Perspectives
Avoiding the noise
May, 2024
How should we quantify risk when investing; is it the risk of losing money? Or, maybe the risk of not achieving our financial goals? Or the risk of preserving our buying power over the longer term in the case of a pension? The reality is that risk exists only in the future and it is […]
Does Military Spending Matter for Long-Run Growth?
May, 2024
The primary role of the state is widely regarded to be the “protection of its citizens” either from themselves (internal order) or military defence (external aggression). History suggests and contemporary events affirm that the “better angels of our nature,” are too often subverted by the demons lurking inside. Nonetheless, for a moment in 1989, […]
UK Household Wealth
May, 2024
How wealthy you feel at any point in time is affected by many factors. Despite being wealthier than they were 20 years ago, many people still feel financially poorer today. This discrepancy between actual wealth and perceived financial well-being can be attributed to various psychological and societal factors. Firstly, the concept of relative deprivation is […]
Population, Migration and Growth
May, 2024
In 2021, the latest period for which figures[1] are available, the UK registered 694,695 live births. In the same period, 666,629 deaths were registered generating a net domestic increase in the population of the UK of 28,026 new people. In common with much of the developed world, and increasingly the developing world, the birth rate […]
It’s not just about China and India
April, 2024
Tacit strategies have a higher-than-average exposure to Asian companies as our analysis highlights that the valuations of many Asian businesses are significantly below their longer-term averages and therefore provide significant upside potential over the coming few years. A second point for holding these investments is that the companies provide higher dividends than those available in […]
“Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum” “Let him who desires peace, prepare for war”
April, 2024
According to data from the Project Mars International Conflict Data program cited in “Our World in Data,” since 1800, 37 million soldiers have died in battle with 75% of that total accounted for by the two world wars: 1914-18, 1939-45. It is perhaps hard to believe in the current geopolitical circumstances that the world has […]
Why not the UK?
April, 2024
The UK stock market has been stuck at these levels for what feels like forever. The chart below shows how the UK stock market has broadly tracked sideways in price terms (excluding dividends) since the turn of the century. On all conventional and comparative historic measures it appears cheap: so why does it not go […]
Cleared for landing
April, 2024
It is something of an obsession in professional investment circles to speculate on ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ landings, but what does it mean? Talk of landings comes after a disruption in the economic cycle. Economists and investors fret over whether the cycle can return to balance without passing through a process of purging. The global economy […]
Damn Lies and Statistics
March, 2024
That eminent thinker Homer J Simpson once noted that, “you can prove anything with statistics, 14% of all people know that!” Disraeli placed statistics below “lies and damn lies” in his hierarchy of mendacity whilst Darell Huff, back in the 1950s, wrote the canonical introduction for students, notably entitling it, “How to Lie with Statistics.” […]
Are things really so different?
March, 2024
Every generation believes that they have it worse than their predecessors. This is a human trait which focuses on the problems with the here and now, rather than comparing today’s issues with the issues of the past for context. Crudely put, is living in a house with two plus bathrooms today really worse than having […]