Table of contents for Issue 1261-1262 in MoneyWeek

The global financial crisis of 2008 had one underlying cause and many proximate causes. The main problem was that central banks had kept the price of money far too low for far too long, inflating a giant credit bubble. They opened the casino, and then everyone rushed in and lost their heads. Home buyers threw cash at home loans that were far too lenient and Wall Street underwriters packaged them into complicated and risky securities. Enter the credit-ratings agencies, who often helped disguise the contents of bundles of subprime debt packages by giving them top ratings. Skewed incentives played a key part in the debacle. US issuers paid for their own ratings, and they shopped around. If Moody’s wouldn’t provide a triple A rating, S&P might. “Credit-ratings agencies were among…

European shares are going “gangbusters” this year, with the Stoxx Europe 600 benchmark up 16% in dollar terms, says The Economist. Yet while every investor knows that German defence firms have “gone ballistic”, few have noticed the surge in neighbouring Poland, where stocks have more than doubled since a trough in 2022. The key turning point came in 2023, when an investor-friendly government led by former European Council president Donald Tusk took office. Investors have been attracted to Germany by government plans to boost defence spending, but Poland is going even further, planning to spend 4.7% of GDP on defence this year. And on a mere ten times earnings (compared with a European average of 15), shares in Warsaw are still “enticingly cheap”. Polish stocks are Europe’s “standout winners” this…

Gold has been “a light in the investing darkness” this year, says Jack Hough in Barron’s. In sterling terms, it rallied more than a fifth between 1 January and a peak last month. Yet last week the metal suffered its worst week in six months as cooling global trade tensions prompt investors to pull back their bets. Still, over the past 20 years the metal has returned 630% in US dollar terms, narrowly beating US stocks. After an “extraordinary” gold rally, “in our view the rest of this year will prove more challenging”, Hamad Hussain of Capital Economics tells The Times. But, “structural factors” such as massive central bank buying should “put a floor under prices... and probably boost gold to new all-time highs next year”.…

Last week, the share price of eToro Group, which offers a platform where users can trade and follow top investors in shares and crypto, rose 29% in its first session following its initial public offering (IPO), which was oversubscribed by more than 20 times, say Bloomberg’s Matthew Griffin and Anthony Hughes. The flotation raised nearly $620m, giving eToro a market value of more than $5.5 bn. While that is less than the $10.4bn it was seeking when it tried to list via a special-purpose acquisition company (Spac) a few years ago, it is still far more than the $3.5bn implied by the last private funding round in 2023. eToro seems to have benefited from optimism about the rise of the small investor, says Lex in the Financial Times. Shares in…

Voyager Technologies has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in New York to capitalise on booming US government spending on defence and space exploration, says Bloomberg. The US company generates most of its revenue from contracts from the US government and its affiliates, including a $217.5m development grant from Nasa to design Starlab, a commercial space station to replace the International Space Station, which it will also operate with equity partners. Voyager posted a net loss of $26.9m on revenue of $34.5m for the first quarter of this year, compared with a net loss of $14.8m on revenue of $30.2m for the same period in 2024.…

Hong Kong CATL surges on IPO: Shares in the world’s largest electric-vehicle (EV) battery maker, Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), rose 16.4% on their debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange in the world’s biggest listing so far this year, say Wataru Suzuki and Peggy Ye on Nikkei Asia. The closing price gave the Chinese company a market capitalisation of about $166bn. CATL, which supplies Tesla, Toyota and Volkswagen and is also listed in Shenzhen, raised HK$35.7bn (£3.4bn), which will mostly be used to build a factory in Hungary. It is also jointly investing with European carmaker Stellantis to build a factory in Spain. The large listing highlights investors’ interest in big Chinese manufacturers as the China-US trade war reshapes global supply chains. Over half of CATL’s offering was bought by…

● “Mr Kipling is exceedingly brave,” says Jennifer Hughes in the Financial Times. Premier Foods, the cake brand’s owner, has transformed itself from a “debt-laden pudding” to a top FTSE-250 performer. Shares recently hit a 15-year high on strong full-year earnings and a higher dividend. With “dough to spare” and an “appetite for acquisitions and international expansion”, Premier has made headway in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Recent deals have been small, which is reassuring for investors who recall the “overindulgence” that forced it into a debt restructuring more than a decade ago. Still, it now has ambitious plans to benefit from “a US perception that British cakes are a premium product”. At the firm’s current growth rate and valuation, it would take 15 years to reach the size of…

Markets are displaying “an extraordinary amount of complacency” regarding the full impact of Donald Trump’s trade tariffs and other risks, says Jamie Dimon, the long-standing chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank. “We have huge deficits, we have what I consider almost complacent central banks,” Dimon told JPMorgan’s annual investor day. “You all think they can manage all this. I don’t think they can. “Even at these low levels, if they stay where they are today, [those are] pretty extreme tariffs.” The US cannot quickly switch to using domestically produced goods to replace imports that have become more expensive, since building manufacturing plants takes at least three to four years. “You also don’t know how every country is going to respond… trading partners are responding by cutting deals…

■ Healthcare real estate investor Primary Health Properties (PHP) has made a third cash-and-shares bid for rival Assura, this time amounting to £1.68bn. The new offer values Assura at slightly under 52p based on a PHP share price of 100p – a near 5% premium to a bid from a consortium led by US private equity firm KKR. Assura’s board, which had previously recommended the KKR bid, says it is reviewing PHP’s revised offer. Three of Assura’s major shareholders – Aberdeen, Schroders and the TR Property Investment Trust – told the Sunday Times they favour an Assura-PHP merger so the new entity could remain listed in London. ■ Augmentum Fintech, the specialist trust investing in early-stage financial technology firms, has led a £4.5m funding round for the RetailBook platform. RetailBook…

conversableeconomist.com “My guess is that everyone would be happier” if economic growth were more like that of yeast, with everything expanding at once and the rewards evenly distributed, than like that of mushrooms, with spurts of growth in certain areas, says Timothy Taylor. “But most of the time, it’s mushrooms.” As a new report from McKinsey, The Power of One, points out, national productivity growth is more a matter of a few firms taking bold action than it is of millions raising their game. This may explain why the US economy outperforms those of places such as the UK – it has more of the kind of “standout” firms that add to productivity growth and fewer of the “stragglers” that hold it back. “Perhaps the biggest lesson,” though, is that…

In 2024, $7.7bn less was spent on art than the year before – a 12% drop in global sales, according to the latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report. Despite this, the overall number of transactions increased by 3%. So, activity and appetite haven’t fallen, but increased. Spending is down, yes, but participation is up. The market isn’t shrinking, it’s shifting. Buyers are buying differently. The 12% global decline is largely driven by China’s 31% drop. A $3.77bn contraction in one region accounts for nearly half the total global fall. If we were to strip that figure out, what remains is perhaps energy redistributed into smaller segments, younger buyers, and more intimate transactions. So we don’t know how much of what we’re seeing is real, and how much has…

Could the Mansion House reforms put your pension at risk? The government has just announced a landmark deal with 17 of the UK’s largest providers of workplace pensions : the firms that invest the money that you and your employer pay into your pension scheme at work. All have promised to invest at least 10% of this money in private assets, with at least 5% of this going into UK investments. Private assets include companies not quoted on the stockmarket – such as early stage start-ups – as well as investments such as infrastructure and renewable energy projects. This deal could unlock £50bn for much-needed investment in the UK economy. Pensions savers could also benefit as private assets can generate high long-term returns. They also provide diversification, smoothing out the…

Last year, we launched a survey to find out which brokers and other firms British investors use the most and what they think of them. The results were very informative and we used them to compile our first Readers’ Choice Awards. So in April, we ran a similar poll again, with even better results this time. More than 3,000 of you responded, giving us your opinions on brokers’ costs, breadth of service, ease of use and customer support. We have put these together into our updated Readers’ Choice Awards for 2025. The investment industry does not tend to change very quickly and so it is not surprising that several of the top-scoring firms are similar from year to year. Still, one can see trends in your voting and feedback that…

The Perfect Game Tetris: From Russia With Love Henk Rogers and Mark Benioff Di Angelo Publications (£26.99) The Soviet Union was notorious for the poor quality and limited amounts of its consumer goods, which were decades behind those in the West. One major exception was Tetris, which would become one of the biggest-selling computer games of all time. While the game itself was first developed in 1984, and originally released on PC a year later, it didn’t become a mega-hit until it was bundled with the Nintendo Gameboy in 1989. The person who played a key role in arranging for this to happen was games developer Henk Rogers. In The Perfect Game, Rogers tells the story of how this came about. By the late 1980s, Rogers had built a lucrative…

“Britain has lost more billionaires over the past 12 months than at any point in its history” owing to the government’s crackdown on the non-domiciled tax status, says Robert Watts in The Sunday Times. Many wealth creators are considering relocating to countries such as the UAE, Singapore and Italy, which have better financial incentives. The combined wealth of the 350 entries on the newspaper’s Rich List totalled £772.8bn, down 3% from last year and marking a third successive annual drop in value. Gopi Hinduja and family, owner of the conglomerate Hinduja Group, topped the ranking for the fourth consecutive year with a fortune of £35.3bn, followed by property investors David and Simon Reuben with £26.9bn. The King’s £640m now matches that of former prime minister Rishi Sunak. And make-up entrepreneur…

Fashion group Burberry’s share price jumped by almost a fifth last week after the British luxury brand announced plans to shed 1,700 jobs, says Helen Reid in Reuters – 20% of its global workforce. The hope is that this will “revive’ Burberry’s financial performance by enabling it to cut costs. Investors were also cheered by an unexpectedly small fall in sales in the year to 29 March, thanks to double-digit increases in purchases from retailers following the group’s fashion show in February. These also ensured that Burberry narrowly avoided a loss for the year, at least in terms of adjusted operating profit. It’s hard to view the news of “more financial losses and hundreds more job cuts” as anything other than “very disappointing”, says Nicole Mowbray in The Telegraph. Burberry…

Five to buy AstraZeneca The Telegraph AstraZeneca’s shares slipped after the group’s first-quarter results, which showed revenue growth falling short of expectations. The fall was “unjustified” as the pharmaceutical giant is still on track to meet full-year guidance. AstraZeneca’s strong fundamentals, favourable long-term growth outlook and sound strategy mean it is well-placed to overcome uncertainties. 10,346p Rank Group The Times Rank Group’s half-year net gaming revenue and operating profit increased, while the casino and bingo operator restored its interim dividend and said it expects to meet full-year forecasts. Rank has been refurbishing its casinos because it can’t open new ones without an act of Parliament. Recent regulatory changes will allow it to add more gaming machines, potentially boosting earnings. Rank’s Spanish arm lags the UK’s, but the British digital business…

News that UK inflation has jumped to its highest in more than a year is not especially encouraging for the economy. We knew that it was on the way – prices hikes from utility companies guaranteed that April’s data would not be pretty. However, the increase to 3.5% on the consumer price index (CPI) measure is greater than expected and does not sit especially well with the Bank of England’s projections that inflation would peak at 3.7% later this year and fade smoothly back to the 2% target. Expectations for further interest-rate cuts have been dialled back a little as a result, though there is no reason to put much weight on that. Markets tend to overreact to one month’s bad number, even though there is plenty of noise in…

Private credit remains a niche investment, to the point where many of you reading this article will immediately be wondering exactly what it is. In a nutshell, private credit means lending by non-bank entities – such as hedge funds or private-equity firms – and despite being a very specialist area, it is now a crucial part of financial markets. Globally, private credit has grown to roughly $2.1trn in assets under management from almost nothing in 15 years, according to data from a recent Goldman Sachs report. This has happened because private-credit lenders have stepped into the gap left by banks in the years after the financial crisis. Nimble lenders Private-credit firms are often more nimble and able to offer more flexibility to borrowers, who often prefer to work with them…

Trump triggers US brain drain Patricia CohenThe New York Times Donald Trump’s decision to freeze or cancel billions in state funding for universities and science institutes has left rival nations racing to attract talent, says Patricia Cohen. The US has long been a “magnet for top researchers, scientists and academics”. Budgets, pay, laboratories, equipment: all were bigger. Last year, America spent almost $1trn, around 3.5% of total economic development, on research and development. Trump has provided a “brain gain opportunity” for others. To tempt researchers, the EU plans to spend an extra $556m over the next two years. That’s not all. Spain is spending an extra €45m to “lure” scientists and Keir Starmer reportedly plans to spend $66m to “finance and relocate international scientists” too. Other countries, from Canada to…

spectator.co.uk When Rusia attacked Ukraine and sent global gas prices soaring, then prime minister Boris Johnson set out a plan to make Britain’s energy supply secure, says Sam Dumitriu. It included a target to quadruple the amount of power Britain gets from nuclear. Instead of one plant every decade, Britain would start building a new one every year, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s. How’s it going? Not well. Costs have soared worldwide, not least because of disproportionate safety regulation. Britain’s plan relied not only on “giga-scale” plants such as Hinkley Point C, but also deploying new small modular reactors (SMRs), made by Rolls-Royce in the Midlands. But building something new is complicated and subject to costly errors and delays. To learn lessons quickly, Great British Nuclear was…

Look at the reverse of a US dollar bill and below “The United States of America” you will notice the words “In God we trust”. That’s all very well for the US government, whose motto it is. There is no higher authority. But for “we the people”, we have little choice but to put our faith in the government to give these intrinsically worthless bits of paper value – whether they be dollars, pounds or euros. It wasn’t always like this. For millennia, the idea that you would trust in the government would have been absurd, especially when your dinner was at stake. (Some of us still believe it is.) It wasn’t the government that gave money its value but what that money was made of – gold and silver…

Whisky as an alternative asset class has undergone a transformation over the past 15 years. According to the Knight Frank Wealth Report, the definitive guide to alternative assets, and its Luxury Investment index (KFLII), the value of rare whisky bottles increased 280% over the ten years to the end of 2023. The Rare Whisky Apex 1000 index, which tracks the price movement of 1,000 rare bottles, recorded growth of 416% between 2012 and 2022. Meanwhile, various sources have cited growth in the value of whisky casks of between 10% and 15% over the past decade. However, while the performance of bottles and casks of whisky over the past 15 years has drawn in capital and investors from all over the world, and helped whisky stand on its own as an…

● More than half of savers cashing in their pension funds for the first time withdraw all their money, says The Pension Regulator. This may be the right option in some cases, but 70% of those savers are taking no independent financial advice on retirement planning. The watchdog is calling for more support for workplace pension-scheme members amid fears that some savers risk running out of cash early in retirement, or leaving themselves vulnerable to an large tax bill. ● The first quarter of 2025 saw HM Revenue & Customs pay £44m to pensions savers who have been overtaxed. The tax authority has repeatedly promised to fix a failure in its systems that causes this problem: its technology is currently unable to recognise that savers often make a large withdrawal…

Mary Perkins met her future husband, Doug, on the first day of term at Cardiff University in the early 1960s. They were both studying optometry. It was the start of an enduring partnership both personally and professionally. The couple, who went on to build the £4bn Specsavers empire, are now in their eighties, but still heavily involved in the family-held business, which is based in Guernsey and run by their son John. While Doug focuses on “innovation and new business”, Mary “devotes herself to the welfare of staff and customers”, says the Financial Times. Once famed for donning wigs and visiting stores incognito to test out the customer care, she says she’s “too easily recognised now”. But there are always opportunities for impromptu market research. “I chat with everyone: taxi…

2023 The Dell Vineyard, Yr Afanc, Wales £20, thedellvineyard.co.uk This year’s Welsh Wine Week takes place from 30 May until 8 June. I attended the annual Welsh Wine Showcase Event in March on the hunt for a wine to celebrate this festival in this special double-issue magazine, and I came up with three! My headliner is a jawdroppingly beautiful wine named after a mythical beast who is said to slink in the depths of Welsh mountain lakes. It is made from reichensteiner, schönberger and phoenix, and it reminds me of the classically dimensioned and uniquely beguiling rare French white style, Jurançon Sec. The stone fruit, wildflower, quince and jasmine tones are exhilarating, and the bitter bite of acidity and minerality on the finish brings the exuberant fruit to a dramatic…

The Gang of Three Written by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky Directed by Kirsty Patrick Ward King’s Head Theatre, London, until 1 June For more than a decade from the mid-1960s, Anthony Crossland, Dennis Healey and Roy Jenkins were the rising stars of the Labour Party. The question seemed to be not whether one of them would become prime minister, but who would get the top job. Yet while all had outstanding careers – Crossland as foreign secretary, Healey as chancellor and Jenkins as president of the European Commission – none would ultimately fulfil those expectations. The Gang of Three – a new political drama playing at the King’s Head in Islington for the rest of this month – examines the friendship and rivalry between the trio. The action…

“Crypto has taken on a new role at the centre of American public life. Several cabinet officials have large investments in digital assets... The industry’s largest businesses are among the biggest donors to election campaigns... The biggest investors in [Donald] Trump’s meme coin get to have dinner with the president...This is ironic, given crypto’s origins. When bitcoin was started in 2009, a utopian, anti-authoritarian movement welcomed it. Crypto’s earliest adopters had lofty goals about revolutionising finance and defending individuals against expropriation and inflation. They wanted to hand power to small investors... That is all forgotten now. Crypto has not just facilitated fraud [and] money-laundering... The industry has also developed a grubby relationship with... [the] government that outstrips that of Wall Street... Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset.” The Economist…

Diageo has reported an unexpectedly high 5.9% increase in organic net sales to $4.37bn in the quarter to 31 March, says Jessica Newman in The Times. But it has still launched a $500m cost-cutting plan. The move will involve “simplifying the spirits giant’s work processes and reviewing supply chains, advertising and marketing spend”. The new strategy comes at a time when President Donald Trump’s tariffs are expected to cost the firm $150m a year, a figure that Diageo claims is “manageable”. The stock barely budged from an eight-year low on the news. Diageo’s estimate that Trump’s tariffs will cost it $150m “could almost be considered cheery news” since it said in February that extra border duties could hit profits by $200m in a mere four months, says Nils Pratley in…

Global hotel group Accor was the best-performing stock in France last year thanks to the post-Covid travel boom, says Stanislas Feuillebois in Le Revenu. The owner of the Raffles and Sofitel brands (among others), Accor has struggled this year as investors worry about a weaker global economy. The board says inbound bookings from Europe to the US for this summer are down 25% amid a boycott by consumers. Still, the US represents less than 5% of Accor’s income, which is increasingly drawn from high-growth regions such as the Middle East and India instead. Recent wobbles may prove a good entry point into a decent dividend payer that is well-positioned in a structural growth industry.…

Sunday saw three “bellwether elections in Europe that were superficially wins for the centre ground” but which in fact underscored how “fear and awe of Donald Trump is influencing political outcomes everywhere”, says The Times. Populists have found a “kind of guardian” in the American president and have “become kingmakers rather than insurgents” as results in Portugal, Poland and Romania – all core EU member and key Nato allies– have shown. In Poland, the conservative mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski won 31.4% of the vote against the little known nationalist Karol Nawrocki’s 29.5%. However, in the run-off on 1 June, Nawrocki may garner the votes of the “even more fiercely Trumpian” Slawomir Mentzen, who won 14.8%, and Grzegorz Braun, who took the surprise fourth place with 6%. In Portugal,…

Wall Street was booming after the presidential election last November. Big business was planning a wave of investment, and global multinationals were shifting operations to the United States. The expectation was that president Donald Trump would run a pro-business, pro-enterprise administration. Yet there has been little sign of it so far. The president’s time in government has been dominated by a huge round of tariffs – a disguised tax, and one that will provoke chaos in supply chains. We have seen a chaotic policymaking, damaging confidence, with plans changing day by day. And we may even see tax rises on the rich. It has hardly been an inspiring mix, and it is not a great surprise that US businesses’ confidence has fallen sharply over the last few months. Wall Street…

The currency exchange rates that we see and use every day are nominal exchange rates. They tell us what we get if we swap a unit of one currency for another – for example, a pound-dollar exchange rate of $1.25 means that we get 1.25 dollars for every pound. This is all that matters if we are buying something from abroad or sending money internationally. But it doesn’t tells us everything we want to know about the value of different currencies. For more insight into this, we can use the real exchange rate (RER), which combines the nominal exchange rate with the ratio of the price of goods or services in the two countries. Say a burger costs $5 in the US, but £3 in the UK. Then the real…

A US activist is accusing watchmaker Swatch of being run for the benefit of its founding family and ignoring the interests of minority investors. The Hayek family own 25% of the shares but have 44% of the voting rights. Nick Hayek has served as CEO since 2003, while his sister Nayla has been chair since 2010. Swatch has faced growing criticism after years of weak returns, which Hayek has rejected while musing about taking the firm private cheaply. Now, Steven Wood – whose firm GreenWood Investors owns 0.5% of the shares – is calling for Swatch to communicate better with investors and to focus on revitalising its high-end brands such as Breguet. “The undervaluation is eye-opening,” says Wood, who this week lost out in a long-shot bid for a board…

“[My wife] Georgia is the outcome of one of my worst-ever investments. I have a portfolio of about 20 small businesses, and one of them fell by the wayside, but the founder... knew Georgia and set us up. So I may have lost £150,000, but I gained a wife. Maybe it was my best investment ever?” BrewDog’s co-founder James Watt (pictured), quoted in The Sunday Times “I don’t want to become a nouveau riche like many of the English artists. They wallow in luxury; they don’t know what to do with their money.” Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus following the band’s victory at Eurovision in 1974, quoted in The Times “The thing that worries me constantly is: will I have enough money if I stop now and there’s no more income? I’m…

capx.co People say that “nothing works in Britain” and “we can’t build anything any more”, says David Milner. But that’s not true generally. On 14 March, digging started on a busy Coventry street to build a tram line. It is an experimental project aiming to do everything differently, with modular, pre-made sections for tracks, fast-tracked planning approval and, crucially, a construction process “so gentle” that it will not touch “the jungle of cables and pipes snaking beneath the streets”. Traffic was still running on the remaining lanes as construction began. On 19 May, just eight weeks after work began, the trams started to run. It took Edinburgh six years and Manchester four to get theirs going. And it’s cheap, too. The track is expected to cost around £15m per kilometre,…

Many luxury products can be considered a Veblen good – one for which, counter-intuitively, demand intensifies even as prices rise. But wine enjoys another attribute that is harder to replicate among, say, watches or cars – its inherent scarcity increases over time, simply because people drink it. According to wine investment firm WineCap’s recently published Wealth Report, 96% of UK wealth managers expect demand for fine wine to increase in 2025 – more than for fine art (94%), watches (90%), luxury handbags (86%) or coins (78%). Collectors, it adds, are attracted to fine wine by its proven long-term price appreciation and intrinsic scarcity. And should those cases of first-growth Bordeaux fail to gain in value as expected, you can at least open them and drink them. So, where to begin?…

Increasingly, investors overlook small but good-quality businesses, leaving the valuations at depressed levels. Volex (Aim: VLX) is one such firm. This is a company that has quietly reshaped itself into a high-value operation, but remains underappreciated. Over the past decade, under the stewardship of Nat Rothschild, Volex has evolved from a lacklustre manufacturer of commodity-like products into a dynamic business with a focus on moving up the value chain. Rothschild is a well-known figure who personally owns a quarter of the business. Prior to his involvement in Volex, his corporate history was mixed, but his transformation of Volex has been excellent. Yet its shares are languishing, partly dragged down by broader outflows from the Aim market, because of recent changes in UK inheritance-tax rules. For patient investors, this presents an…

The equity-release industry is booming. Older Britons unlocked £665m of finance from their properties between January and March, the Equity Release Council reveals, almost a third more than in the same period of 2024. The trend reflects two separate drivers. Traditionally, equity release has been the preserve of “asset-rich, cash-poor” pensioners. These are people who own their home, but are struggling to get by on limited income in retirement. The size of this group has grown in recent years amid the cost-of-living crisis. For many, it makes sense to use the value of their homes to boost those incomes. The second factor is concern about inheritance tax (IHT). With the threshold at which IHT becomes payable on estates now frozen until at least 2030 – and last year’s budget expanding…

“The new technology platform from Ascendis can be used for a range of rare diseases” Biotechnology companies have been a cornerstone of the pharmaceutical industry since the mid-1990s. Today, many of these firms have matured into profitable companies. We divide biotechs into three categories: profitable, revenue growth, and development-stage. This classification helps us identify solid investments with approved products that tend to perform well during economic downturns. Revenue-growth companies are particularly compelling. These firms have successfully navigated the rigorous clinical development process and received drug approvals from regulators. While they are generating top-line sales, they have not yet turned a profit, making them medium-risk investments, as they still need to prove themselves on the market. Around 70% of new drug approvals are now attributed to biotechs, a notable change from…

Rashid Ali regularly sends employees to “Meat School”, a specially designed course at the University of Wisconsin where they learn exactly how Chomps’ upmarket meat snacks are made. It’s all hands on deck, says Bloomberg Businessweek. The company – fittingly run out of Chicago’s famed meatpacking district – is churning out two million sticks a day, yet still can’t satisfy America’s voracious appetite for “on-the-go protein”. One of the fastest-growing US food brands by sales (which are likely to double this year to almost $1bn), it is struggling to meet demand. Not bad for a venture that started life 13 years ago as “a side hustle”. It all began with a poker game where Ali, then a strategy consultant with Alvarez & Marsal, was introduced to Pete Maldonado, a former…