The Information Age is about to get interesting

The IT revolution has been around for a while now, says Merryn Somerset Webb. But we're just getting to the good bit.

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In this week’s podcast (moneyweek.com/podcasts) I talk to Rob Arnott, the chair of Research Affiliates. We talked a good bit about the UK market: he is as convinced as we are that now with Brexit off the front pages (the gas shortage has nothing to do with Brexit) and the UK’s Covid-19 strategy proving to have been more successful than one might have suspected last year, there is no good reason for our market to be trading at a 60% discount to the US market. We talked about the US market too – I wondered if it is possible that the valuation differential between the US and the UK might be closed not by the UK rising, but by the US falling.

In part, yes, says Arnott – there are parts of the US market that are definitely not in a bubble of any description (think energy) but there are other parts that are (technology). It makes sense for investors to steer away from the super expensive to the reasonably valued.

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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.