Taylor Swift and the financial benefits of marriage

**Dan Coatsworth** (0:09)
Hello, welcome to the AJ Bell Money & Markets podcast. I'm Dan Coatsworth, and joining me at some point will be Charlene Young and Sarah Coles. Just a small explanation here, we had a few technical hiccups recording this podcast, so I'm having to redo the intro.
I'll give you a quick run through of what to expect from the episode in a second. And then, but after we've heard from our first guest, it will revert back to the normal recording. I'll disappear, and you'll get Charlene and Sarah. But for now, in this week's episode, I'm going to have a chat with Paul Niven, the fund manager from F&C Investment Trust, about what he's seeing on the markets at the moment. We'll explore what Andy Burnham's comments about a new type of collaborative politics could mean for your finances. I'll explain why July is actually an important month for the self-employed. It's also an important month for Taylor Swift, apparently, and we'll explain why in a little bit. And also why it can be a smart money move for anyone. Now, we're going to have some interesting statistics on the juniorized, sir, some news about child trust funds. And also be joined by Tilly, a 15 year old who's spending the week with us in AJ Bell. And she's going to tell us a little about why HMRC's efforts to reach young people might be going awry. So we'll also finish up with a bit of news from the Tooth Fairy, who's had a good year and increased the payouts per tooth. But first, let's talk some investing news. So we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon. We've had an update from the owner of Primark, Associated British Foods. So for those who aren't actually familiar with this business, it's a bit of a mishmash of lots of different companies in the ingredients, the food and the agriculture sector. They just happen to own Primark on the side as well. So a little bit of a sort of a strange one. But actually, when we look at this business, having a conglomerate structure normally is quite good. It tends to mean that one part of the business, if it's not doing so well, it's held up by lots of other ones. But actually, with the latest update from Associated British Foods, a bit of a problem here is, we've got weakness on multiple sides. The agricultural bit is not doing very well. There's a warning about the sugar stuff. And ultimately, the Primark side of the business, it's fine, but it's not amazing. So I think you just got a bit of a tricky situation here where, whilst Primark does operate in lots of different countries, so you do have a bit of geographical diversification, it's just not doing as well as it could do. And I think that's partly down to the consumer sort of feeling a bit under the cosh. But at some point, these businesses will separate. We'll have Primark as a standalone business on the stock market. But that's something that we're not expecting to happen until next year.
Now, we also had some news out from Sainsbury's where it had 2.1% like for like sales growth in last quarter. That seems OK for a grocery business. But actually, if you look at last year, the comparative period was 4.7% growth. So we are seeing a bit of a slowdown in terms of sales growth. But I think if you drill down the details, it seems to be doing OK. So we've got business here catering for people who are watching every penny. So their value range is doing well. But actually, it's more posher type food where people are prepared to pay a little bit more potentially for a little sort of a treat. That's also doing quite well.
Argos, it also owns this retail chain, which is not doing so good. But it was helped by sales of fans during the hot weather and also by people buying new TVs to watch the World Cup on. But at the end of the day, Argos is still holding Sainsbury's back as a business. At some point, I do think that you'll see a separation of those if you can find a willing buyer.
Elsewhere we had some news about gold. At the start of the year, everyone was loving it. The price was nearly $5,400. But this week, we've seen the price of gold fall below $4,000.
That's partially because we've got competition here from the fixed income market where higher bond yields are attracting investors. Just remember that gold doesn't actually yield anything at all. But we've also got people being interested in stuff like AI and tech and space stories still.