Going cheap – bargain assets to put in your portfolio now

Don’t try to predict the immediate future – just buy what’s cheap. John Stepek looks at the best buys in the market today.

It may have been the most foolhardy announcement of the American election campaign. In August, Republican candidate Mitt Romney said that if he became president, he wouldn't re-appoint Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman. Up until then, concerns about political impartiality might have held Bernanke back from acting ahead of voters going to the polls. But after that, what did he have to lose?

Last week, impending US election or no, Bernanke launched the third batch of American quantitative easing (QE). QE3 impressed even the most bullish investors. The Fed will print $40bn a month to buy mortgage-backed securities. The aim is to drive the price of home loans down from already low levels, and keep them there, thus aiding the nascent US property market recovery the only way the Fed knows how. Bernanke also promised to keep the federal funds rate (the American equivalent of the Bank of England base rate) at near zero until mid-2015.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.