Tacit Thought
What could go wrong?
June, 2024
The Tacit approach to running money focuses very much on growing sustainable cash flows which in turn leads to higher asset prices. This has generated superior returns to our peers in 12 out of the 13 full calendar years since Tacit was launched almost 14 years ago in our Total Return Strategy, which has the […]
What could go right?
June, 2024
The Tacit Investment Strategy Group meets every quarter with the sole purpose of taking a long view on the global economy and global asset markets. In a world where daily news flow can skew opinion and perception the role of this group is to review, without short term bias, financial markets in the context of […]
Do Elections Matter for Markets?
June, 2024
The imminent General Election will be the 12th since Margaret Thatcher’s epochal win in 1979. Of those elections Labour or “New Labour” won three and the Conservatives won eight, albeit with one as a coalition (the Cameron/Clegg administration) and one as a minority with Theresa May’s administration supported by the DUP in a “confidence and […]
Perception and reality
June, 2024
When investing you can focus on two types of risk: volatility and the risk of a permanent impairment of your capital. Volatility often refers to the amount of uncertainty or risk related to the amplitude of changes in an investment’s value. A higher volatility means that an investment’s value can potentially be spread over a […]
Avoiding the noise
May, 2024
How should we quantify risk when investing; is it the risk of losing money? Or, maybe the risk of not achieving our financial goals? Or the risk of preserving our buying power over the longer term in the case of a pension? The reality is that risk exists only in the future and it is […]
Does Military Spending Matter for Long-Run Growth?
May, 2024
The primary role of the state is widely regarded to be the “protection of its citizens” either from themselves (internal order) or military defence (external aggression). History suggests and contemporary events affirm that the “better angels of our nature,” are too often subverted by the demons lurking inside. Nonetheless, for a moment in 1989, […]
UK Household Wealth
May, 2024
How wealthy you feel at any point in time is affected by many factors. Despite being wealthier than they were 20 years ago, many people still feel financially poorer today. This discrepancy between actual wealth and perceived financial well-being can be attributed to various psychological and societal factors. Firstly, the concept of relative deprivation is […]
Population, Migration and Growth
May, 2024
In 2021, the latest period for which figures[1] are available, the UK registered 694,695 live births. In the same period, 666,629 deaths were registered generating a net domestic increase in the population of the UK of 28,026 new people. In common with much of the developed world, and increasingly the developing world, the birth rate […]
It’s not just about China and India
April, 2024
Tacit strategies have a higher-than-average exposure to Asian companies as our analysis highlights that the valuations of many Asian businesses are significantly below their longer-term averages and therefore provide significant upside potential over the coming few years. A second point for holding these investments is that the companies provide higher dividends than those available in […]
“Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum” “Let him who desires peace, prepare for war”
April, 2024
According to data from the Project Mars International Conflict Data program cited in “Our World in Data,” since 1800, 37 million soldiers have died in battle with 75% of that total accounted for by the two world wars: 1914-18, 1939-45. It is perhaps hard to believe in the current geopolitical circumstances that the world has […]