As the first crane goes up, the stock market comes down.
I have taken a bit of a beating – down almost 15% since mid-November 2021. Scottish Mortgage is down more than 30% but MP Evans, Vietnam and Persoanal Assets are keeping the leaky ship afloat. In another part of of the financial forest, McInroy & Wood is sticking to its knitting, and an obscure hedge fund in the Cayman Islands is doing rather well. As usual I advise investing in safe, low risk funds but add in a pinch of Alpha if you are feeling adventurous.
Yesterday was a day of two funerals – one real and the other conveyed through an obituary in The Times. “Jan Collins, MBE, publisher and sportsman, was born on June 10, 1929.” He was more sportsman than publisher and he had just as much sense of humour and fun as his wife.
I had a memorable evening with him and his redoubtable mother, Lady Collins, Sir William’s widow, in the 1970s. In those days Collins presented a prize to the author of best religious book; a splendid ceremony but one to which I was not invited. I was asked to the dining room at the Collins’s London HQ in St James’s Place where the crème de la crème, at least in matters of Scripture, attended for a small, maybe a dozen, maybe fewer, attended.
I recognised the Archbishop of Canterbury but had to be told who the Apostolic Nuncio was, although he was in full kit. I was with Jan’s daughter and a highly strung red-head. We were there to serve the food; we were university friends. Understandably nobody paid much attention to us until we served Lady Collins. “This is my granddaughter and the other two are her friends” she announced fortissimo. Then we got respect.
One of us put a large salad bowl on the floor and another stood fair and square in it. Nobody seemed to notice until one of us spilt a jug of cream down the back of the Papal Nuncio’s tunic. It was a thick fabric and he was unaware. The ABoC saw this rather embarrassing incident. After the Apostolic Nuncio departed the ABoC burst into laughter and the party improved. Jan Collins took me to his office. Besides being equipped with a bottle of whisky, he seemed to be more interested in sharpening pencils, although both the drinking and sharpening activities had to be suspended when he had an in-coming call from Australia. Rupert Murdoch is an early riser.