Share Sounds from The Financial Outlook for Personal Investors

In the light of market reaction to Janet Yellen's comments about inflation, Russ Mould, Investment Director of A J Bell, asks if markets are at a major turning point? If inflation is making a comeback, what would the effect be for equities; should investors be thinking about real assets rather than paper assets. With, apparently, 41% of US household assets now in the stock market, are equities exhibiting too much exuberence?

Russ Mould, Investment Director of A J Bell, applies Sir John Templeton's dictum on the four stages of bull markets to suggest how investors can spot the next round of market winners – and dodge the losers. He compartmentalises the market's sectors into those suffering pessimism, scepticism, euphoria and optimism and suggests how investors might be able to suppress their natural instinct to follow the herd; as Warren Buffett said, "You cannot buy what is popular and do well".

In the light of the announcement that semiconductor company Alphawave IP is going to seek an IPO, Russ Mould – Investment Director of A J Bell – asks what the prospects are in the light of the Deliveroo disaster. And he ponders why Britain is so good at starting tech companies and yet so bad at keeping them long enough for them to grow into giants.

Russ Mould, Investment Director at A J Bell, marvels at the recovery of the FTSE to a higher level than it stood before the pandemic hit the UK. But how secure is its current level and where will it go from here? Now with a 3.5% yield and dividends growing rapidly, Russ assesses the FTSE's growth prospects and says that your outlook will be coloured by whether you feel the UK is out of the pandemic woods yet or not.

Tim Price of Private Value Partners explains why he thinks technical analysis - particularly trend-following - may be a more useful discipline than fundamental analysis. He recounts the anecdote of the true-life counterparts of the film Trading Places, with so-called novice investors, called "turtles", taught an investment system, with many of them becoming hugely successful. He points out the downside of index investing and believes that the early warning of problems with the world's burgeoning debts may first be seen in the foreign exchange markets, which central banks are not big enough to control.

Tim Price, director of Price Value Partners, looks at why benchmarking to stock market indices is a bad idea and why investors should think more about the preservation of capital than chasing the latest market fads. Tim discusses the surge of interest in cryptocurrencies, why gold is less rampant and why value investors, of which he is one, need considerable patience. Citing the ignominious debut of Deliveroo amongst other things, Tim senses the market may be on the point of a big change of sentiment.

Russ Mould, investment director of A J Bell, looks at the performance of small cap companies. After a year of outperformance, of late they have come off the boil. He looks at their potential for being the acorns from which big businesses might emerge but also considers whether their recent lack of lustre might be a useful leading indicator.

One year on from the market lows of March 2020, Russ Mould, Inestment Director of A J Bell, looks at what has done best - and what has done worst - in the 12 months since. In retrospect, he points out, what seemed to be the safest areas when everything was bleakest turned out to be the most dangerous. Explaining why first Asian and then Emerging Markets have done well, he says that, within the UK, the sectors that have performed best have been oil and financials.

Russ Mould, Investment Director of A J Bell, asks whether markets are currently in a bubble. If they are, what are the various stages common to bubbles over the years and the centuries and what stage have we reached? For those investors concerned we ARE now in bubble territory, what are the options? And, as an aside, why do the regulations (and blame) always concentrate on short selling and not the overenthusiastic buying that drives the bubble in the first place?

Russ Mould, investment director of A J Bell, has crunched the numbers to ascertain which Chancellors of the Exchequer have presided over the biggest rise int he All-Share Index and those who have been the most costly. He stresses the important of accounting for inflation, which changes the picture somewhat and reiterates just how important the current debate over whether inflation is returning could be to the safety of investors' portfolios.