Daily Snapshot

The penny finally dropped today. Here I was focussing on shares and I now realize that all that everyone else has been […]

Another day of bump’n grind here. The emphasis being less on bump and more on grind really. Volumes painfully low again. This time last year the Stoxx 600 fell 3.24% on 3.5bn shares traded. Today we gained 0.45% on approx 1.5bn shares traded. A good day for a good lunch then (if you could find a table and someone to go with) and you wouldn’t have missed much in the afternoon but there were a couple of bits to focus on that happened earlier in the day.

There’s a tipping point where the beard that I’ve occasionally sported over lockdown slips from receiving a compliment or two and instead starts to make me look alarmingly like Jeremy Corbyn. I fear I’m about three days past that tipping point so this won’t be the longest Snapshot ever as I simply MUST go and find a barbers that doesn’t have ten people queueing outside it.

Sometimes it pays to be brave. I’d argue that anyone who has bought Bitcoin is brave. Others have a different word for it but for now it’s the people who put their money on the line and believed in a new asset class who are laughing. Bitcoin breaking out above the previous All Time Highs to gain another 5% and sit at $63,000 last. I’d say it was brave of our economists to argue in mid-January “The technology underpinning these new assets is opening up a new world of decentralised value exchange which could upend traditional financial and economic structures, offering far more than a gold-like inflation or money printing hedge”.

I won’t say this often but today is not the day to be sat reading the Snapshot. Today is the day to log off and head out. Go to the pub, to your local restaurant, to an independent retailer, to get your hair cut and coiffed. This is a day to support all those who’ve spent the weekend scrubbing floors and polishing windows and putting out their hanging baskets humming with anticipation after months of waiting patiently.

So I had a bit of a conundrum today. What April Fools would be a good one for the Snapshot. Redburn overtakes Goldman Sachs by market cap? Senior Partner Jeremy Evans quits to focus on his upcoming appearance in the Masked Singer Season 6? I’d maintained my Fast800 diet? None of those believable and after I made my children burst into tears with a (brilliantly executed) announcement that the school had been in touch to tell us they were going to catch up for lost Covid hours by implementing extra lessons on Saturdays through the summer I decided it might be best just to leave the whole thing alone.

So there we go folks, Q1 done and dusted and if we zoom out from what has been a pretty dull week I’d say we can say it was a good ‘un. The Stoxx 600 finishing the quarter up 7.66%. That compares to Q1 2020 which was down -23% and the SXXP showing a 34% gain since this time last year. After that racing start to the year the FTSE ends the quarter up 3.92% and up 18% from a year ago.

Scorchio in the UK and the markets running a little hotter too today. Temperatures hitting 24.2 degrees today in central London for the hottest March day in 53 years. Most people’s conversation seemingly focussed on the fact that it won’t last and with a bit of window dressing possibly going on before tomorrow’s quarter coming to an end you do wonder if the same couldn’t be said for markets.

There’s a moment in the Hangover where they finally piece together how it is that they got to the point where the movie starts (in a trashed Vegas hotel room with a baby in the wardrobe, a tiger in the bedroom, one guy missing a tooth and the groom nowhere to be found). Financial markets in a similar state of chaos today (The Hwangover?) as Archegos Capital, a NY based firm that manages the private wealth of the hedge fund manager Bill Hwang, was reported to be at the centre of a massive margin call with c$20bn of stock sold to the market late on Friday and in Asia overnight. Massive leverage with absolutely no hedge once again a good idea until it isn’t.

So it’s not the Oscars until 21st April but we already have the winner of Best Original Score in a Drama. That prize undoubtedly going to the Suez Canal Authority on Youtube for their hauntingly suspenseful music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk2WSGJ_rKw). Still no movement and the day’s major attempt to refloat the Ever Given ending in failure and prompting the New York Post to start murmurs of a global toilet roll crisis. Surely not another one? At least that gave us all some memes to look at as we again finished a dull week with a whimper.