Worldwide Financial Planning

Readers of this column over the last 27 years will know of my deep concern of how customers are loaded unerringly into the wrong funds at the wrong time. We buy a pension and think, great, that’s a boring subject out of the way and it's ‘filed’ into the cupboard with the heating manual.

When there is a death in a business you discover that a partnership can be profitable, busy and well-run, but still be dangerously fragile.

When financial resolutions go wrong, it tends to boil down to a handful of common psychological and practical mis‑steps and, just between us, deciding to set goals in February can relieve a surprising amount of pressure.

With two notable exceptions, all the tech companies delivering stock market updates this week have exceeded already ambitious revenue growth forecasts. This has been true not only among mega‑cap names such as Apple and Meta, but also across many second‑tier US tech firms.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they carry their purse. My grandmothers' was worn, always clean, contained enough cash for the day (and an emergency), a few boiled sweets, and a steel clasp which shut with purpose. That purse taught me more about money than any financial seminar ever could.

This week Donald Trump’s belligerent attitude towards Greenland rattled equity and bond markets and sent the dollar lower before his U-turn on
using military force saw markets reverse course.