SGM-FX insights

Judging by appearances   Not necessarily the right approach: look at penguins when they are on land (which is after all where we see them) whether it be Yellow eyed(New Zealand), Galapagos(Galapagos), Humboldt(Peru) or Fairy(Australia); all these species have adapted to different climates and environments which is quite something given that they are built like […]

Who are you?   0.7% in one day is a pretty decent rally for the Pound. Sterling currently sits at 2 week highs against the US Dollar and yesterday GBP reached 2020 highs against the Euro. But what brought us here might surprise you: Confederation of British Industry survey data! This piece of soft data […]

History and Hong Kong   News that China is considering the nomination of Shenzhen as a business centre is an unequivocal message to Hong Kong: continuing civil disturbance will be punished. Shenzhen is already a major city with a population of 12.5 million located on the east bank of the Pearl River Estuary on the […]

How Low Can Ya Go?!   Despite its relative adolescence on the global stage the Euro is a big player. Largely due to its incompleteness it hasn’t achieved the status of a reserve currency and doesn’t play a huge role as an underwriter of trade in goods and services outside of its own member states […]

There’s no business like shoe business   Reassuring to learn that even the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett occasionally( very occasionally) gets it wrong. Back in 1993: he paid $433 million for a shoe company named Dexter Shoes. Quickly he realised that he had bought a dud as its shoe product was being undercut by […]

Fishermens’ Friends   In Jiangsu Province, Eastern China there is a coastline 620Km long which faces Japan and South Korea with Taiwan 500 kms to the south. There is also a large US presence in that region. All those countries including China keep a close watch on each other, and the chosen way to do […]

Signed, sealed, not delivered   A trade deal is done between the US and China: call the IMF to tell them to change global growth forecasts; let emerging market currencies rally at the expense of overvalued safe-havens! Sadly not.   Whilst Trump didn’t give markets any last minute surprises by refusing to sign the document […]

Global Bank Shares   Looking at the net movement over the past 10 years there is a mixed picture: Broadly the USA has done best; Bank of America +1066%; JP Morgan +756%; Wells Fargo +505%. Europeans the worst Deutsche -595, Intesa -11% and Unicredit -86%. But having said that, ING +332%, KBC +742% and Skan […]

Cheaper Rates – Cheaper Sterling   At December’s monetary policy decision the Bank of England chose to hold interest rates steady at 0.75%. But the decision was not without dissent and division within the authority’s core, the Monetary Policy Committee. At this meeting two members, Haskell and Saunders echoed their previous dovish warnings that borrowing […]

Where does GBP go in 2020?   According to a poll of 65 FX Strategists the answer is that it will appreciate 3% versus the USD. Having spent a lifetime in currency markets, I have to tell you that this is going to be wrong. The 3% number is the average of what those FX […]

Oil   Prices receded on the back of the easing of tensions in the Gulf with WTI dipping just below $60 which represents a drop of 6% since the previous Friday when the U.S. drone strike killed  General Solaimani. As trailed earlier in the week, despite there remaining tensions on the back of that, there […]

Fun while it lasted   The flight to safety and risk-off fire sale sparked by the events following the assassination order of Iranian General Soleimani seem to have been erased by markets as we open in Europe this morning. Cable (GBPUSD) trades almost exactly in line with where it did this time last week despite […]