Member Info for skier1

Cannot believe anyone takes the Bank of England seriously anymore. It was wildly wrong on Brexit in 2016, wildly wrong on inflation in 2021, and now it's wildly wrong on the 2023 "recession". The BoE just stumbles endlessly from one calamity to another. It's a disaster.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/markets/article-11684857/Bank-England-U-turn-dire-recession-forecasts.html

Jeremy Clarkson, in the Sunday Times this weekend, is arguing for a reverse-pension.

Get 10 years of free money in your peak 20s. Spend it on booze, not soup.

0-20yo = education
20-30yo = pension party
30-100yo = work until you drop dead

Yup, US GDP growing faster than expected, at 2.9% YoY. US govt does a great job of talking up their economy.

Tesla numbers also good.

Nasdaq looks set to open up +1% today.

Where London leads today, the rest of the UK follows tomorrow... Paying tolls to enter or exit your own home town, stricter freedom restrictions on car movement... It's all coming down the pipeline for the rest of the country... Caura is in a high-growth market.

It will be 0.50%. The BoE governor is desperate to talk and push the UK down into recession, for his "told you so" Brexit moment.

Day trading in UK shares is largely a thing of the past. The London market just doesn't have enough liquidity anymore.

LTI
Looks like SMIF are skimming off a hefty 1.15% fee, there is a chunky NAV premium, a chunky spread to buy-sell, invests in illiquid junior CCDSs that put creditors at the back of the queue if things go belly-up, may perhaps use risky leveraged derivatives, and the share price has plunged -25% in 9 years. Where's the good news?

..."the wait may be considerable"...

Lol.

CGNR started circa 1995.
Shares have collapsed -99.9% since 2000.
The CEO in 2023 is knocking on 90yo and pulling in a cool quarter-million a year.

First Direct pays 7% per year and allows £300 a month to be filtered in. The annualized ratio of 3.5% will nudge 5% if the £3600 allowance is filtered in monthly from a 3-4% account elsewhere.

Skipton, for sure, almost never shows up in the list of top savings accounts. The poster could almost certainly make even more money by shopping around, at (say) First Direct, Barclays, Vanquis, etc. Need to move fast, tho -- rates are plunging.

Skipton BS savings rates are rubbish. Pretty sure you could earn another 50-100% more relative interest by shopping around even more. For example, First Direct pays 7%, while Skipton is around 2-4%.

The amount of money wasted in the UK by not chasing the best savings rate is quite staggering. There is around £400b stuffed in accounts paying less than 0.25% interest. Shifting to a common 4-5% account would generate an extra £15b of free cash every year. Enough to give every single child in the country a free £1,000.

PSN has already rallied +25% in the past 3 months. With big stamp tax cuts and a mortgage war, this has scope for more upside.

Leaving ketchup out in the open at Spoons saves on fridge-and-fetch costs.

What did you have to eat?

As predicted, UK mortgage rates are now falling.
Nationwide, Halifax and others may be on the brink of a fresh mortgage war for spring 2023.
BoE also says inflation will fall sharply in the coming months.
The UK housing outlook is improving rapidly.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-11654493/Nationwide-Halifax-cut-mortgage-rates-0-2.html

UK retail sales revenue grew +5% YoY in Q4 2022 and +4% YoY in Dec 2022.

Yet another self-loathing doom-loop of misery from the ONS "marketing" dept.

There's no question that lab-grown meat, protein, fish and dairy is the future. The question is whether that future lies in the UK. Having watched the (miserable) BBC "debate" today, I'm not sure that it is. ANIC finds itself in an anti-lab-food culture. That doesn't bode well for attracting investors.

Specialist investment funds with a weak domestic industry don't tend to flourish. They don't form a scalable cluster of skills. They struggle to find expert staff. For example, tech funds gravitate to tech hotspots, like the US. Mining shares are gravitating to mining hotspots, like Australia.

If the investment culture remains so hostile for lab meat in the UK, local and global investors will look elsewhere at less-risky hubs, such as the US or Singapore.

Most mortgages work on swap rates, not interest rates.

Swap rates are peaking and falling.

Politics Live on BBC2 at lunch today had a "debate" about the future of UK lab-grown meat. Probably on iPlayer somewhere.

A researcher spoke for ~1min in favour of lab meat. This was followed by ~5mins of sneering hostility against lab meat from the interviewer and panel. They even roped in a shouty farmer to put the boot in. The researcher was vastly outnumbered in the "debate", roughly 80% against and 20% for. A classic BBC ambush.

The researcher noted it can take ~3 years to get licensed approval from the govt for lab meat.

Overall, it was a pretty depressing outlook. Poorly argued belligerence and glacial bureaucracy. It's hard to see the UK building a credible lab-meat industry at this point. The headwinds look bad. Not good news for ANIC.

The big stamp-duty (tax) cut until 2025 is -- today -- now officially passed.

The UK has seen a huge wave of housing-friendly trends in the past few months.

Mortgage rates falling.
Inflation peaking.
Second-lowest G7 debt.
Highest G7 GDP growth.
GDP jumped in Oct.
UK named as world's 3rd biggest tech industry in 2022 (after US and China).
UK named as world's 2nd most attractive investment destination in 2023 (after US).
Everyone has a job.
Wages soaring.
Housing-friendly budget.
Stamp duty (tax) cut.
UK house prices jumped +10% YoY in Nov 2022.

Good trends for PSN.

It's important to look at facts, and not get swept up in socialist hysteria and propaganda.

UK house prices today are not expensive by international standards. For example, NZ, Israel, many others, have far far higher prices.

Real UK house prices today are *lower* than they were in 2007.

UK mortgage payments as a % of disposable income (takehome pay) have almost *halved* in the past 30 years.

UK housing is not really "expensive" at all. There remains plenty of room for upside UK price growth in the next decade.