Yes, as the alpha males stalk the sun-drenched square mile with at least four shirt buttons undone (three is SO 2014), so renewed wealth from a prolonged bull run takes us back to the yuppies of the 1980s.
And then of course there’s the phones. We at SHAM have devised a new way to measure the temperature of the stockmarket – The Mobile Index™. Bear with me bears, and listen to this – the bigger and brasher the phone, the higher the FTSE.
The big call
We all know that back in the ‘80s the Motorola’s were mammoth, and this continued through the following decade with some horrific handsets before our games of snake were cut short by the dot com crash, which in turn ushered in the more modest Nokia 8210.
By 2007, the real tech boom finally got into swing with the iPhone and the big phones were back before the mother of all slumps, and so 2008’s BlackBerry Storm was hailed as the “single biggest disaster in smartphone history”.
And where are we today? A glance at the new iPhone 6 and its clear the big phones are back and so, until fairly recently, has the FTSE 100 been hitting new heights.
And so, I hear you ask, what does this mean for SHAM’s calls on asset allocation? Well, in the spirit of the age we’ve been looking at the big boys.
SHAM invests in eight funds over £1bn: the £1.9bn BlackRock European Dynamic, £6.1bn Woodford Equity Income, £2.8bn First State Global Emerging Market Leaders, £5.5bn Invesco Perpetual Corporate Bond, £2.9bn JOHCM UK Equity Income, £4.8bn M&G Recovery, £9.8bn Newton Real Return and £2.1bn Schroder Tokyo.
I’d like to say these funds are only so large because of our investment, but the choice is actually more to do with our contrarian’s contrarian approach; that is investing where everybody else does.
