James Paterson @Airwalk86: "Good morning guys and I..."

United Kingdom

Good morning guys and I hope you all had a decent start to the week? You know as investors our goal is to maximise returns, projected out over a certain time horizon which will usually be determined by our age at time of inception (when we first started to invest). In our earlier working years we should be positioning ourselves in growth assets and be prepared to stomach high levels of volatility which normally then leads to outperformance - hence the usual composition of this portfolio as a man in his mid to late 30's! However I like to keep up with current affairs and at least have an opinion on the possible near-term path of markets for peace of mind. There is a dreaded word starting to creep it's way back into the market conscience and that is INFLATION! Now currently it is just a whisper but as a result of the Middle-Eastern conflict we are seeing higher input costs as a result of the rising $OIL price and a strengthening $USDOLLAR which is bad for business & multinational corporate earnings. As a result there is a risk that we see rate hikes out of the major economies with the bank of Australia hiking rates about an hour ago by 0.25% to 4.10% 4% is seen by many wealth investors as a good rate to invest in government debt to lock in a solid return, pulling money from equity markets into bonds. We currently have the fed, BOE & ECB up this week for the next rate decisions with all EXPECTED at present to hold rates however a shock rate hike is not out of the question for any of them due to current events. Needless to say a rate hike out of one of these big players would again be short-term negative. So we will watch the news and markets closely this week. On a positive we had a great day yesterday with this year's return now far above $NDQ100 with a 5% + return now even after giving back 3% (at time of writing). I still see a great deal of potential for a good year for risk assets this 2026. $SOL $ETH Cheers, James

Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.