It’s a funny old game this sales trading lark. It can be lonely one minute and then overly social the next. You can have moments when you think you’re never going to deal again (yesterday at about 4pm) and moments when you get so busy you can’t write your – ahem – end of day […]

So we’ve gone from Mega Move Mondays to Admin Mondays in the last couple of months and while that’s – ahem – slightly less exciting it does allow the sales trading team to check in with our analyst teams. We’ve been doing these on and off through lockdown as a way of keeping in touch […]

Lots of hot air around on World Earth Day as we had one of the busiest earnings day of the year so far but the activity levels unlikely to raise any temperatures as another day of solid to better updates steadied us towards the highs but without much excitement (Stoxx 600 +0.68%). Joe Biden hosting […]

You all strike me as far too responsible to have had to do a speed awareness course but after 28 years of driving without a single speeding ticket a rogue gust of wind as I travelled downhill meant I got caught doing 46 in a 40 the other day. Some pretty amazing stats from the […]

One of those rare days where the back pages and the front pages collide as plans were revealed for a European Super League of 15 clubs, sparking passionate debate about the greed of the few at the expense of the many. Obviously the behemoth clubs talking of the trickle down benefits that would be generated […]

The penny finally dropped today. Here I was focussing on shares and I now realize that all that everyone else has been trying to do all week is to book an outside table. No wonder the volumes are so rubbish. It should be simple shouldn’t it. You want to meet some friends for a long […]

Another day of bump’n grind here. The emphasis being less on bump and more on grind really. Volumes painfully low again. This time last year the Stoxx 600 fell 3.24% on 3.5bn shares traded. Today we gained 0.45% on approx 1.5bn shares traded. A good day for a good lunch then (if you could find a table and someone to go with) and you wouldn’t have missed much in the afternoon but there were a couple of bits to focus on that happened earlier in the day.

There’s a tipping point where the beard that I’ve occasionally sported over lockdown slips from receiving a compliment or two and instead starts to make me look alarmingly like Jeremy Corbyn. I fear I’m about three days past that tipping point so this won’t be the longest Snapshot ever as I simply MUST go and find a barbers that doesn’t have ten people queueing outside it.

Sometimes it pays to be brave. I’d argue that anyone who has bought Bitcoin is brave. Others have a different word for it but for now it’s the people who put their money on the line and believed in a new asset class who are laughing. Bitcoin breaking out above the previous All Time Highs to gain another 5% and sit at $63,000 last. I’d say it was brave of our economists to argue in mid-January “The technology underpinning these new assets is opening up a new world of decentralised value exchange which could upend traditional financial and economic structures, offering far more than a gold-like inflation or money printing hedge”.

I won’t say this often but today is not the day to be sat reading the Snapshot. Today is the day to log off and head out. Go to the pub, to your local restaurant, to an independent retailer, to get your hair cut and coiffed. This is a day to support all those who’ve spent the weekend scrubbing floors and polishing windows and putting out their hanging baskets humming with anticipation after months of waiting patiently.