Almost exactly a year ago the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, announced to a surprised House of Commons that he was making his last Autumn Statement. This puzzling news was rapidly explained in the next few sentences, as the Chancellor revealed that he would be moving onto an Autumn Budget cycle in 2017, following a final Spring Budget earlier in the year.
I pointed out in the most recent Investment Services Quarterly that over the past fifteen or twenty years October had a slightly rude reputation as a bad month for equity market investors. October 2017 will go down in the history books as not only being a positive month for almost all global investors, but additionally one which saw many well-regarded volatility measures continuing to bump along the bottom.
What were you doing on the 5 July 2007? I cannot remember either, but the history books tell us that this was the last date when the Bank of England raised interest rates (by a quarter of a percentage to 5.75%). Since this point, interest rates have only fallen, including the most recent August 2016 decrease to the current rate of just 0.25%.