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Leigh Harrison
Head of Equities
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Leigh Harrison's Blog
Leigh Harrison, Head of Equities
What planet are they on?
11 Apr 2012 I was at an interesting dinner the other night where we discussed the existential dilemma facing investment banks. It was quite illuminating to hear about the immense pressure on their existing business models and to discuss their responses. Inevitably it's a lot about where the profit is and, increasingly, this seems to be about volume and scale in markets I've barely heard of - delta one, high frequency quant driven trading and so on. All sounds a world away from me trying to understand companies and the macro environment with a view to finding future successful businesses. ... more >
Tags: investment banks, restructuring, fund managers
Are we not men?
19 Mar 2012 Strange to find Keynesians clamouring for more borrowing and spending to stimulate growth. Wasn't that the policy pursued by the last government for the best part of ten years? It boosted growth alright but at the cost of weakening government finances and creating an economy where growth was dominated by the expansion of the public sector. There seems to have been very little sustainable change to the non-government sector, outside finance, which boomed and is now contracting steadily. Quite understandable that one might have a policy to slow the contraction in the state sector w... more >
Tags: Kenya, Greece, bond investors, LTRO
The end of something
02 Feb 2012 Two truisms: investment banks are of little help to investors, and politicians are shallow and self-interested. RBS implodes in 2008 after underperforming for years because its poor management, who were addicted to value-destroying acquisitions, finally made a deal too far and sunk the ship. In all the years leading up to that there had been very little suggestion from all the highly paid analysts in the investment banking world that the return on assets was low and falling or that the business was over leveraged and likely to fail in anything other than a favourable environment. ... more >
Tags: RBS, Fred Goodwin, risk assets, eurozone, growth
Honey, I shrunk the banking sector
06 Jan 2012 The New Year has started with some unexpected optimism in equity markets based, it seems, on better news from the US and Asia. Bond markets, however, are still focused on the deeper structural issues that overhang Europe and steadfastly refuse to budge from this. No doubt equity markets will come down with a bump at some point as reality reasserts itself. We are now five years into this crisis, if you include 2007 as the start, and yet the implications of the new reality are still not widely recognised. Banks and financial service companies are still behaving as if things w... more >
Tags: equity, bond, banks, financial sector
Euro yo-yo obscures true value
07 Dec 2011 Markets go up, markets go down. Last week was an up week, the previous week was a down week. Yet people try to read something into these gyrations. Is it any more than the market acting as a barometer for sentiment, in this case towards the eurozone? The price of a business can change a lot in these moves yet there is very little information there about the change in the value of a business. The volatility attracts attention in the same way that the flickering of the TV screen catches the eye. This week we seem fixated on the upcoming summit meeting at which there are g... more >
Tags: Eurozone, volatility
The author of this blog is writing in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are the author's alone and do not necessarily accord with those of his employer. They are made as at the date of publication but are subject to change without notice. None of the content in this blog should be construed as the giving of investment advice or recommendations.