SGM-FX insights

UK Employment At 75.1%, employment for people aged 16-64 looks sort of OK depending on what that really means, but it does not alter the fact that there are currently 1.55 million people who are unemployed, or 4.4% of the potential workforce. Another much more significant number, is that there are currently 9.27 million people […]

Rotation out of the US Quite what that rotation may mean and by how much is exercising the markets and also doubtless the Chair of the Federal Reserve. For the yield on 10 year US Treasury Bonds to move from 3.99% to 4.50% in a week is extraordinary. At the same time, the US Dollar […]

Brent sub $60 The last time that oil was at this level (now clawed its way back to $62) was in February 2021, following the 18% drop in price in the past 6 days. Currently, although for very different reasons, events plus supply resemble what happened to the oil market in 2020, when during the […]

News Overload In the last days it has at times felt overwhelming given the plethora of Trump announcements and the less than credible attempts by his coterie of officials to explain or even more ambitiously, to justify the illiterate economic reasoning behind it all. Take Jonathan Ferro on Bloomberg, whose eyebrows nearly disappeared into the […]

EU Consumers While no one would pretend that the past week has been good for savers and investors, there is a glimmer of hope for EU consumers. The argument goes as follows: the EU exports EUR 500 billion of goods to the USA and imports EUR 350 billion. Conversely, the EU’s service sector is exactly […]

Weaker US Dollar As the dust settles and the tealeaves are sifted, the obvious early take is that POTUS has achieved an initial post tariff announcement reduction in the value of USD which he stated as his aim before he took office. An immediate jump in value of so called safe haven currencies Japanese Yen […]

US Trade War Tariffs With all markets awaiting what emanates from POTUS later today, Trump has certainly achieved one aim: getting the world’s collective attention. Increasingly desperate TV pundits have spent the past hours dragging past Trade Negotiators into the studio in an effort to get them to predict what the tariffs will look like. […]

De-Dollarization A shift away from the US Dollar with Central Bank Reserves denominated in US Dollars moving down from a high of just over 70% down to 60% in the past 20 years is note worthy but the speed of that decline makes it less striking. However there are 3 factors that are changing the […]

Pairs Trading Back in the days when I worked in Bermuda for a hedge fund, we were always seeking stocks that were overvalued and other stocks that were undervalued having analysed both sets of historical price behaviours. Normally those stocks were in the same industry but not necessarily in the same geographic region. In the […]

British Government Securities-Gilts Gilts are increasingly popular as a place for UK investors to park savings: the Interactive platform for example is seeing a 42% increase in gilt transactions and a 65% increase in gilt investments. Part of the reason is that in the first 6 months of 2025 no less than GBP 80 billion […]

Gold Another week and another high for Gold at $3045. It’s not just the fear factor that leads investors to buy Gold, it’s the Central Bank buying in a bid to diversify away from USD. In the past 3 years, that buying has amounted to over 1000 tons led by China and India, but also other […]

Uncertainty and GBP This is the word that dominates market thinking at present. No surprise that like the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England left UK interest rates unchanged with that uncertainty overshadowing all markets plus the expectation of UK inflation rising from its current 3% rather than falling to the target of 2%. […]