Please find this week’s edition of Weekly Digest attached.
COVID Update
Some improvement in trends – decelerating growth (e.g. -4% cases globally week on week) is showing measures are having an effect. Italy, Russia, Poland, Germany, the UK, Spain and France all saw declines in the seven-day average number of new infections:
I set out below an interesting chart from Berenberg highlighting the hoped for progression regarding COVID vaccinations:
Markets
Thanksgiving contributed to a relatively quiet end to last week, with November being a sharply positive month for investors. Recent trends continued including environmental, financial and mining names being in favour.
This week sees relatively few company results, although DocuSign is due on Thursday, Hipgnoisis Songs announced a useful net asset value upgrade today and Mirriad Advertising announced at the end of last week a capital raise to support their US growth, which has given another boost to the share price.
We are having an increasing number of conversations with clients about low interest rates. This leads me to share this chart highlighting there is now $17.5trn negative-yielding government debt (also now $1.4trn corporate debt with a negative yield):
