The commodities comeback

Shares are starting to look expensive, says Merryn Somerset Webb. It's time to give commodities another look.

The annual moment of truth has arrived. Companies are publishing their numbers for the full year of 2013 and it is time for us all to "brace for a moment of particularly inconvenient truth", says John Authers in the Financial Times.

Profits aren't rising fast enough to justify stock-market valuations. The market soared last year forward earnings multiples are about 16 times at the moment. That's "well above the historical average" of more like 13 times.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.