Spy took out the popcorn, a big glass of Baron de Sigognac, 20-year-old brandy and watched with a certain amount of amusement as France went into a paroxysms of petulance and booted out its government this week. South Korea decided to get in on the act and have itself a martial law drama. Japan is throwing a strop, Germany recently collapsed its hopeless coalition and Britain is about as happy as an alcoholic on a detox retreat with its new government. Never has the saying, “The peasants are restless” seemed so apposite. For the global elite, the Christmas break can’t come soon enough, it would seem.
Sometimes you need to look a little deeper to see what is really going on. Spy was intrigued to read in a note put out by Eastspring, “Over the last three years it is estimated that Chinese companies have returned around RMB 2trn ($276bn) back to shareholders through buybacks and dividends and this number is expected to grow to over RMB 3trn in 2024.” The undervalued and unloved China market is throwing off opportunity, for the brave of heart.
Robin Hood is coming to Singapore. Spy is not talking about the much-loved renegade of English folklore who bested the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham. This is Robinhood, the trading phenomenon that treats the markets like a game and whose users are likely to get their advice from bulletin boards where poor grammar is prerequisite. “We plan to be serving customers across Asia soon,” Vlad Tenev said on Wednesday at the firm’s investor day in New York. Spy will be watching with interest to see if Singaporean investors are just as keen at HODL-ing as their Yankee counterparts.
Abrdn, the much-storied asset manager, can’t seem to catch a break. According to Short Tracker, the Scottish asset manager is now the UK’s most shorted stock. 5.8% of its shares are currently being shorted, typically by hedge funds. Spy is almost tempted to buy a few and let them percolate – any change in the weather and Abrdn’s stock could be in for an almighty rally. Nobody scrambles for an exit quite so fast as a hedge fund when the tide turns.
A huge amount of ink, digital or otherwise, is going to be spilt attempting to predict what president elect Trump and his merry band of iconoclasts will achieve with their blunt foreign policy and blundering tradecraft. Spy enjoyed this rather succinct line from Lombard Odier Investment Management, “Simply put, the Trump 2.0 administration’s intended tariffs pose more risks to global growth than to inflation.” Bonds, not gold, then.
Spy used to laugh that the German health service still uses fax machines. It seems Singapore is still clinging to an outdated technology for reasons that are hard to fathom. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has just extended the deadline for firms to cease issuing cheques until the end of 2026. Spy has not used a cheque, personally, since 2001 and finds it utterly staggering that they still exist in any quantity whatsoever. Apparently, the MAS predicts that the volume of cheques in 2024 will be under nine million. This is in fact down from 13.8 million in 2023. Progress of a sort, Spy supposes.
With the crypto block having a moment in the sun, Spy reckons it is not Bitcoin’s $100,000 price that is the main story. Take the fact that the oldest bank in the America is the Bank of New York, which was founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton and is now known as BNY Mellon, It’s worth about $59bn. BNY has $18bn in annual revenue and 53,000 employees. In contrast, Dogecoin, a joke crypto, has just achieved a market cap of $69bn. The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies combined currently stands at $3.54trn. Nvidia, darling of the AI world, stands at $3.44 trillion.
Incidentally, the combined market cap of the US stock market is now $60trn. It just happens to be at a record high. Again.
Odd story of the week comes from Caixin. Apparently, thefts during flights are on the rise. Spy can’t imagine what desperate person wants to nick something during a flight, but Hong Kong recorded a rather juicy 169 cases on flights to the city in the first ten months of 2024. The total value of goodies pinched was about HKD 4.32m ($560,000).
Spy rather loves this: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, was asked where he gets the confidence to even attempt to build companies of such massive scale, such as Amazon and Blue Origin. His response was extraordinary. “I think it’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general would be well-advised to try and bias against that. The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive… You say it’s confidence, but maybe I’m just accepting that human bias and trying to compensate against it. The second thing I would point out is that thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” This is as true of wealth management, as it is of anything.
Until next week…
