If you are checking through one of your bank accounts this morning and are surprised by the positivity of its balance the NTI newsroom have a number of suggestions for where you might want to place your excess funds.
If you don't already own a stake in a French, Spanish or Italian vineyard with sparkles around the edges you should consider buying one. NTI's bet for the next James Bond added some fizz to his budget last Wednesday and makers of Italian prosecco, Spanish cava and French Champagne were celebrating as their products will now become about 87p more competitive. But will they be as good as their English equivalents? Hampshire's own Black Chalk's classic 2016 will send our continental cousins dashing back to their barrels to give them another stir, as will Roebuck Estates Classic Cuvee. An award-winning snip at £45 a bottle.
If you have a little more to spend you might want to join the Bamford family who make up the 'B' in 'JCB; and put in a mighty pre-order for millions of tonnes of green hydrogen; their way of stamping a carbon-neutral footprint over the future of the UK's hydrogen economy. The seller? Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest and his mining group Fortescue who looks like being about $7.5 billion better off, this being the cost of importing that volume of green hydrogen in 2030, assuming it is priced at around $5 per kilo. That's quite the bet on hydrogen, but it is thought this amount could power about 100,000 lorries per day by 2030 (this is, of course, if Xi Jinping can get through and be heard on Zoom at COP26 this morning and there are still roads not under water to drive lorries down by 2030).
If you have only one project into which to invest your spare billions an alternative could be the fund Qatar and Rolls Royce are jointly launching to (gently and ever-so-neutrally) pump funds into new green engineering projects. Boris is pouring over plans, even as Billy types, to build a new science and engineering campus in the north of England for start-ups to test and develop green technologies. The target is to create five “unicorn companies" - start-ups worth $1 billion - by 2030 and up to 20 by 2040.
As far as Tracee can see (and that is not far this morning after attending a Squid Games Halloween all-nighter) the Qatari fund will act like a venture capitalist, taking equity stakes in the projects. Rolls-Royce will make its laboratory and manufacturing resources available to the start-ups, also taking shares in some. Your part in this project? You just have to move to the north of England and be one of the 10,000 people who will be employed on these new green projects by as early as 2028.
If you fancy a punt on the US stock market you may be a day too late when it re-opens on Monday morning. A late Friday surge in the final 30 minutes of trading in New York left the indices up 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent respectively, both notching new record highs. This closed out the best month of trading this year. Apple posted revenues of $83.4 billion for the fiscal quarter ending in September, up 29 per cent, but slightly below consensus estimates as supply constraints hampered growth. Meanwhile, Amazon warned that labour challenges and rising costs would dampen earnings for the rest of the year, as it delivered third-quarter sales of $111 billion; below the $112 billion projected by analysts (but still pretty close and a lot, right?).
If you are a betting person and have religiously kept in touch with NTI news bulletins of late you may want to join Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley in taking a punt on predicting a small climb in the cost of borrowing at the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee meeting this week. We're not sure what odds you will get, as even the dumb money fancies a 0.15 per cent rise. Mortgage companies, demonstrating typical customer service and empathy have already begun scrapping their best deals in anticipation of a rise in the Bank rate, with typical two-year fixed deals expected by brokers to rise from about 1 per cent to 2 per cent in the coming months.
If you're David Bowie's family, you might want to push throught the sale of his back catalogue for £200 million. If you're Prince Andrew's family you might want to contact the FBI with details of his WhatsApp messages over the past 20 years (they've got to be worth a bob or two). Whoever you are.
Happy Sunday.
