Should you dump equities?

At present, there is a distinct lack of high-quality income earners to buy at reasonable prices. According to recent research, that should send alarm bells ringing.

High-quality equities are expensive. That's something we've been telling you for a while now (although we haven't been entirely sure what we should all do about it). A note out from one of our favourite analysts, Andrew Lapthorne at Socit Gnrale confirms the extent of the problem.

Thanks to the generally weak fundamentals across the board, the pool of higher quality assets has become more limited in the last few years. And if you try and screen the remaining ones by some kind of valuation filter, not much comes up.

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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.