An imaginative approach to investing

When thinking about how macro trends could shape the world and your portfolio, it pays to think big, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

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Think big, but keep your feet on the ground
(Image credit: © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.)

There's a lovely line in The Greatest Showman (our family's current favourite film). Accused of being a fraud selling nothing but fakes by a humourless journalist(!),PT Barnum responds: "Men suffer more from imagining too little than too much". The original quote is a little more cumbersome: "Persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much". It's a criticism you could easily turn on many of today's investors.

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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.