Building resilient portfolios in an uncertain world
The first half of 2026 has been a reminder that market outcomes rarely follow a single, neat narrative. While headline returns have been reasonable, market behaviour has been shaped less by clear economic…
Clare Bruce · 4 min readModel Portfolio Service — factsheets, June 2026
Factsheets for all five portfolios in the range — allocation, top ten holdings and performance as at 30 June 2026.
PDF downloadModel Portfolio Service — factsheets, May 2026
Factsheets for all five portfolios in the range — allocation, top ten holdings and performance as at 31 May 2026.
PDF downloadMarket Commentary — March 2026
In the age of artificial intelligence, investors have rightfully been focussing on software and semiconductor companies. However, another category of businesses may prove equally attractive: HALO companies – those…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — February 2026
Gold’s abrupt 9% plunge on 30th January shows that an anarchic, gold-based international financial system will probably be inherently less stable that the dollar-based system has been. A lot of people think that…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — January 2026
Never mind the tariffs. The S&P 500 finished the year with a 16% gain, higher than the index’s long-term average of 10%. Indeed, “average” years are actually quite rare. In only 4 of the past 75 years has the S&P…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — December 2025
Some commentators have been comparing the AI trade to the dot-com bubble. There are certainly parallels, but there are also clear differences. Investors who took part in the boom of the late 1990s bid stocks higher…
GAM Investment Team · 12 min readMarket Commentary — November 2025
The pound has gained more than 6% against the US dollar this year, but the rally may already be over. Sterling’s strength owes much to the Bank of England, which has been slower to cut interest rates than central…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — October 2025
Investing and gambling are not the same. Investors have access to relevant information, such as a company’s competitive advantages, cash flow and earnings. Ironically though, this difference can make people feel…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — September 2025
Bond vigilantes are piling the pressure on chancellor Rachel Reeves. Global factors initially prompted the sell-off, with German and French bond yields hitting their highest levels since 2011. But Keir Starmer’s…
GAM Investment Team · 14 min readMarket Commentary — August 2025
We’ve heard the current stock-market rally referred to as “the most-hated rally in history”. Indeed, it has endured wars, high interest rates, inflation, huge government budget deficits and American tariffs. So…
GAM Investment Team · 14 min readMarket Commentary — July 2025
Interest rates may stay higher for longer. The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee (MPC) held borrowing costs at 4.25% at its June meeting. Interest rates have fallen 1% since the first cut in August last…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — June 2025
Prospect Theory proposes investors feel the pain of losses more intensely than the pleasure of equivalent gains. That can lead to irrational decision-making, particularly when the market is tanking. The problem…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — May 2025
The US government, which happily spent the last quarter of a century financing itself via the kindness of strangers, just raised two fingers to its primary lenders. Within days of Liberation Day, the US faced a…
GAM Investment Team · 14 min readMarket Commentary — April 2025
US brokerages are scrambling to revise their forecast models with tariff distress threatening to sap business confidence and slow down global growth. “Disruptive US policies have been recognised as the biggest risk…
GAM Investment Team · 19 min readMarket Commentary — March 2025
US merchant and marketing pioneer John Wanamaker used to joke that “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half ”. There are, however, times when 100% of marketing…
GAM Investment Team · 15 min readMarket Commentary — February 2025
The Nasdaq fell 3% in a single day late January on news DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, has released a large language model (LLM) more powerful and less expensive than established LLMs from Meta, OpenAI, and others…
GAM Investment Team · 14 min readMarket Commentary — January 2025
We wish all our clients and readers a very Happy New Year. 2024 was a good year for shares. The start and middle were better than the finish, as confidence that inflation and interest rates were heading decisively…
GAM Investment Team · 14 min readMarket Commentary — December 2024
As we approach the end of 2024, we are seeing two conflicting forces at work. Investment managers that are beating their benchmark are lightening up on their equity exposure and starting to plan for 2025…
GAM Investment Team · 12 min readMarket Commentary — November 2024
European companies will shortly be required to report data on water use, energy consumption, labour conditions, waste, chemical use and emissions throughout their supply chains. The reason is the EU’s sprawling…
GAM Investment Team · 12 min readMarket Commentary — October 2024
If one were to ask the average investor to name the leading S&P 500 sector this year, Information Technology might very well be the most-common answer. But that answer would be wrong, as the Utilities sector is…
GAM Investment Team · 15 min readMarket Commentary — September 2024
Insider buying (purchases of a company’s shares by its directors) tends to get more attention than insider selling. Indeed, Peter Lynch famously noted that “insiders might sell their shares for any number of…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — August 2024
Share prices have been hit by a global sell-off as weak US jobs growth stoked fears of a sudden downturn in the world’s largest economy. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped by more than 2.4% in just one day…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — July 2024
Stock markets have logged gains at mid-year that would be acceptable for a full year. But recent sentiment among investors has been held hostage by interest-rate obsession, with peaks for stocks on days when the…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — June 2024
The FTSE 100 has been left out of the “AI mania” gripping global markets, but the UK’s blue-chip index made new record highs in May and is up 7% for the year. London’s bias towards “old economy” sectors such as raw…
GAM Investment Team · 15 min readMarket Commentary — May 2024
Good feelings tend to fade away fast when confronted with discomfiting reality. Following hot jobs and inflation data, investors were confronted with stumbling stocks and surging Treasury yields though mid-April…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — April 2024
A chart really is worth a thousand words. Technical strategists say that investors in any given period are either in the mood to “sell the rally” (bear markets) or “buy the dip” (bull markets). If 2022 was all…
GAM Investment Team · 15 min readMarket Commentary — March 2024
Record highs for everyone – Tokyo, New York, Frankfurt, Paris but poor old London isn’t getting a look in. Maybe that’s a good thing. We don’t like all this froth. Yet according to Bank of America, overseas…
GAM Investment Team · 14 min readMarket Commentary — February 2024
The “Energizer Bunny” stock market seems to have a lot of juice left, as the major US indices power to new all-time highs. Each day and each week, the market goes up and the rubber band is stretched further and…
GAM Investment Team · 13 min readMarket Commentary — January 2024
We wish all our clients and readers a very Happy New Year. John Bogle, the founder of index-tracking firm Vanguard, once said “Intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of…
GAM Investment Team · 14 min read