Financial Analyst, former management consultant, equity research analyst Bruce Packard started his career at Credit Suisse followed by various banks and stockbroking firms before quitting The City to work in financial PR, Litigation finance and finally financial education. In 2008 he predicted the nationalisation of the UK banking industry.
I’m a self-invested, low frequency, buy and hold investor focused on quality. As well as writing for ShareScope I like to capture my financial analysis and non-conformist thoughts on my own blog brucepackard.com. I also used to own a craft beer bar in Berlin and for fun play beach volleyball (unlikely to turn professional though).
At midnight, on 1st January this year, the K.L.F. released their back catalogue of music (hits such as 3AM Eternal, Justified and Ancient, Last Train to Trancentral) on Spotify and uploaded their old videos to YouTube. This was their first activity as a band since 1992, when they announced they were leaving the music industry
Last week Bloomberg reported that junk bond yields in the US fell below 4% the lowest level ever recorded and down from 11.5% peak yield in March last year. This is the opposite direction to the yield on the “risk free rate” of US 10y bond (hitting 1.18% last week) which has been steadily rising
Moonpig IPO’ed last week at 350p, valuing the company at £1.2bn, and the shares rose +24% to 430p the following day. Meanwhile the FT reported that Elon Musk is expecting SpaceX to be valued at $60bn in a funding round later this month. Virgin Galactic is up +163% in the last 3 months. Valuations are
Some of the speculative exuberance has spilled over the punch bowl at the cryptocurrency party into a number of glass half empty equities. GameStonk, err I mean GameStop, rose from below $20 a share earlier this month to over $500 per share, as retail traders from the Reddit thread “Wall Street Bets” piled in to
I was initially unimpressed by the UK’s mass vaccination rollout. However it is important to keep updating your beliefs when data is better than you had been expecting and not miss the inflection point. From below 150K per week in December, we now have almost 5m vaccinated. My mistake was to extrapolate in a linear
In the early days of a new Democrat presidency, the President’s campaign manager observed that: “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or a 0.400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate anybody.” The
The FTSE 100 started the year strongly +6% during the week to 6857. Both the S&P 500 +1.3% to 3804 Nasdaq +1.4% to 13068 were more subdued, though largely unaffected by events in Washington. 10 years ago when I was in Tbilisi, I remember a US dignitary explaining to the Georgians that the point of
“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words… wait and hope.” – The Count of Monte Cristo The FTSE 100 finished the year at 6460, down 14% from 7585 this time last year. There were some odd movements in share
The FTSE 100 closed around 6,487 to 24 December down -15% from the start of the year. From a peak of 7670 in mid-January the index fell by -35% to a low of 4998 at the end of March before recovering +30%. A reminder of the importance of pound cost averaging, because a -30% drop,
The FTSE stayed level around 6580, while Nasdaq hit a new high of 12752. Bitcoin rose through $20,000 for the first time. I have a dim memory of a party in South London, around 2006-2007, when someone began trying to convince me that everyone could create their own electronic currency. After all, he said, money
After a strong November and start of December the FTSE 100 was largely unchanged this week at 6566. More broadly, the signs of a cyclical recovery are evident: oil price rose through $50 a barrel and copper and other industrial commodities have also been strong. Airbnb IPO’ed with the shares closing on their first day
The best performing FTSE 100 stock last week was Rolls Royce, up 19%. The worst was Unilever down 6.5%, which suggests expectations of a vaccine are inoculating investors against risk. On Nasdaq, the vaccine stock Moderna, was the best performing up 44% in the last 5 days, while Zoom was the second worst performing down