Perspectives
Not all bonds fall when interest rates rise
March, 2023
With interest rates rising, bond prices have fallen. Bond prices move inversely to interest rates: they rise when interest rates fall, and they fall when interest rates rise (as now). Since November our strategies have had meaningful exposure to a different type of bond in lieu of equity, namely Floating Rate Notes (FRN). FRNs, unlike […]
Counting the cost of interest
February, 2023
There is a very old story about a king and a trader. The king liked to play chess and collected rare and fine chessboards. One day a trader approached the king with a particularly ornate chessboard and offered it to him. The king was enraptured by the piece and asked the trader to name his […]
8012 Points
February, 2023
This week the FTSE 100 index reached a new all time high of 8012 points. This is a newsworthy event as, unlike other equity markets around the world, the UK equity market has struggled to make new highs since 2018. In fact, the index failed to trade higher than its level in 1999 until after […]
Follow the Money
February, 2023
There are two sources of investment: endogenous, to use a word popularised by Gordon Brown some years ago which is to say domestic savings, or exogenous, funds brought into the economy by foreign actors, normally companies. One of the factors we look at when we consider regions for investment is whether they are attracting foreign […]
It’s really about how old we are.
February, 2023
In the recent IMF projections, it was difficult to ignore the fact that the UK was forecast to be one of the worst performing countries economically year. Interestingly, in contrast India, is experiencing the fastest rate of economic growth this and next year. At Tacit we find this interesting. as whilst many focus on short […]
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. […]