What to buy as revolution spreads in the Middle East

Protests in the Middle East and North Africa have gone beyond the point where they can be easily contained. What happens next is anyone's guess. So it makes sense to set your portfolio up for an uncertain world. John Stepek explains how.

"We are not afraid any more. Death is going to come anyway. It will come in the road or it will come in the bed. Enough is enough."

Those are the words of a Tripoli resident, quoted in the FT's front page story on the uprising in Libya.

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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.