This is where I can don my ‘been around the block, seen it all before’ mantle. What’s happening in our business/industry/profession at the moment is a lot of what’s become known as consolidation, big companies, many fuelled by private equity, buying up smaller firms or taking over the clients of retiring advisers. In theory, this is good news for the regulator, as it should be much easier to keep an eye on a few, national giants than on a population of small, local minnows. Does that improve ‘outcomes’, as they’re keen to call them, for clients, however? It can be just as easy for bad apples to hide in a big barrel and do harm before they’re found out. And the hard-selling, target driven bank financial services arms, which were pretty much allowed to get on with it in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, reinforce that big is not always, and often rarely better. I’d say.
“Stocks surge and yields stabilise as Trump tariffs paused”
“The reason our stock market is so successful is because of me. I’ve always been great with money, I’ve always been great with jobs, that’s what I do”, said the man himself about (of course) himself. And, yes, one tweet, if we’re still allowed to use that old Woke term, on Truth Social can indeed send markets firmly up as well as down.
