Investing

Journalists and media outlets often lead on stories around market volatility and warnings of falling share prices or turmoil for investors. While this news can be unsettling, it is often looked at without any broader context. 

The pandemic has brought the importance of being financially prepared into the spotlight. Coupled with concerns around climate change, growing numbers of adults have been investing in socially responsible investments for their child’s future.

The global economy has had a wild ride during the past 18 months. Cycles are always exaggerated during shocks, and the remainder of 2021 will continue to surf the tail-end of what we would describe as a macro-data wave created by last-year’s shutdown. Still, with the gradual re-opening of businesses, both in the UK and the US, we expect growth to moderate to more sustainable rates.

Although markets always experience a degree of volatility, the past two years have seen some particularly high levels of price fluctuations as both bad and good news around Covid-19 has hit the headlines. Our director of investment risk, Pacome Breton, details why this is the case and explains why volatility is not inherently a negative thing for investors.

‘Stagflation’ is a word that you may have heard bandied about by economic commentators lately. Stagflation is an ugly word in economic policy circles, combining, as it does, ‘stagnation’ with ‘inflation’. And while Stagnation is never a positive thing, as we have often said, inflation is not necessarily bad. And considering that central banks have spent the last decade trying to induce higher inflation expectations, why, you might ask, the sudden panic?

In the second of our series looking at the medium-term structural shifts that global investment assets will be exposed to, we focus on climate and natural resource disruption, and the risks and opportunities these can create for the global economy and investors in the decades ahead.

If you’re thinking about getting yourself into good financial shape, then there’s no better time to start than today. Whether you’re making the most of your existing tax allowances or setting yourself a new goal, here are some tips for getting financially fit.

Since the pandemic spread around the world and global equity markets fell in March 2020, equities have rebounded very strongly. With a rally in global equities of more than 70% (MSCI World including emerging markets between April 2020 and August 2021), many investors are wondering whether equity markets have become worryingly expensive.

Thinking of overpaying your mortgage or starting to invest? These are the five questions you should ask yourself.

Nutmeg provides globally diversified multi-asset portfolios across a choice of investment styles (check out “Our investment styles explained” for a guide to these). Underneath each style lies design-choices about risk level, suitability of asset universe at each risk-level in each investment style, UK bias for £-based investors and foreign currency exposure. We have written elsewhere about how Nutmeg manages UK home-bias.  In this blog we’ll provide insight into how we determine benchmark currency exposure across the risk spectrum.  

When it comes to investing for retirement, UK consumers now have more choice than they have had before. For most pension investors, gone are the days of being put into a provider’s default retirement fund and, other than receiving an annual statement through the post about their investments, never really giving their pension another thought.  With the advent and adoption of digital wealth managers and online pension providers, consumers have greater choice and control – so, how do you know what the right approach is for your pension?  

A lot has changed since we first wrote about bitcoin three years ago; indeed, even since January this year when we took another look. We have witnessed an incredible rise in volatility and expansion of the crypto offering, which led the FCA to issue the following statement at the start of 2021.