Weekly Wrap - Budget Week

This week’s Budget from George Osborne offered a few surprises. With policies that picked off Labour’s better ideas, the chancellor was clearly aiming to strengthen the Conservative’s hold on power in the face of weakened opposition. From an investment perspective, the introduction of a ‘living wage’ will be more costly for some businesses but the aim seems to be to move towards a higher productivity, higher wage model. Stock markets appeared to like what they heard as the recent declines seen across the UK indices halted. Though with Grexit uncertainty still looming large, markets continue to trade nervously. Our small-cap expert Paul Scott did his own reader survey this week to find out how concerned investors really are - you can read up on the results here.

Elsewhere this week, we’ve been reading:

• Kevin Murphy, The Value Perspective - The Jellybean Trilogy (Part IV) – How academic research can be as flawed as this title

• John Authers, The FT - A performance-linked model for fund fees (£)

• Richard Beddard, Interactive Investor - Avoiding biases the easy way

• Factor Investor - The surprising truth about when bear markets occur

• Pragmatic Capitalism - Never invest in something you cannot understand

• John Kingham, UK Value Investor - UKVI Portfolio review for 2015 Q2

• The Economist - Elon Musk - Fortune favours the brave

• Ben Carlson, A Wealth of Common Sense - Who would benefit from a stock market correction?

• Tim Richards, The Psy-Fi Blog - Bitcoin Bugs’ Belief

Safe Investing!