Daily Snapshot

Tonight is pretty much as close as it gets to Christmas eve for British and French rugby fans as the Six Nations kicks of tomorrow in Paris. As a Scotland supporter it also usually marks the high point of the Six Nations, level on points with our rivals and all to play for over the next 7 weeks. Optimism is sky high and as we know the famous saying goes…. ‘It’s the hope that kills you!’ As I touched on yesterday there is certainly more hope around that Europe could be in for a good year and def…

“We have begun to turn things around” ….That could have been plenty of people on a day like today. Was it ASML’s Christophe Fouquet after their superb orders beat or was it Bernard Arnaud on the call post their disappointing numbers? Well, it was neither actually and in fact Rachel Reeves who was delivering a well-reported speech today on levers of growth the UK has to pull. A 3rd runway at Heathrow, development of the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor to create UK’s Silicon Valley and redevelopment of…

Time is a healer, so the saying goes, and to say that yesterday’s tech sell-off brought plenty of pain would be an understatement given that the Nasdaq dropped 3%, the SOX Semis index fell -9% (its largest drop since March 2020), and Nvidia wiped $589bn from its market cap. Frightening numbers for sure but once the dust had settled overnight we did walk into a calmer setting this morning as Siemens Energy, one of the European names caught most in the cross-fire, settled some nerves with a pre-r…

Following a weekend of sporadic updates from my siblings on the havoc wreaked by Storm Éowyn on the West of Ireland over the past 72 hours, I started the week in good spirits given that London emerged unscathed from any hurricane-force winds. However, a different type of chaos was waiting for us at the desk this morning following the disruptive emergence of DeepSeek’s R1 model. DeepSeek is a Chinese chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and their R1 model which was built in just two months fo…

We’ve had plenty of footage from the World Economic Forum in Davos over the past few days but the highlight has to have been today’s interview with Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, who became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 24 and was donning a considerably more casual look than some of the other interviewees sat before him! A sign of the times for sure and the fact that that I’ve singled this out as a notable moment tells you all you need to know about the level of exc…

It was very much a risk on day, fuelled by declining yields, a somewhat softer stance from Trump (so far), AI Infrastructure investment continuing and lifting all relevant (and some less relevant) ships and solid corporate updates from a wide range of sectors. That drove Equity markets to new highs with the Stoxx 600 hitting an all time (intraday) high in the process whilst the Euro Stoxx 50 made a 24yr high and the DAX made an all-time high! We also started to see some fairly consistent demand…

The classic Roast Chicken with a bit of a jazz up was on the cards this weekend and I cannot recommend it enough. First seen on Sunday Brunch a few weeks ago this recipe is simple, fairly healthy and all done in one pot – it’s what I call a January winner. January winners have been quite hard to find so far, it’s been an interesting if not spectacular month so far but now Martin Luther King Jnr day is out the way, Trump is in the White House, January could really get going….(well that’s the pla…

“Just popping outside to warm-up” was heard at the desk this morning and did make me laugh given that the external temperature read +3°C at the time but it turned out that an AC malfunction to start the week was actually a bit of a blessing in disguise as a cooler office was needed to keep us awake throughout today’s session which was a bit of a snoozefest given that US bond and equity markets were shut for MLK day alongside the majority of investors waiting for Trump to be sworn-in as US presi…

The closest I’ve been to being what they would call a ‘Luxury Player’ is snaffling up some Lurpak and a bottle of Filippo Berio in these inflationary times! But in circles higher, and then higher again the focus has been on if and when the demand for Luxury goods will come back, especially for European investors with such well known names as LVMH, Kering, Hermes and Richemont a staple in the Equity complex here. The latter today was the standout for Europe as a giant beat in the Americas and Eu…

With my new years resolutions mostly broken in week one (anyone else the same?) I’ve been on the look out for a new one (inevitably to break in the next week) and have settled on a chapter of a book per night! So far so good and just finished another Ben Macintyre thriller and he’s really the only author that gets me turning the page. With non-fiction I find I learn a bit too along the way which is crucial in all aspects of life. Another thing I’ve learnt along the way is that the first day of…