SGM-FX insights

Limewood Hotel, New Forest   News of the theft of 82 bottles of wine worth GBP67,000 last week. Presumably the insurance company will fork out for the replacement cost of these bottles at an average GBP 817 cost per bottle. Incidentally at a normal restaurant mark up of 3 times that equates to GBP 201,000 […]

Markets   Today’s close of business marks the half way mark for November and a plethora of news including the Fed Chairman stating that he does not expect a major setback in equity markets is giving all markets encouragement on the economic front. From a political perspective however it is a different story with markets […]

Piss up in a Parliament   Having sat in countless lectures by the people who quite literally wrote the book on tactical voting and collective action, I can assure you that academia doesn’t have the answers to voting outcomes especially under circumstances of manipulated voting. It’s not failings on their part, rather it’s the entropic […]

  It’s Official: The Market is now on an Election footing   Further acres of newsprint and a torrent of tv and social media comment in prospect the General Election on December 12 is the first since 1923 to take place just before Christmas. And……the currency market has not moved GBP at all on that […]

Joker   Well the joke (if that is what it was) was definitely on me: off we went to the local Cineworld for the must see Todd Phillips movie Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix and Robert de Niro. Drawn in by the film taking $96M on its opening weekend and more than $250M to date and […]

GBPZAR   Remember that old teaching: you can achieve similar things by smacking something very hard with a small hammer or by tapping something softly with a sledgehammer? I must confess I’ve never found great use or utility in this phrase partially because of my underwhelming expertise in DIY and secondly, it totally ignores the […]

If Only   This weekend could have delivered a Brexit victory for the UK Government of the decisive nature of the England Lions’ victory over the Wallabies. It was not to be. After 5 1/2 hours of debate, there was a palpable sense of disappointment from all in Westminster that the Letwin Amendment had managed […]

UK Brexit   Market news was dominated yesterday by the announcement of a deal between Europe and the UK. Still doubt on whether the UK Parliament will ratify it, but for those European couch potatoes among you with nothing better to do tomorrow, Saturday, you can watch the UK Parliament on live TV from 1030 […]

Pony up   It might be sceptical to assume that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that has held two consecutive Conservative governments at knife point are looking for a bribe to pass a deal… but it would also be largely correct. Throughout the Brexit process the European Union has been perceived as the enemy of […]

UK plc   Yesterday was a challenge for all market commentators who had had an easy summer being negative about all things UK EU: good news of a likely breakthrough in negotiations.  However not all was lost: the UK employment figures were released and showed a fall of 56K in employment versus an expected fall […]

A Few Bad Men   “You can’t handle the truth!” A great film and, at least as far as its most famous line, somewhat representative of the Pound Sterling’s fortune. GBP has staged an immense rally as position adjustment forces those betting on the Pound’s decline to re-evaluate and trim their positions. Billions of Pounds […]

Thrown under the bus   Do you remember when Boris Johnson told the world that he likes to build models of busses in his spare time? The ‘confession’ offered during the televised interview with talkRADIO was, the daily mail conjectured, a PR spin to draw attention away from the referendum red bus that brandished the […]