Investment Management Blog - Montague Capital

It’s one of those rare days when one feels just the teeniest bit sorry for HMG.  It is being criticised by a group of 16 know-it-all “economists” for its plans to accelerate public works programmes in order to try to spend the UK’s way out of recession.  Admittedly there is a germ of theoretical truth […]

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If the best measure of efforts to solve the global financial crisis were the TV coverage world leaders have been grabbing for themsleves in the last few days, by now we’d be well on the way to recovery.  Unfortunately, the best thing that could be said about Junior’s 0800hrs performance on Saturday, for which the […]

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If Asia’s markets this morning are any guide, the UK and Europe are not going to be striking out on an independent course after last night’s 7.3% collapse on Wall Street.  At the time of writing, the Nikkei may be off its worst for the day, but it’s still down 7.6%.  To what do we […]

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Yesterday’s markets displayed an unaccustomed level of reality.  In falling more than 3% – relatively small beer by the standards of recent volatility and apparently not that much to worry about any more – Wall Street is telling us that it is not that confident that The Plan will get through the House of Representatives […]

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Paulson has proved that he was right about one thing all along.  A failed deal is worse than no deal at all.  This was why the US authorities had refrained from interference until ten days ago.  Confidence would best be restored by leaving the market to sort its own problems out, with occasional official nudges […]

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Have we now heard the name Ken Rogoff had in mind when on August 19th he warned “We’re not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper”?  (See Daily 090820.)  Which category does Lehman or Merrill Lynch fall into?  And AIG isn’t even a […]

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Let’s see if we’ve got this straight.  The idea of financial markets is that they are supposed to be efficient processors of all available information and anticipate where the trend is headed.  How then do we make sense of yesterday’s surge on Wall Street, and the slavish imitation of European equity markets, to news that […]

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After two days spent swallowing any old optimistic tosh put in front of it, Wall Street returned its more customary diet of a reality sandwich yesterday.  CY07Q4 GDP growth was revised down from +0.6% to -0.2% and CY08Q1 growth from +1.0% to +0.9%.  But such ancient history was less important than the news that CY08Q2 […]

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It seems that we just can’t have a measured response to company news these days, in either the size or direction of the share price reaction.  There are very long gaps between the rare occasions when this note has anything kind to say about BT.  But the company didn’t entirely deserve the 12% caning it […]

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Barratt Developments becomes the latest UK housebuilder to add to the UK’s dole queues, laying off 1,200 of its 6,700 workforce yesterday.  But the market was too busy celebrating the company’s successful renegotiation of its banking facilities to notice.  The shares have now risen 72% in the last two days, a savage bear squeeze by […]

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