SGM-FX insights

Bulgaria On Thursday last week Bulgaria formally adopted the Euro and for 6 months both EUR and the Lev will be legal tender in Bulgaria. In practice, Bulgaria already moved to the EUR in January 2025 when last week’s adoption was approved. Bulgaria, a country with 6.8 million people, is one of the EU’s poorest […]

Copper and FOMO Sometimes known as Dr Copper since the price of Copper reflects the health or otherwise of the global economy, a 38% increase in 2025 would normally be big news. But because that rise has been overshadowed when compared to the rises in Gold and Silver of 73% and 140% respectively, there is […]

Chinese Yuan Leaving aside the Frankincense and Myrrh, it is the relationship between the prices of Gold and Silver that are worth a further look at this point. In the past month, the ratio between 2026 could be the year that the Chinese Yuan becomes a world funding currency because of the ever-onward march of […]

Previous Metals Leaving aside the Frankincense and Myrrh, it is the relationship between the prices of Gold and Silver that are worth a further look at this point. In the past month, the ratio between Gold and Silver has moved from 80:1 to 64:1 or a 20% move. Some precious metal traders are claiming that […]

USA and the UK: 2 different tales Last week hedge fund tyro and super successful business builder Ken Griffin of Citadel gave a powerful interview on Bloomberg TV. One of his well-made points was that Europe needs to become more businesslike and encourage and applaud business. We took a look at the Top 50 World Companies: […]

European Job Vacancies Here’s a chart which made us sit up and reflect on how things differ across the larger European economies. Looking at job vacancies in 2020 at the time of the pandemic versus today, France and Germany have approximately 15% more jobs on offer whereas Spain has 53% more and Italy a stonking […]

Bank of England As expected, the Monetary Policy Committee delivered a 25bp rate cut to 3.75% yesterday lunchtime. This was what is being described as a hawkish cut which means that further reductions are less predictable in a mixed economic environment which has the curate’s egg attributes of rising unemployment and falling inflation. The Committee […]

Eurozone Growth Those productive Germans have for the second month been less productive it turns out in December which was a surprise to the pointy heads deputed to monitor EU stats. The story is as follows: the German services sector remains relatively resilient but manufacturing output has declined. At present the French economy is doing the […]

UK Economy The question is whether the contraction of 0.1% in the UK economy announced on Friday between August and October was as a result of the Chancellor’s economic strategy or due to her Hokey Cokey Budget that resulted in UK plc sitting on its hands for 3 months in the run up to November […]

Profit Repatriation For UK companies with overseas earnings reporting in Sterling, 2025 has been a salutary tale of a strengthening British Pound with periods of volatility prompted primarily by geo and domestic politics and POTUS. GBP/USD has seen a range of 1.22 to 1.37 and GBP/EUR 1.13 to 1.22. Finance managers at such companies are […]

Condensed Hours This is a relatively new concept which used to be called flexi hours and is available to public sector workers who as we have already written, are permitted to WFH – almost 50% of the public sector are in fact WFH for 2 or 3 days per week and 73% want to WFH for […]

Part-Time Employment It became fashionable to talk about the “Gig Economy” 20 years ago when technology allowed people to tele commute, and at the same time younger workers elected lifestyle over lucre and went for part time employment, permitting travel and more time for themselves to pursue their non work interests. Then the global financial […]