Britain’s public markets are contracting in size. Years of underperforming listings, fund outflows, and the rise of sponsor takeovers have actively reduced the number of businesses listed in London, while at the same time the ones that remain continue to trade at a significant discount to their peers in the United States.
M&A touched record levels in H1 2026, but the market was increasingly defined by scale rather than breadth. The total value of announced deals hit $2.85tn in the first six months (LSEG), up 50% YoY and the highest year-to-date total since LSEG records began in 1980. Yet the total number announced fell 9% to 24,000 so far in 2026, a six-year low.
Most systematic trading strategies apply fixed weights regardless of market conditions. A momentum fund stays long whether the market is trending or oscillating. This paper builds and tests a system that routes capital differently depending on which of four market regimes is active at any given time.
US equity markets closed the week with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite both hitting fresh all-time highs on Friday, propelled by a stronger than expected April jobs report and continued AI earnings momentum, with the Nasdaq surging 4.51% on the week and the S&P 500 gaining 2.34%: marking the sixth consecutive winning week for both indices. The Dow lagged with a marginal +0.22% gain, dragged by Thursday’s broad sell-off.
Download PDF Introduction The UK government will spend close to £111.2bn servicing its debt this year, more than the entire schools budget. With 30-year gilt yields at their highest since 1998 and the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom at just £23.6bn, the pressure on the public finances is not letting up. A Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Principal component analysis is widely used for explaining and hedging in the interest rates markets due to its construction based on orthogonality which pairs well with the multicollinearity prevalent in rates. Its explanatory power is able to consistently explain over 95% of the variance in yield curve Read more…
Download PDF Abstract Every empirical study of financial returns since Mandelbrot (1963) has converged on the same short list of stylized facts: heavy polynomial tails, anomalous scaling of volatility with the aggregation horizon, power-law persistence of absolute returns, multiscaling across moment orders, and vanishing linear autocorrelation. These regularities are robust Read more…
Download PDF Introduction “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” Bill Gates wrote that in January 1996, in an essay better remembered for its three-word title, Content is King, than for the prediction itself. Three Read more…
Download PDF Introduction The AI trade is no longer behaving as one single boom, as the debate over which parts of the industry will actually capture the profits has intensified among investors. After two years in which artificial intelligence pushed valuations higher across semiconductors, cloud platforms, model labs, and enterprise Read more…
Download PDF In this article, we introduce the Gauss+ model for the yield curve. The model belongs to a wider class of models called Affine Term Structure Models (ATSMs) which serve the purpose of modelling the short rate for the pricing of risk-free term structures. These models typically link the Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Global humanoid robot shipments totaled approximately 13,000 units in 2025 against $10.3bn in venture funding across over 450 individual rounds. This divergence defines the analytical challenge facing the current robotics cycle. Barclays projects the global humanoid market to reach $35bn under its base case by 2035, and Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Restaurants in Japan offer a wide array of dishes that cater to different budgets and tastes, resulting in a highly diverse culinary landscape. Next to dining places that offer typical Japanese dishes, such as sushi, soba, and udon, restaurants offering Western-style food, such as hamburgers and ethnic European cuisine, Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Lead-lag relationships describe a simple claim: asset X may embed information about asset Y at two different points in time. If this delay is systematic and measurable than a model can exploit such a structure to produce forecasts and ultimately trading signals. The challenge is that the Read more…
Download PDF History Unilever’s [LON: ULVR] corporate structure has historically been defined by the coexistence of food and personal care businesses, which originated from the 1929 merger between Margarine Unie and Lever Brothers. The rationale for this consolidation at that time was largely based on scale and distribution synergies, but Read more…
Download PDF USA U.S. equities extended their rally this week, with the S&P 500 (+0.9% w/w) and the Nasdaq Composite (+1.1% w/w) both closing at fresh record highs, as investors looked through a still-challenging macro backdrop and focused instead on a crucial earnings test for mega-cap tech. The week made Read more…