Show Notes
Merryn Somerset Webb and John Stepek are joined by Hargreaves Lansdown’s Anna Macdonald to unpack the UK Budget, from fiscal drag and tax complexity to what it means for investors and small businesses. Plus, they ask whether the market's drastic reaction to a mild disappointment from Alphabet is a sign that AI exuberance is nearing an end. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
More from Merryn Talks Money
No investor can know exactly what markets will do next. So instead of trying to predict the next winner, the goal is to build a portfolio that can hold up across a range of scenarios — one that reflects your appetite for risk, your financial goals and how long you have to invest. In the third and final episode of the series, Merryn Somerset Webb, John Stepek and Bloomberg experts break down the building blocks of a diversified portfolio and explore how different assets perform as economic conditions change. They explain how to combine those assets and where diversification can fall short. Because investing isn't about knowing what comes next. It's about building a portfolio resilient enough for an uncertain future.
In this episode of Merryn Talks Money, Merryn Somerset Webb and Steve Hou, head of research at Silicon Data, delve into an emerging issue in the economics of artificial intelligence: token prices are falling while the cost of compute needed to produce them is rising. They discuss what this mismatch could mean for the valuations of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, whether demand can justify the enormous sums being invested in AI infrastructure and what happens when everyone has armies of AI agents working on our behalf. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Are we heading for another eurozone panic? This week, John Stepek and Bloomberg’s Sam Unsted discuss why political uncertainty in France is pushing up the country's borrowing costs, why the UK has (perhaps surprisingly) managed to avoid similar pressure, and where the first signs of strain are emerging in the AI boom. They also explore what slowing AI investment could mean for the investors, governments and industries banking on its growth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Passive investing was designed to track the market, not shape it. But as Merryn Somerset Webb and John Stepek explore in the second episode of The Portfolio Reset, the enormous growth of passive investing has changed the market it was built to follow, just as some of the world’s most valuable companies are staying private for longer. Using SpaceX as an example, they examine the changing relationship between public and private markets and why no investment is truly passive — someone is always making a decision somewhere in the process. As passive flows grow powerful enough to move markets, Merryn and John explain why investors should make sure they’re making active decisions in pursuit of their own financial goals, rather than leaving those decisions in the hands of strangers. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
After years of being overshadowed by US megacaps and the artificial intelligence boom, could smaller companies finally be ready for a comeback? Merryn Somerset Webb speaks with Downing fund manager Simon Evan-Cook and Odyssean Capital’s Stuart Widdowson about why small caps remain unusually cheap, what could bring investors back — and whether small-cap value could become the ultimate anti-AI trade. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.