menacing look in his…

Well here we are [%= :subscriberName(D,Reader) %], Friday again. It doesn’t feel like a week has passed since I was writing to you last Friday. Though longer or shorter, I can’t tell – isolation has made my perception of time…

My perception of time is becoming increasingly distorted by the isolation… but it doesn’t feel all that long since our last bank holiday. Spending every day alone in my flat has made life a blur – as most weeks are…

We had long feared they would come. Watching the monetary corruption spread across foreign lands for so many years now, I guess we all knew, deep down, that they would arrive on British shores eventually. I had hoped we would…

It’s your last chance to celebrate it with a menthol Camel cigarette. From today on, all flavoured cigarettes and rolling tobacco are illegal to sell in this country. Get ‘em while you can. The rationale behind banning menthols is that…

Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve recently took to television to reassure the world that everything is, indeed, under control Gromit. While the Fed is of course the US’s central bank, his words are globally relevant to investors here in…

Well that’s that dear reader – The Halvening has happened. Block 630,000 was mined yesterday just after 8pm. The long-awaited block of transactoions only took 20 seconds in the end. It’ll be another few years before we see the next…

“Realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the…

A rather long note today. If you want to get right to The Two Thrones of the global economy, skip down to the next heading. If you want to meander down some rabbit holes with me first, just keep on…

Monday again, and we’re back in business. A new week beckons – and if it’s even a quarter as dramatic as last week, we’re in for a hell of a ride. While the crazy action of last week was contained…

Friday at last… I think. I find it hard to tell these days. All this staying at home has made the days a blur, I wouldn’t have been able to say it was Friday without checking. I often work on…

Too much oil is one thing… but no beer production is something else entirely. Some of the largest breweries in the world are facing a shortage of one crucial element required to brew their nectar. If left unchecked, a beer…

Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts… – Shah of Shahs, Ryszard Kapuściński (1982) Times have changed an awful lot since 1982….

The oil price in the US began Monday at $12. That’s pretty low. … But that didn’t stop it falling by 300% just a few hours later. Yes, you’re reading that right. The price of the most important commodity in…

I’m taking a short break from hosting our daily market broadcasts this week. My colleague Kit Winder will be hosting it in the meantime, focusing on how the WuFlu will permanently change the energy market. He’s never hosted a podcast…

Nobody wants to talk about this asset… but it’s been performing incredibly well during these wild times. It’s been in a bull market for years now. It wasn’t shook at all during the brutal March we’ve just had – indeed,…

Amid the WuFlu chaos… The escalating and ever more visible Second Cold War… The fiendishly volatile stockmarket… And as we all slowly go insane in isolation… We take a moment here in lockdown to admire something shiny in the sunlight….

“If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.” While this old saying may be true of Marvel films, it sadly does not apply to financial crises. They never arrive exactly the same way as they have in the past –…

Southbank Investment Research is shut today, but with everything going on out there and as it’s Eastertime, I thought we should send out something special in today’s note instead of my normal scribblings. Following the strong feedback we’ve had for…

Happy Easter Monday! I hope you’ve been enjoying the break as much as you can in these circumstances. I’ve been taking the time to get my thoughts in order, do some reading, and listen in to what the folks at…

An old buddy of mine contacted me yesterday asking what stocks he should buy now that the market has turned down. This very same friend contacted me at the very end of the crypto bull market to tell me he…

The ability of a gyroscope to remain stable no matter the forces at play around it has immense value.  That perpetual stability – rain or shine, chaos or serenity – has allowed engineers to create ever more complex systems around…

Who would win in a fight: former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi… or freshly anointed governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey? I asked a few colleagues and contacts which of the central bankers they reckoned…

Somebody just got air-ambulanced nearby. The red chopper flew low over the rooftops with a mighty whirr, closer than any other aircraft I’ve seen whilst living here. All anyone could do is watch it through their windows like some metropolitan…

Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. – Shah of Shahs, Ryszard Kapuściński (1982) The chart speaks for itself. Source: me, on Twitter…

Is it just me, or did the day the pubs shut feel like an incredibly long time ago for you too? Seems like months since I’ve had a freshly poured pint in my hand. Let me tell you, when this…

Back when WuFlu was just a twinkle in some bat-eating deviant’s eye, I thought it’d be worth giving Seattle a visit. A reassuringly rainy area of the developed world with a strong beer culture and a view of the Pacific…

Remember when some fella attacked the bull sculpture on Wall Street with a banjo last year? We mentioned it in this letter at the time – The banjo player and the bull market golden calf (10 September 2019). We wondered…

You ever watch an American TV show or film and think they overdo it with the music? Just smothering scenes in slow piano when they’re trying to spur emotion in the viewer? I felt that when I was watching an…

I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray, Hooray In Dixieland I’ll take my stand, to live and die in Dixie Away, Away, Away down South in Dixie… – “I Wish I Was in Dixie” (1850s) You wouldn’t expect an old…

I’m sorry for not getting in touch with you about this sooner. What’s going on here is really quite something. Last week I wrote about how the price of precious metals and the cost of actually acquiring them are decoupling,…

Well that was it, dear reader. “Whatever it takes” indeed. Mario Draghi’s statement, which is credited with saving the euro back in the sovereign debt crisis, has been taken to heart – and to market – by the Federal Reserve….

“You’ll find, young man, the future looks rosier through the bottom of a glass.” – The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas With the pubs shut, British investors are going to have a harder time imagining a rosy future – right…

If you’ve been listening to our daily market broadcasts this week, you’ll have heard Charlie Morris’s unbridled optimism in the . To close us off for this week, he penned this note for me recently on what’s going on in…

I asked Tim Price to write today’s Capital & Conflict, as he’s just the man you want in your corner during a market panic like we’re witnessing now. Tim has won awards as a fund manager for his defensive investing style, and…

The US stockmarket was halted just 30 seconds after opening yesterday. Couldn’t even survive a minute before eating a 7% loss. And that was after the Federal Reserve threw the sink at the problem, cutting interest rates to zero and…

The global stockmarket (MSCI World index, three-year chart) gets a front-row seat to a viewing of Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant “Honestly I think every national politician is going to get CV-19. Their lives are a series of meetings like this,…

Let me be frank. By the time you read this, I have no idea where the market will be for almost any asset. The volatility and speed with which they are moving as I write makes it almost impossible to…

It was only a matter of time. The Bank of England (BoE) took it upon itself to cut interest rates, following the Americans’ example of a double-cut, reducing the BoE base rate by 0.5% down to 0.25%. They’re meeting again…

The CNN Fear & Greed index, which gauges the mood in the US stockmarket from utterly terrified at 0, and scandalously greedy at 100, is currently displaying a reading of… four. Fear is in fashion. But so far, the American…

“This is the best goddam drill the army’s ever put on!” – US Navy sailor at Pearl Harbor after the explosions began The bull market is dead. Long live the bull market. That’s the FTSE 100 well into the bear’s…

So you’ve heard of Big Tobacco… Big Oil… Big Pharma… Big Tech… But what about Big Loo Roll? If anybody’s making a mint from the pandemic panic, it’s the toilet paper manufacturers. The Australians are eating each other over Andrex….

The most powerful bank CEO in the world had to have emergency heart surgery yesterday. I don’t blame him. I was going to write to you about something different today, but the level of sheer stress writhing within the financial…

“How did he die?”  “Your contact?” Mr Market?” *nods* “Not well.” – Casino Royale, opening scene (mildly edited) It’s “No Time to Die”… or to risk losing Chinese box office revenue. I may well be proven wrong on this, but…

Another day, another dollar CEO decides they don’t want to be responsible for what happens next. This time it’s the man at the helm of Harley-Davidson ($HOG) who’s joined the group of easy-rider executives cruising into the sunset. What happens…

Many years ago, a lady by the name of Leslie Shook was contacted by a stranger who told her that she’d saved his life. She wasn’t the creator of some new wonder drug. Nor had she recently donated an organ,…

“Artist’s impression” of the global stockmarket after we buy everything the Shoshan-Hubble Inter-market Transnational Easing Scheme of 2020 is implemented and a BoE-financed foreign acquisition boom begins The British Empire, with its pink map and territory equivalent to the surface…

He had killed six men during the past month—or was it a year?—he had forgotten. Time had become curiously telescoped lately. What did it matter, anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to…

Were you taught about this at school? Source: britishempire.co.uk This likely reveals a lot about my age, but I only discovered that maps of the British Empire were illustrated in pink relatively recently. For those as uninformed as myself, this…

Today’s letter comes from Eoin Treacy, who wanted to expand on a crucial flaw in the UK economy which he believes will drive. It all comes down to a simple metric so basic that’s it’s often overlooked – despite its…

In November 2008, in the churning black depths of the global credit crisis, Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided it was time for a trip. Leaving the winter weather and Downing Street behind, he charted a course for sunnier, sandier climes,…

What lethal goods were Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair all keen on selling to one particular client while they were in Downing Street? The three make for strange company. But their political differences – Wilson’s price fixing, Thatcher’s…

It’s that time again. Time for beer where beer is due – to a switched-on subscriber who can crack the investment theme that answers a riddle. But this time, we’re trying something slightly different. I’m not going to ask you…

Have you watched Treadstone on Amazon Prime by any chance? It’s a spin-off TV series from the Jason Bourne series of films. It’s not quite the same as watching Matt Damon pulverise legions of CIA/FSB foes without any equipment, but…

I’ve something special for you this fine Sunday. While you don’t normally receive my daily notes here at Capital & Conflict over the weekend, today we’re making an exception – we’ve received some valuable intelligence straight from “Corona-land” that’s worthy…

King of Thieves, released in 2018, is a film about the Hatton Garden heist that took place three years prior.   It had a lot going for it when it was released, with an all-star cast led by Michael Caine.   However,…

This chart may not look all that important… Source: Bloomberg  … but it is. Let me tell you why. That line represents the amount of gold held by certain investors.  It’s just hit an all-time high – an important story…

Cats and dogs litter the pavement. Their small fluffy bodies are contorted into unnatural positions, limp and lifeless. A rumour went around that pets might be carriers for the coronavirus, and their owners threw them from their apartment windows high…

There are always wars of opinion within the investment community – it’s a difference in views that makes a market after all. The more long term the issue is, the more likely you will find a binary split where two…

What I’m about to share with you is something subscribers to The Fleet Street Letter Monthly Alert asked us to make public. While I normally enjoy my job, what I’m about to link to in today’s note has most certainly…

Our ride on the “₿ullet Train” continues. This sure as hell isn’t a sleeper journey – if you doze off on this ride it might wipe you out… The bitcoin price over the last few days has been going at…

Between 3pm and 6.30pm on Monday, three and a half billion quid’s worth of BTC was transacted over the bitcoin blockchain. Nobody knows who it was or what it was for. And as every transaction verified by the bitcoin miners…

So the Chinese Communist Party ram £130 billion worth of stimulus into its financial system in a day… It makes it illegal for major shareholders in companies to sell any stock for six months… It straight up bans people from…

What connects a monument in the Czech Republic… David Bowie… A romance involving a pigeon… The ancestor of the “Marine Lizards” prowling the South China Sea… And an investment of several million dollars (in today’s terms) by JP Morgan in…

“What is it?” “It’s a pie machine, you idiot. Chickens go in, pies come out.” “Ooh, what kind of pies?” “Apple.” “My favourite!” “Chicken pies, you great lummox. Imagine: in less than a fortnight, every grocers’ in the county will…

What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple? Being eaten by it. And I’m not talking about the worm.   Bigger than BMW… Volkswagen… Daimler… Adidas… Lufthansa… Siemens… and 24 other titans of the German economy… $AAPL is now bigger…

As strange great swell of sea foam floods through the streets of a town in Catalonia… As warming weather leads to “exceptional breeding conditions” for locusts, and terrible swarms ravage East Africa, threatening famine… As cases of the coronavirus are…

Well that was quick! I was going to send through some additional doctored photographs, but several of you figured it out right away… Yesterday I asked you what historical event brought a motley crew including commodity traders, a US business…

It may be Monday… but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beer o’clock. Don’t worry, I’m not downing pints of Guinness at my desk this fine morning (though that does sound delightful). No, it’s time I put a bottle of my…

A truck chugs slowly through a street in Shanghai, spewing bulbous great clouds of disinfectant powder into tower upon tower of apartment buildings. It’s like the crop duster scene from North by Northwest. Except instead of taking place in a…

If you saved $10,000 (£7,600) a day… … every day… … since the pyramids in Egypt were constructed… … you would now have one fifth the average wealth… … of the world’s five wealthiest people. So says a report called…

A reader responds to our letter on Friday… Highly prophetic that you should write “guard your car” – someone has just had the catalytic converter off my mother’s car as it sat outside her house in West London. You guys…

What will a cocktail of market forces and climate change taste like, when they’re shaken together by a politico with a righteous twist of regulation? While this drink has yet to reach the global market, it is possible to get…

I hated my name when I was a teenager. I despised hearing “… What?” whenever I introduced myself, and didn’t like standing out during my formative years. In fact, I abhorred “Boaz” so much, that when I spent a year…

“Who do you think buys the stones I bring out? Dreamy American girls who want a storybook wedding and a big shiny rock just like the ones they see in the advertisements in your politically correct magazines. So, please, don’t…

Of the many brilliant Calvin and Hobbes comic strips penned by the great Bill Watterson, there is one which aptly describes our direction this week. Six-year-old Calvin feels that technology has separated humans from nature. And so while out walking…

Ayn Rand famously declared that “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality”. Escaping reality is big business, and likely always will be. Even during Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan cultural purges, people still risked going to…

How should one best prepare for long-term success? Get on the housing ladder as soon as you can scrape together a deposit? Should you invest in your appearance, to make better first impressions in your professional life? Maybe amplify a…

Yesterday, we speculated that the US is turning Russian. We weren’t referring to any of the “Trump is a Russian asset” hysteria of course – we were referring to how the energy market has changed the US’s temperament. When it…

“Buy when there’s blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own” goes the advice of Baron Rothschild, sharing an investment lesson he learned brutally during the chaotic tumult of the 18th century. … or at least, that’s…

Well here we are dear xXreaderXx, We’re one week into 2020. And what a year it’s turning out to be so far. The US embassy in Baghdad being stormed by militia… an IRGC general getting droned by the Americans in…

Welcome to this edition of Investing Lessons Learned the Hard Way. In this series, we ask each of our editors a simple question: What is the single most important piece of advice you could give to investors? Find out what…

Something a little unusual to go in today’s episode of our 20/20 Vision series. You see, normally it’s me interviewing our editors on video – but this time, the tables have been turned – and it’s me being grilled this…

Well here we are: another Christmas beckons. A lot of us at Southbank Investment Research will be heading back home next week to spend Christmas with friends and family – myself included. But don’t worry – we’ve lined up plenty…

Apple ($AAPL) has seen a 30% drop in sales, year-on-year, in 2019. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this might lead to a similar drop in its share price – it’s an entirely reasonable assumption. But I’m afraid that’s not…

Welcome to this edition of Investing Lessons Learned the Hard Way. In this series, we ask each of our editors a simple question: What is the single most important piece of advice you could give to investors? Find out what…

In today’s episode of our 20/20 Vision series, I bring you Tim Price, award-winning defensive investor and free market firebrand. In this interview, he lays out his investment philosophy, and answers your questions on investment strategy and how to prepare…

In today’s episode of our 20/20 Vision series, I’ve brought in our energy expert James Allen. An unashamed renewables bull, James has taken some of the negative press green energy took in 2019 on the chin, and lays out his…

Today’s edition of 20/20 Visions comes from our tech and trading expert Eoin Treacy. It’s an extraordinary mix of the good, the bad and the ugly. And Eoin also takes some time to answer a few reader questions, which you…

Today’s edition of 20/20 Vision comes from our former HSBC fund manager and Grenadier Guard, Charlie Morris. While the rest of us have ideologies and investment strategies to guide us, Charlie seems to rely on his experience and research. He’s…

In today’s episode of 20/20 Vision, I sit down with my good friend and colleague Nickolai Hubble to discuss what the coming year has in store for investors (we let our video production go nuts with the background). In our…

In today’s episode of our 20/20 Vision series, I’ve something special for you – a gentleman “old school” Southbank Investment Research readers in particular will remember and appreciate. The founder of our business, Dan Denning, was in town recently, and…

Today’s edition of 20/20 Vision comes from our trend following experts Robin Griffiths and Rashpal Sohan. They use a rules-based model to make investment decisions, taking the guesswork and human error out of the mix. Instead of a Q&A format,…

Today’s edition of 20/20 Vision comes from our tech and crypto expert Sam Volkering. I’ve known Sam for about seven years. I remember him talking about bitcoin before I knew it existed. He also anticipated what he calls the “crypto…

“Can you give me a good reason one person should have a BILLION dollars??” Some questions produce more questions than they do answers. That question comes from Peter Daou, a politico formerly in the employ of John Kerry and Hillary…

Nick O’Connor here. Usually I write to you about your money, the markets or world events. But not today. Today, I’m getting in touch simply to wish you a happy Christmas. However you’re spending the holiday, I hope you find…

Behold: the great waves of global investment flows are returning to Britain’s drying shores. Source: The Market Ear The removal of “Corbyn risk” and BoJo’s unchallenged control over the Brexit process now has cash pouring back into the country like…

The “Santa Claus rally”, a recurring trend where stocks tend to go up as the end of the year draws near, appears to be arriving on schedule, with Boris Johnson loading the sleigh. I freely admit it: what happened on…

“We have been striking for over a year, and basically nothing has happened. – Greta Thunberg The world’s most valuable listed company was born yesterday – right as its polar opposite made the front page of Time magazine.   I’ve…

Brexit continues to deliver sterling results – in the most unexpected of places. You may well be familiar with some of the strong economic gains the UK has reaped since 2016: low unemployment, wage growth, interest rates above zero and…

Yesterday I wrote to you about Xinjiang, and the incredible things that are happening there. Mass confinement in re-education camps for over one million Uighur Muslims. Children separated from their parents. Total surveillance infrastructure in place to monitor ever word…

I’m with Boaz. The US/China fallout will not end with a trade deal. I think the US/China conversation is only just beginning. I’m going to look at two things, today and tomorrow, which highlight why the trade war is merely…

As the end of the year draws closer, we’re preparing some festive content for Capital & Conflict readers which we hope to share with you over Christmas and Hogmanay. I’ll be hosting a short video series with our editors, to…

The next issue of The Fleet Street Letter Monthly Alert drops tomorrow. As I mentioned yesterday, myself, Nickolai Hubble and Charlie Morris will all be issuing our predictions as to what will happen next year. As we’re in a festive…

It’ll be a short note from me today. I’m currently writing this month’s editorial for The Fleet Street Letter Monthly Alert. Charlie Morris, Nickolai Hubble and I are all submitting three predictions for 2020, and how to profit if we’re…

The governments of the world are in debt to the tune of £46 trillion. When you include unfunded liabilities like state pensions and welfare, the figure is much higher. And with politicos unlikely to break the habit of spending other…

If you’ve been reading this letter for a while, you’ll likely know I often compare events occurring now to those that have occurred in the past. My Cold War II thesis is probably the biggest example of this, though in…

Promising plunder was as much a skill for a pirate raising a crew back in the early 1700s as it is today for a politician. However, while pirate captains had literal skin in the game, losing their captaincy and often…

There are some phrases you should always be wary of when you hear them. “I trust you to do the right thing…” “I’m not telling you what to do, but…”  “In the end it’s your decision, but…” “This is not…

Will Rogers, the old-school American actor and humourist, once advised: “Don’t gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” What…

Remember, we are actively competing with nations who openly cut interest rates so that now many are actually getting paid when they pay off their loan, known as negative interest. Who heard of such a thing? Give me some of…

At the beginning of last year, a member of Trump’s National Security Council leaked a deck of PowerPoint slides to the press which had been presented to senior Whitehouse officials. In order to counter the rise of China, the presentation…

Considering the amount of press garnered by China’s Silk Road project in recent years, it’s surprising how little attention was paid to the US’s announcement that it was launching a Silk Road of its own earlier this month. The Silk…

I read a lot of comic books when I was a kid. Many of them were published in the States, and so they contained ads targeted at young Americans. I enjoyed seeing what the ads were like over the pond…

It seems our investing opportunities are running out, dear XXC&CsubXX. We wanted in on the yacht industry – more QE = more wealth inequality, we argued – and keenly anticipated the initial public offering (IPO) of Italian yacht builder Ferretti….

Remember this thing? A screen that never cracked…   A battery life that lasted for days… Required no updates required. An actually finished tech product right off the shelf (perfection requires no improvement, as the Russians say of the Lada)……

In today’s letter, I’m going to tell you about that heavily relied upon (though rarely acknowledged or appreciated) force underpinning the global economy that I’ve been referring to over the last couple of days. More importantly, I’ll tell you why…

What do you make of this thing? Looks like a UFO to me: Source: Sinot Yacht Architecture & Design That’s a superyacht concept from a design firm called Sinot. 112m in length, with all the goodies one would expect inside,…

What do horse asses, a 1.5 mile tunnel in Staffordshire, the Space Shuttle, and the price of oil all have in common? I wrote yesterday how the peace of “the post-Cold War order” (as Tony Blair would put it) bred…

A few days after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Tony Blair sent a note to George W. Bush titled “The Fundamental Goal”. “This is the moment when you can define international priorities for the next generation – the…

Our investing strategy has been scuppered. It’s been holed beneath the waterline. A favoured stock we were watching has been scuttled in the harbour before it ever took to the high seas… A little over a month ago we were…

How suddenly it seems the nights draw in at this time of year. Like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, the days seem to get shorter gradually, and then all at once. A few years ago in an interview, the hedge…

I got a new hoodie recently: bright blue, with orange details and a massive “Gulf Oil” logo printed on the back and breast (I say “I” got it: my girlfriend is credited with the procurement). As we’ve detailed in previous…

My tip for future investments. Funeral directors. Add in a few extras such as alternatives to burying or burning and you are onto a winner. For traditionalists, investment in land suitable for cemeteries. For those of the burning kind, super…

November already, huh? It feels like this year has flown by even faster than the last. With the nights drawing in and the Christmas trees nearly upon us, it’ll soon be time to reflect on the past year. How will…

It’s a bit like watching the national debt go up. Except the other way around. Source: nbim.no That’s the homepage for Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, the trillion-dollar beast of an investment portfolio born of the country’s oil revenues. While the…

I’ve never been to California, but I’m reliably informed that those who hail from the state are not known for their subtlety. With that in mind, it’s fitting that when Mark Zuckerberg showed up before Congress to testify on his…

It‘ll be a short note from me today. I’m currently working with Charlie Morris over at The Fleet Street Letter on a new project: a comprehensive guide to valuing Bitcoin, for speculative or long term investing purposes. The Bitcoin market…

Have thieves snuck under your car, ripped out its catalytic converter and harvested its innards yet? No? Well if I were you I’d be getting very protective of that grimy box under the chassis… for the precious metal within it…

“We rebuilt China over the past 25 years… But those days are over… No longer will America’s leaders hope that economic engagement alone will transform Communist China’s authoritarian state into a free and open society that respects private property, the…

Sometimes, you have to laugh. I know I did. Source: DW The news that the German defence minister suggested sending the emaciated German military into Syria, to provide the illusion that the EU can project power abroad, was quite something….

Or at least, that’s how nuclear Armageddon would have looked like in the “olden days”… That was the playbook for the last Cold War, produced by the Nuclear Threat Initiative over in the US, giving an illustration of just how…

Thursday could be one for the history books. I won’t beat around the bush. Let me tell you why I think an event that day is worthy of your attention, be you an investor or an observer with an interest…

In the wealthier countries around the Persian Gulf, gold can be eaten in all manner of ways. Injected into soups, dusted over fries, flaked on pizza, frosted on muffins… some hotels have to buy kilos of gold leaf every year…

I’d been meaning to tell you about this for a while, but hadn’t got around to it. I’ve been working on a new project here at Southbank Investment Research with Nickolai Hubble. It’s called the Daily Blitz. It’s not a…

On 24 January this year, an individual known by the online handle “Grubles” was woken early in the morning to the sound of thunder and rain outside. Half asleep, they rushed to make sure a small computer plugged into a…

As the Greek government is paid to borrow money, eight years after being charged credit card rates… As the Federal Reserve starts printing $60 billion a month, but refuses to call it quantitative easing… And while the Dutch central bank…

“You Americans don’t smoke anymore. You live long, dull, uninteresting lives.”  – Black Hawk Down A Blackhawk helicopter over Iraq. Source: WikiCommons It’s strange to think that once January comes around, all the kids born in this country when Black…

It’s a rare occasion in the office when several of our editors are around at once, and I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Eoin Treacy and Sam Volkering, who spend their working lives analysing the future of…

“That’s funny. That plane’s dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” – North by Northwest (1959) Source: WikiCommons If Hollywood ever churns out a modern-day reboot of North by Northwest, it’ll be a drone that hares after the protagonist in…

In the previous stages in the Atlas Mountains, I could always see the tire tracks of my competitors in the dirt in front of me. But right now, in the golden Sahara sand, I could not find any tire tracks….

I hope you enjoyed Kit Winder’s note yesterday. I was working on the latest issue of Zero Hour Alert last week, and I’m just getting caught up now. It was worth it though – that issue is a winner. Using…

This week I finished watching season one of Top Boy, the Channel 4 and now Netflix drama. It’s only four episodes, but packs a hefty punch. One of its most powerful images is of a couple of the main characters…

When Sotheby’s got bought out earlier in the year I was disappointed, as its shares were one of the few ways the everyman could receive a dividend from the central banks. As I wrote in QE for the auctioneer (16…

Well now it’s official. The People’s Republic of China has made it past the Soviet Union. The USSR died at 69. The PRC has made it to 70. But with the US now raising its shotgun, for how much longer…

For the last couple of weeks, Nickolai Hubble has been furtively sneaking into the studio, not telling anybody what he’s in there for. Such behaviour is in some regards, to be expected; Nickolai has a reputation for being the office’s…

Making connections and recognising patterns where none actually exist is a risk all investors face. As humans, we’re hard-wired to do it. After all, our ancestors who didn’t make connections – like linking the sound of leaves rustling to the…

Over the last couple of days, the UK government has been doing something it never has before: selling bitcoin. It’s not doing it to bring about greater BTC adoption of course. Nor is this an attempt to suppress its price….

Well thar she blows again! A whale has surfaced once more in the bitcoin market – and this time, it’s caused even more of a stir. Though it’s disturbed the water, I’m not so worried; over the long term the…

Have you ever heard of Camel City? Its official name is Winston-Salem. It’s over the pond in North Carolina, and earned its nickname from being the base of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company – creator of Camel cigarettes. Nearly…

Now we are ready to sail for the horn Weigh, hey, roll and go Our boots and our clothes boys are all in the pawn To be rollicking randy dandy-o… Sea shanties, like financial data, can be quite hard to…

A friend recently recommended me a book. A must-read to understand the direction of economic sentiment in the US, apparently. It’s called The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing by Frances Coppola. She is not the director of Apocalypse Now, by…

Yesterday I spent the night in a hotel with my wife and son. The reason was that we had an early appointment at the Australian High Commission in the Strand and figured we’d ‘make a day of it’. Our appointment…

I first visited New York City a couple of years ago. I was there to attend my brother’s wedding, but it was scheduled close to my birthday, so I took a few extra days off to see more of what…

The capital of Cuba likely isn’t the city that springs to mind when you think of a bustling stock exchange. But on the dusty streets of Old Havana, there’s still one standing there. The Lonja del Comercio building in Old…

“Eureka!” cries Archimedes, rising from his bathtub. Sculpture of Archimedes outside Manchester University. Source: flickr He’d just discovered how displacement works. That the volume of water displaced when he entered the bath must be equal to the volume of his…

There’s something happening here. What it is, ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there, Telling me I got to beware. I think it’s time we stop, Children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down… –…

“I reached pension age and then I ran out of money. So it occurred to me – perhaps I could live for free if I lived in jail. So I took a bicycle and rode it to the police station…

“Investing in today’s surreal world calls for the experienced eye of the Profit Hunter.” So read an ad for Artemis Investment Management on the side of a black cab. I noticed it as I was heading back into work after…

One cold December night in 1989, a man drove a lorry into Wall Street. He was there to commit a crime he’d spent two years preparing for – ever since the stockmarket crash of Black Monday in 1987. As he…

A few weeks back in this letter (Fear is in fashion –19 August), we declared that with the financial commentariat becoming so bearish, that it was high time we got a melt-up. However, if a global recession accompanied by a…