How much do you need to pay someone to run a large company? Is one million enough? Five million? Ten? Fifty? Does it depend on the type...

I guess quite a number of readers will have visited Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the site of World War Two code-breaking; compared...

These days, even people who in the past used to think they understood what was happening in the market are frequently baffled by...

In the late seventeenth century, around the village of Salem, in Massachusetts, there was an outbreak of group hysteria that led to...

Steel is currently the metal of the moment – and not in a good way. The woes of Port Talbot, the UK’s last major-league crude steel...

At a meeting of some of the writers and sponsors of this site towards the end of last year, there was a debate about the value or...

The automation of the financial markets continues apace. Robo-advice is the coming thing in money management, apparently. I may have come...

The beginning of 2016 was horrendous across financial markets. Pretty much everything (excluding precious metals) took an almighty hit,...

It used to be relatively straightforward to predict aluminium prices. You could look at demand in the west, then estimate supply and come...

It is not immediately obvious how to establish a link between Austin Powers and Rhodium – but I’ll try. It centres, essentially, on...

On the heels of Anglo’s announcements of intended asset sales come BHP Billiton’s second half 2015 numbers. They show a loss for the...

‘Hard landings’ are uncomfortable. In the days when I flew small aeroplanes myself, I made enough of them, but the one that really sticks...

When I was a young clerk and junior dealer on the LME, I would sometimes hear the senior men say to one another as they left the morning...

Most of us greeted the New Year with a degree of optimism, I think – maybe rightly, maybe wrongly. But today Richard Horswill draws us a...

Jinzhou I have been in China twenty-four hours and no one has mentioned the crisis. Perhaps it is just too cold to talk, as the...

The London Metal Exchange Benevolent Fund is being wound up, after over a hundred  years. I suppose I’m probably fairly typical in that...

Financial market regulators come in for quite a lot of criticism, very often well deserved, but on occasion they are not actually the...

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” Those two lines (from ‘The Hollow Men’) are probably the most quoted...

2015 has been a pretty miserable year for investors. No asset class really stood out as providing more than a mediocre return, and in...

When people reach a certain age in every generation, we are liable to hear the words – ‘things were much better in my day’, and we know...