SGM-FX insights

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 […]

Markets   Optimism was the name of the game on Friday: China-USA Trade and anticipation of a meeting between the two Presidents in Chile next month. Then the identification of a U.K. and Europe pathway towards a Brexit deal. The Hang Seng soared then later in the day the Dow followed suit. GBP rose 4 […]

Greece   They may have lost their (Elgin) marbles, but Greece is clearly doing something right: with their economy due to grow by 2.8% next year, they have joined the elite group of countries that are able to issue government debt at negative interest rates. Yes! Greece is able to charge storage for investor money! […]

Poor Teddy   The closer we get to a deal on trade between the US and China, the more expensive the world seems to get from the perspective of the UK. The trade war between the two behemoths of global trade has introduced a broad-based systemic risk that permeates throughout the entire world economy, creating […]

The World’s Top Performing Currency is?   In case you had not spotted it, it is of course the Russian Rouble which has been as muscular as Russia’s President Putin in 2019. However with a stronger US Dollar battering all emerging currencies, it is likely that the Rouble will lose its crown before the end […]

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 […]

Libra: Digital Currency in Doubt?   PayPal pulling out of Facebook’s initiative to create a global digital currency is a key signal to the remaining members of the project which have each pledged but not paid the $10M joining fee. Watch for MasterCard and Visa to see if they follow PayPal. If they do, as […]

Polish Preferment   All those British who took out Swiss Franc mortgages 20 years ago and then found that while they enjoyed much lower interest rates: they ended up repaying far more as GBP depreciated against the Swiss Franc and can only look on at yesterday’s European Court of Justice, Europe’s top court ruling with […]

Mass Spectrometry   The process of mass spectrometry in its crudest format involves separating the components of a substance into its basic parts to allow us to understand what exactly makes it up. Invented shortly after World War I, the process is still used in areas of criminal and analytical investigation. I reckon it’s about […]

Taiwan and Typhoon Mitag   Despite markets, schools, airports and businesses being shut on Monday here in Taipei, Taiwan where I am writing this, there has been some unexpected good news for the economy. Analysts had concluded that Taiwan would suffer badly from the US-China trade war. Instead international funds are investing once again and […]

Borderline   The best way to solve a problem in politics, almost without exception, is to present the simplest form of the idea possible to maximise the expectation of success that each voter carries. What’s not a particularly grand idea in most scenarios, and certainly not when attempting to do something quickly, is to redefine […]

China and Hong Kong: enigma   The incredibly successful statistics from China throw out a big question of which more below. Between 1952 and 2018 GDP averaged 8.1%. Life expectancy has risen from 35 in 1949 to 77 today. 770M people have been taken out of poverty since 1978. More than $2 trillion has entered […]