Please find below our Investment Market Update as at 1st September 2023.
Being the end of the month, we will continue with our series of articles on wider financial planning issues. This time we will cover income tax, as well as a summary of this week’s market movements. Our communication is written by Andrew Dunn (known to many of you as Gus).
Our agenda is as follows:
- Summary of market movements
- Why bonds look increasingly like a great place to be
- Reducing your Income Tax bill
This Week’s Markets
It has been a positive week with the main markets all up, and so were all of our portfolios. You may have read about the phrase ‘risk on’ and this means that the markets believe that risk-based assets and shares are deemed to be worth buying and this pushes up the price.
This is often on the back of positive economic developments, or sometimes just that assets had been oversold and were cheap. This week was probably a little of both, with mixed news, but the positive being seen as the dominant story. As ever, this is largely US-based where job openings are sitting at a two and a half year low and US results for the second quarter are slightly down but better than expected. This provides the Federal Reserve with room to hold off on interest rate rises and the increasing possibility of the ‘soft landing’ for the all-important US economy.
The contrast here were the words of Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Central Bank, who reiterated that the fight against inflation was not over and that all options, including rising interest rates, remained on the table.
Continues….
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Risk warning
Please Note: This communication should not be read as giving specific advice regarding your personal circumstances. This would only be given following detailed assessment of your individual needs. The value of investments may fall as well as rise; you may get back less than invested. Past performance is not necessarily a guide to future returns.
