Tom Stevenson

England

Contributing Editor at London Review of Books

Foreign correspondent. Contributing Editor @LRB. [email protected]

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Articles

it pays to stay calm

1 week ago | telegraph.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

The first reason that I am relaxed about equity market volatility is that you have not lost anything at all until you have sold an underwater investment. Unless you sell, it is just a number on a screen. And avoiding being a forced seller of that investment is simple. You just need to ensure that you have enough cash to cover your needs until the market has bounced back. This is doubly important when you start to live off your accumulated savings in retirement.
Markets are in flux

2 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

When it comes to the most commonly used valuation measure, which compares share prices to earnings, it's another case of "move on, nothing to see". The ratio of price to earnings in the US has fallen from 26 to 21, which means the market is no longer expensive but not obviously cheap either. With the first quarter earnings season due to kick off, the focus will be on just how long profits can keep growing in the face of the tariff squeeze.
Trump's trade war has been a gift to China

3 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

While these impacts are clear in the performance of the market indices, it is at the individual stock level that the effect is most obvious. The dispersion of returns over the past three months between the winners and losers is breathtaking. An investor who looked at Elon Musk's rise to prominence in the Trump White House at the start of the year and invested £100 in Tesla shares would have £64 today.
Betting against Uncle Sam is a high-risk strategy

4 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Tom Stevenson
The world's markets have turned upside down

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

I have always employed it when allocating my own investments, and I have for many years divided my self-invested pension using a simple, possibly over-cautious, 10-way split. If anything, diversification is more important to me now than ever. That is because my days of accumulating my retirement savings are largely in the past and, as I look towards drawing an income from them, a smooth ride and capital preservation are more of a priority than shooting the lights out in performance terms.
Ignore the Trump slump

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

My pension, Isa and other investments have always been very broadly diversified, with exposures to the US, UK, Europe, Japan, emerging markets, some bonds, property, infrastructure, gold and cash. Asset allocation is within our gift. It is always something we can change. We recently analysed what would have happened to a portfolio split evenly across 15 different investments, comparing its performance with the same amount invested exclusively in each of them.
Why I don't think America First means Wall Street First

1 month ago | livewiremarkets.com | Tom Stevenson

At the start of the year, I highlighted three risks for 2025 - the return of inflation, Donald Trump’s trade policies and the US market’s concentration. I said: ‘navigating these will most likely involve more diversification than has been necessary in recent years.’ My fund picks for the next 12 months consequently included a global fund with an underweight to the US, an income-focused fund with a bias towards Europe, and a US fund with no exposure to the Magnificent Seven.
Money is flowing away from Trump’s Wall Street

1 month ago | msn.com | Tom Stevenson

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Boardroom Briefings: the rise of data centres

1 month ago | lexology.com | Tom Stevenson

While scrolling through the 10,000 photos and 1,500 videos on my phone, I reflected on the fact that we easily overlook all the data powering of our devices, which needs to be stored somewhere physical. Enter the data centre, a hyper-scale facility specialising in scalable data storage, distribution and handling. In September 2024, the UK government recognised the ever-increasing requirements and announced that data centres are now classified as critical national infrastructure (CNI).
Beyond Mesopotamia

1 month ago | lrb.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work?