Michael Hewson

If today’s outage at AWS (Amazon Web Services) has shown us anything it’s how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted.

We’ve seen a fairly benign reaction to an unremarkable set of results for BP today, the shares slipping back from 8-month highs.

Transfer pricing is no longer a technical exercise but a governance issue involving decisions about value chains, intellectual property ownership, and distributor characterization that must withstand courtroom-level interrogation.

We’ve seen a remarkably strong performance from the FTSE100 this year with multiple instances of new record highs, and well in excess of expectations of a move towards and through the 9,000 level that we were hoping for at this time last year.

During 2024 both US and UK banks performed reasonably well, comfortably outperforming banks in Europe, despite concerns in the US over the mid-tier banking sector in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

On the topic of AI, I've lost count of the number of times it's been said this year that AI is in a bubble, and yet despite some sharp selloffs the market has so far managed to retain its resilience.

As the G20 Summit approached, the conversation around a new African credit ratings agency was gaining momentum.

In this week’s podcast we talked about the negative market reaction to the latest numbers from Tesco and Sainsbury and posed the question as to why?

As IPOs go you couldn’t get a more exciting one than the prospect of a company that sends rockets into orbit, and then is able to land the boosters back on the ground to be reused again.

I’m old enough to remember when 2021 was a record year for IPOs with 126 companies listing and a total of £16.8bn raised.