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Rich McDonald (0:00)

On this week episode, Spice takes on the Bears as the Neo Clouds start to form over equities. Will there be a silver lining? And CJ benefits from his eternal optimism on the UK.

Yes, it's at the top of the leaderboard at last. Welcome to The Art of Investing.

Welcome to The Art of Investing, brought to you by IG, the Global Investment Platform. And a huge thank you to all of you who attended the live session at Lourdes on Tuesday night. A wonderful success, CJ. What do you think?

Chris Fellingham (0:36)

I thought it was absolutely fantastic to listen and hear the wisdom of the two of you with such a wonderful crowd in there. I just want to thank IG for such a wonderful evening. The location was excellent. Everybody enjoyed themselves. And none of this would happen without IG. So big thank you.

Rich McDonald (0:58)

And of course, Spice, we realize the vast majority of people listening today weren't there. So we're going to go over some of the details again, aren't we?

Mark Holden (1:05)

You're right, Rich. It was a very, very interesting evening. And actually some of the sort of the surveys we took at the audience were quite eye-opening and surprised us.

Rich McDonald (1:14)

So those details coming up for you all. But first, let's take a look at the portfolio performance. Because the portfolio has not performed this week, down 1.1%.

Chris Fellingham (1:25)

Our survey said, failure.

Rich McDonald (1:28)

And things starting to get a bit hairier in the last 24 hours as well. So that leaves us up 11.9% on the year and plenty to go through in the winners and losers this week. A lot of dispersion happening in this market and plenty to go through. So into the spice market update.

Mark Holden (1:46)

Thanks Rich. Well, it's been a week that's concentrated around oil and chips. So obviously, we've seen a higher oil price up about 3% this week as the Houthis have attacked Saudi Arabia directly and going for some of their refineries.

But the oil price is still anticipating we get a fall of about 4% or 5% in the next couple of months, if you look at the futures curve on that one. Nevertheless, it's hurt out there. The dollar's been pretty flat this week, it's still up a little bit, which doesn't help some of the commodities. Ironically, though, gold this week had the first time it's been up while markets have been down and actually while the oil price has been up. So that was a nice change. Silver, though, sort of suffered down 7%. I haven't been able to report any new all-time highs, but what I can report, sadly, is that Korea entered a bear market this morning. It's down 22% since we last reported.

Chris Fellingham (2:38)

So you mean like 60% of the S&P, which is in a bear market. I will be mentioning all those numbers, which we talked about on Tuesday night.

Mark Holden (2:47)

We did, but as we know, that doesn't necessarily knock the whole thing off the bat. But you'll see that has impacted emerging markets. Generally, Taiwan's had a difficult time. Taiwan's down about 13%, 14%.

That's despite things like some very good results, actually, from Taiwan Semiconductor out there. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the problems that is causing this shakeout in the chip sector, which is down about 14%, if you look at the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index. Underneath that, Magnificent 7 is actually pretty flat. So some of the defensive qualities like Apple and Microsoft have actually done okay, but Nvidia is down 9%.

Rich McDonald (3:20)

Especially Apple. In fact, Apple could probably be described as a new high.

Mark Holden (3:24)

It's very, very close to it. I did have to look twice this morning, but yeah, it's very, very close to it. And our old friend Bitcoin is down about 4%, so getting sucked into some of this risk off. One of the other big differences this week is that actually the Euro has managed to stay pretty flat against the dollar. Obviously, we talked at the last podcast about the problems within France and Spain, and that was having an impact, particularly in the currencies, particularly in the Euro. But also, the sterling has been pretty flat as well today, which is not a bad result. We're in the midst now of the corporate reporting season. So it's kicked off with Pepsi Cola. Don't want to do too much advertising, but the results were actually a little bit disappointing, not because of the revenues, but because their costs are higher than expected. And we talked about this before. Obviously, the higher oil price has to go somewhere, and it also feeds into higher input costs in agriculture as well, because there are costs associated with that. So they had their costs disappointed. Shares went off too much. Delta Airlines, who you would expect to be very badly hit by, obviously, the high oil price, did have good revenues, but again, hadn't quite managed their costs as well as people had expected, because there's high oil price. So again, they were disappointed. So we start with two disappointing sort of numbers this reporting season.