Where to find value in volatile markets

Buying in to the stock markets at the moment won't make you rich. And cash is a non-starter. So where should you turn to find value? Merryn Somerset Webb picks one fund that seems to be getting it right.

I haven't always seen eye to eye with Ken Fisher, the US market guru. But, in much of his material, he tends to make one very good point: that you almost never get what you might think of as a normal return in the stock markets.

In his latest book, Debunkery, Fisher lays out the numbers. He puts the average nominal annual return on the S&P 500 since 1926 at 10%-12%. He then notes that the market rarely returns this kind of number in any given year. It has ended the year up between 0% and 10% in 12 years and between 10% and 20% in another 16 years.

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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.