Tacit Thought
Bertrand Russell’s Turkey
January, 2023
The British philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell, once told a sad and rueful tale about a Christmas Turkey. It was a parable to illustrate the problem of learning and particularly learning from experience. A family bought a turkey. Every day, before school, the children would wander down to the enclosure where the turkey lived and […]
Looking under the bonnet
January, 2023
This week was the Annual General Meeting for one of our longest standing holdings, Finsbury Growth & Income Trust. The Trust’s manager, Nick Train, presented what appeared to be a very simple set of slides but we feel the content was actually very interesting given the current concerns around inflation. Nick Train’s investment strategy is […]
Digital currency or cryptocurrency?
January, 2023
The term digital currency and cryptocurrency can become interchangeable in general conversation however they refer to two materially different assets. Similarities are that digital currencies and cryptocurrency do not have physical attributes and are available only in digital form. Transactions involving both are made using computers or electronic wallets connected to the internet or designated […]
What Next?
January, 2023
2022 was a year most professional investors would like to forget (a bit like 1998, 2001, 2008 and 2020). When we launched Tacit in 2010, it was our belief that clients expect their professional advisors to be contactable at times of stress and to manage investment risks that they themselves do not fully understand. That’s […]
Looking ahead
December, 2022
2022 is a year when equity markets and bond markets fell in tandem. This makes it an unusual year as the historic correlation of these two asset classes is very low. At Tacit we distinguish between absolute loss of value and volatility, which has distinguished us from most of our peers over the past decade. […]
Residential Property for Children
December, 2022
Many of our clients have children and grandchildren who, with the ineluctable passage of time, are now adults with young families of their own. We are often asked what we think the outlook for property prices looks like and whether now is a good time to buy a new house. It is a notoriously difficult […]
That was then
December, 2022
Income has historically provided a significant proportion of total returns over the longer term. For the past decade interest rates have been kept close to zero and this has distorted the income-seeking investment strategy. In such a low-yielding environment, an investment with a materially higher yield, say 4%, carried significant capital risks. In other words, […]
The Rubik’s Cube of Currencies
December, 2022
Few ideas in finance carry more confusion than currencies. It is not uncommon for senior international figures to mix up strength with weakness and get them totally the wrong way round. The key thing to remember is that currency quotes are a “rate” not a “price.” As you will know from your trips abroad you […]
Hedging
November, 2022
For UK investors the performance of the Cable or Dollar Index has a significant influence over the risk and return characteristics of their portfolios which are typically priced in British Pounds. “Cable “a slang term dating back to the mid-19th Century when telegraph cables were laid between London and New York to enable faster communication, […]
It’s all about remembering what you need
November, 2022
When markets are going up, we feel annoyed if we have not participated in that rise. When they fall, we feel annoyed that we invested at all! This phenomenon is known as the psychology of missing out – as humans, we fear being left behind. This occurs in everyday life as well as when we […]