Our stockmarket has been an international pariah this year and the exodus is gathering pace, says Daniel Grote on Citywire. The latest monthly Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey of global fund managers revealed their allocation to UK stocks had fallen to a near-record low. British investors are just as negative.
Meanwhile, a harmful no-deal Brexit is still not widely thought likely, but in any case, valuations have reached the point where plenty of bad news is already in the price. The FTSE 100 offers a forward dividend yield of 4.9%, says Hamish McRae in the Evening Standard. The yield has very rarely been above 4% in the past 30 years. And the fundamentals are solid, with the labour market bolstering wages, which bodes well for consumption, and UK corporate profits (the mid-caps and blue-chips combined) reaching an all-time high in the year to November, according to the Share Centre. The upshot? Next year could well be a much better one for UK shares than 2018.
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