Daily Snapshot

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is close to my heart having attended many shows and street performances throughout my childhood. The best joke this year went to a pasta pun and If I’m honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan. My pick of the shortlist – “My attempts to combine nitrous oxide and Oxo cubes made me a laughing stock.” And my second pick would be “I can’t even be bothered to be apathetic these days” and can’t help but feel the August lull has caused a bit of this in the markets.

Now we don’t like assumptions in the markets but I am going to go out on a limb and predict that no one reading the Snapshot received their A Level results today. I am however sure there are many amongst you that have connections who did. From all at Redburn we hope they achieved the grades they were hoping for and there are celebrations on the horizon. Jeremy Clarkson out with his like-clockwork yearly ‘do not worry’ post this time from quite a fancy boat it seems.

No one warned us about the cost of baby clothing. It’s even more of a drain when your daughter inherits her father’s growth characteristics and we have to upsize her clothes on what feels like a weekly basis. Luckily we’ve found a Farah Kids at the top of our road, and the Scotsman in me feels particularly happy every time we dip in and pick up baby clothes for the right price whilst also ticking the “environmentally friendly” and “charity” boxes.

The rain is finally here – rejoice, unless you were one of the many that reported a strange smell. If you’re off to Lords tomorrow for the Cricket and don’t see a single over of play there is still a chance  you’ll have a more interesting day than looking at the European equity markets. That may be a bit harsh, we’re still in peak summer season and there are still a lot of moving parts but overall engagement seems to be trending towards YTD lows.

A real life reminder of the dangers of crowded trades happened to me this weekend. I am clearly getting far too old and Dad life is ageing me well beyond my young years as I found myself leaving the thoroughly enjoyable and frankly excellent Coldplay concert half way through the encore. Maybe it was the introduction of Craig David that persuaded me but avoiding the masses I managed to make my way back for the fairly sensible time of 11:30pm but quite smugly woke to a message from my friends that they hadn’t got home till 3am.

You really know when supply chains are disrupted when the poor people of Dijon can’t get their hands on any mustard. Yes that’s right, the French consume an estimated 1kg of mustard per person each year and the large majority of that is Dijon unsurprisingly. Now rules state that to be classified as Dijon it must be made from brown or black seeds – problem is that these are largely imported from Canada, some 80% of the 35k tonnes in fact. But Canada’s harvest was about half that last year which has led to empty shelfs, rationing to one jar per customer when they do get supply and cries of ‘sacré bleu’ from our Paris office.

Well it’s time to eat humble pie as my prediction for higher U.S. inflation than expected missed the dart board all together. But it’s a good tasting humble pie as the softer data is a good thing for Equities on the whole and sets the path for the moves we saw in July to keep going – a bit of respite after the rotation on rotation we’ve become accustomed to.

The occasional guest writer of the Snapshot Andy Willson shared with us this morning that his son and friends were off on their summer holiday. Months of planning and organising but the crucial bit of kit was picked up today –  The head to toe Greggs ‘collaboration’ with Primark outfit to travel in. We’re talking socks, shorts, tees, vests, crocs, sliders and jumpers.

There is always a time in life where one knows one’s place. Whether it’s Ronaldo warming the bench and running the waters, to BoJo finally stepping down…this week the turn of the humble Sales-Trader. This week the Sales-Trading team and all at Redburn are working remotely in order for our office to be re-vamped and re-jigged as we continue our expansion. In the re-jig, execution finds itself book-ended by the two gents bathrooms and although this may have been completely coincidental, a few questions have been asked!

Today’s episode of ‘Has the world gone mad?’ features AMTD Digital (HKD US), a software and financial services company based in HK that listed in New York just 3 weeks ago. This little known company was at one point this week the third biggest financial company in the world leaving the financial juggernauts Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Redburn trailing.