The Transcript’s weekly update sent today was titled “A good start to 2025” as it ran through a number of quotes last week from the likes of Fed’s Lisa Cook, The Blackstone President and Delta Air Lines CEO all sounding quite bullish though with today being my first proper day of 2025 it felt anything but that. The start of the year always tends to feel like a game of Chess where it takes a little while for patterns to emerge and moves to be made and this year does feel quite familiar in that s…

A bit of a farewell from the Snapshot team here (and I reiterate it’s a HUGE team effort) with this being my (pretty much) last day of 2024 and with the next couple of weeks looking like a disjointed last kilometre of what has been mountainous marathon of a year it’s probably worth kickstarting back on the 2nd Jan with a little recap of what we’ve all missed (knowing this year it’s probably a lot!). Fittingly even on the 19th of December there was plenty still to talk about after the Fed gave e…

Crawling pace to start the week (as one might have imagined) as we continue the countdown to Christmas. Having moved house, and with us hosting our first ever Christmas it took us until this weekend to discuss if the oven is even big enough to host! It better be given the time of year its just too late to change plans. Other things not changing plans is the feeling within the European Equity complex as some similar themes of 2024 emerge strong once again: It was all about momentum today and for…

We surprised my mum at the weekend with a whole family outing to Abba Voyage. What an unbelievable set up they have! 3000 fans dressed in all sorts of 80’s clobber, all paying top dollar to go dance and sing to the bands greatest hits performed by holograms! 99% sold out, seven shows a week earns them $2m weekly – not bad business and the sort of growth trajectory I’d invest in! ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme… an inline inflation report’ cried the market who were desperate for an inline inflation print t…

Running out of things to say this week so just as well I’m off to Edinburgh tomorrow afternoon for the Scottish Investment Charity Dinner (Aka the Smoker)! With that in mind I’ll keep it short today. The one theme today that was evident everywhere you looked was that winners are continuing to do just that: The best sectors YTD in Europe (Retail, Tech and Industrials) were all amongst the leaders today. Notable gainers in the single stock space included SAP, Inditex, Schneider, Rheinmetall, Zeal…

Looked up the French word for resilience this morning was disappointed to find it was résilience. From the Latin verb resilire, meaning to rebound and not (until recently) a word used when describing the Scottish rugby team’s performances. A number of indices in Europe were making new highs today including the FTSE All Share total return and the DAX, whilst the FTSE 100 was approaching a big resistance at 8400. The Euro Stoxx 50 ended the day up 66bps for its first 4-day win streak since August…

We’re in December now (Santa rally pending? Well that really is the period between Christmas and New Year) so it was finally time to put up the Christmas Tree (how expensive are these now?!) and various other decorations alongside a customary mince pie and glass of Bailey’s. Drama arose in an effort to unblock a gold glitter glue pen (bear with me) when I finally managed to do so it was at the expense of my left eye as it fired gold glue into it much to the enjoyment of my daughter. Even though…

Apart from the Snapshot (I hear you say) is there a worse email to receive than the Lottery’s “Courteney, you’ve won a prize!” email only to find out you’re not the UK winner of €173m but in fact the winner of 10p (and actually its more like an overall loss of £7.40 in total but who’s counting). Another fairly quiet day as we limp towards the Thanksgiving holiday, Equities in Europe are still happier to drift with the Stoxx 600 ending the day -20bps but no real damage done and not a huge amount…

I’m off to Christmas Lights at Kew right now this evening which I’m told is very good even if it still feels a little early to be getting in the Christmas spirit. No real bright sparks in Europe remains the case – in fact since the middle of March the Stoxx 600 hasn’t actually moved at all and we’ve always been within a pretty tight 10% range. Not exactly the most exciting backdrop whilst the S&P 500 has rallied 16% and is still showing renewed signs of climbing with new closing all-time highs…

“How are things in the UK right now?” Well….the budget has caused a significant amount of discontent and the petition “I would like there to be another General Election” has gathered 2,271,394 signatures in a pretty short space of time less than 6 months into the ‘new’ labour government. It’s unlikely to move the dial despite how embarrassing it might seem and as Starmer said today it’s not unusual for a government to be unpopular, but the speed in which is kept on going up was quite impressive…