Notes on money, markets and the businesses behind them.
Long-form essays on real acquisitions, property plays, fundraising and the unsentimental economics of modern investment — written for principals who read for substance.
Market BriefWhy the UAE investor quietly fell in love with British pubs
Behind the headlines on Middle Eastern capital flowing into UK real estate, a quieter trade is happening: freehold pub acquisitions at 8–11% net yields with optional development upside.
TriviaThe mathematics of compounding, explained without a single Warren Buffett quote
Why £1,000 invested at 8% for 40 years becomes £21,725, and why almost nobody actually achieves it.
Success StoryShe built a £2.4m luxury candle brand in her kitchen. The exit was the easy part.
Anika Pereira spent three years bootstrapping a fragrance line on £14k of savings. The trade sale was 38x trailing EBITDA. The story is what she did with the proceeds.
PlaybookThe 47-line due diligence checklist we use before acquiring any UK restaurant
Nine out of ten restaurant acquisitions fail in year two because the buyer never reviewed the weekly wage-to-sales ratio. Here is the full list.
Case StudyThe 32-room London hotel that tripled revenue in 14 months without raising rates
A tired three-star property in Bayswater bought for £4.1m. Eighteen months later, EBITDA of £980k and a valuation north of £9m. The interventions cost less than £400k.
TriviaTen things you didn't know about the London Stock Exchange
It started in a coffee house, it has lost more listings than New York has gained, and one of its earliest traded securities was insurance against piracy.
Market BriefThe truth about Airbnb yields in 2026: the regulators have already won
Short-let registration schemes, council-led caps and lender restrictions have quietly removed 40% of the supply that drove 2019–2023 returns. The yield curve has not adjusted yet. It will.
Market BriefWhy Amazon arbitrage stopped working — and what replaced it
The retail-arbitrage YouTube ecosystem peaked in 2021. The actual category-level arbitrage opportunity migrated to brand acquisition and aggregator roll-ups, which then also peaked. Where is the money now?
TriviaWhat the 1973 oil crisis teaches us about portfolio construction in 2026
The energy shock of 1973–74 destroyed a generation of conventional portfolios. The investors who emerged best had three things in common — and none of them were market timing.
Success StoryHow a South Asian family office quietly built a 14-home UK care portfolio
Started with a single 28-bed home in Leicester in 2019. By 2025, a 612-bed regional operator with £4.3m EBITDA and a discreet trade buyer circling.
PlaybookLuxury brand licensing, explained: where the money actually flows
A licensing deal between a fashion house and a fragrance manufacturer can be the most profitable line item on both income statements. The economics are widely misunderstood.
Case StudyA tale of two bakeries: why the smaller acquisition was the better trade
Two acquisition candidates, similar locations, similar revenue. The buyer chose the smaller, less profitable business. Three years later, the maths is unambiguous.
PlaybookHow to think about currency risk when you live in one country and earn in another
For international founders and overseas investors, the most undermanaged risk in their portfolio is rarely market risk. It is the silent erosion of multi-year FX drift.
Market BriefThe 2024 UK budget that quietly rewrote private equity economics
Carried interest reform, business asset disposal relief tightening, and non-dom restructuring — three measures that have repriced the after-tax IRR on a typical UK PE deal by 280 basis points.
Success StoryFrom corner shop to 7-store portfolio in six years: a self-funded retail story
He bought his first convenience store with a £40k deposit and a CDFI loan. By 2025, seven stores, £6.2m revenue, and the first private-equity inbound.
Market BriefWhy emerging-markets equities disappointed for fifteen years — and may not for the next ten
The EM trade was the consensus call of 2010. By 2024, MSCI EM had underperformed the S&P 500 by 540 basis points annualised. The structural setup for 2026–2035 is meaningfully different.
TriviaThe Airbnb superhost who runs his portfolio like a Fortune 100 ops team
A solo operator in Lisbon manages 47 short-let properties with three staff, one playbook and a 4.92 average rating. The operating model is closer to McKinsey than Mom-and-Pop.
PlaybookWhat makes a good investor pitch: notes from twelve years of receiving them
Most pitches that close successfully share six structural elements. Most pitches that fail share the same three failures. We see the same patterns weekly.
Market BriefThe quiet renaissance of UK contract manufacturing
Reshoring rhetoric is a decade old. The actual data on UK industrial output, capacity utilisation and order books finally turned in 2024 — and the trend is more durable than the press has noticed.
Case StudyThe most expensive lesson I ever learned about acquiring overseas
A Dubai-based investor acquired a UK hospitality asset in 2018 without UK counsel. The legal cost of unwinding what should have been a routine completion exceeded the deposit.
Market BriefWhat 4.8% gilt yields are telling you that the equity market isn't
Long-dated UK government bond yields are at their highest sustained level since 2008. The cross-asset implications are larger than most allocators have priced.
Success StoryShe walked away from a £2.4m offer. Two years later, the company sold for £14m.
Sarah Goldstein, founder of a B2B SaaS workflow tool, declined a strategic acquirer's offer in 2023. The advice she received at the time was nearly unanimous against her decision.
TriviaAn evening with the numbers behind Monaco's real estate market
Monaco's residential market consistently trades at the highest per-square-metre prices on earth. The reasons are not what most observers assume.
Market BriefWhat the next UK budget will probably do to UK property — and how to position for it
Three policy directions look directionally certain. The wedge they create between residential and commercial, between landlord and owner-occupier, will define the next decade.
PlaybookThe art of the non-binding letter of intent
An LOI is the single most underestimated document in private M&A. It is non-binding and yet it shapes 80% of the deal terms that ultimately matter.
TriviaGlobal trade routes and the Suez effect: shipping costs as a leading economic indicator
Container rates on the Shanghai-Rotterdam route moved 380% between November 2023 and February 2024. The downstream effect on UK consumer prices took six months to surface — and is still being absorbed.
Case StudyThe acquisition we walked away from on the morning of completion
Three months of diligence, an exchanged contract, a packed completion meeting in a Mayfair office. We left at 11.40am without signing. Here is what changed.
TriviaThe strange economics of the podcast business, briefly
A top-100 podcast in the UK generates between £180,000 and £1.4m in annual gross revenue. The bottom of that range loses money. The top is more profitable than most TV production.
Market BriefThe overlooked end of furnished holiday lettings — and what it means for short-let portfolios
Furnished holiday letting tax treatment was abolished in April 2025. The compliance reset is largely complete; the operating model adjustment is not.
TriviaWhy Warren Buffett's 1965 partnership letter still applies, only differently
The first Berkshire Hathaway annual letter ran to four pages and contained almost no investment advice. What it did contain has aged better than the financial press of any subsequent decade.
PlaybookWhat makes a great non-executive director — and why most are not great
The brief of a great NED is structurally different from what the recruitment market typically delivers. The gap is widely tolerated and quietly expensive.
Market BriefThe coming decade of the private secondary market
Private equity secondaries have grown from a niche $40bn market in 2010 to over $130bn of annual transaction volume. The growth driver for the next decade is structural, not cyclical.
TriviaWhat makes a good question in a board meeting
The single highest-value behaviour in a board meeting is not a long speech, an insightful comment, or a counterintuitive opinion. It is a well-chosen question.
Case StudyThe Shopify brand that became a physical retailer — and why every D2C brand eventually does
A direct-to-consumer apparel brand built its first £18m of revenue entirely online. The next £30m required a physical retail strategy. The economics are completely different from what the founders expected.
TriviaHow the UK VAT system quietly shapes consumer pricing in ways consumers never notice
The VAT rate on a chocolate-covered biscuit is 20%. The rate on a chocolate-coated biscuit is 0%. The economic effect on the UK biscuit industry is real, measurable and ongoing.
Case StudyWhat I learned from a failed acquisition: the post-mortem nobody wants to write
An acquisition that completed cleanly, transitioned smoothly, and underperformed every projection for three years. The post-mortem identified six errors, four of them avoidable.
TriviaWhat the data actually says about female-founded businesses: a corrective
Female-founded UK businesses receive 2.7% of venture capital but generate per-pound-invested returns 11% higher than the all-founder average. The interpretive question is which number is the anomaly.
PlaybookThe unsentimental economics of running a small UK hotel
Independent UK hotels of 12–30 rooms occupy a structurally difficult position: too small for institutional operating discipline, too large for true owner-operator economics. Here is the honest P&L.
Market BriefThe Mansion House compact, two years on: what it actually changed
The 2023 Mansion House compact committed UK DC pension funds to allocating 5% to unlisted equity by 2030. The on-the-ground effect by 2025 is more uneven than the headlines suggest.
PlaybookHow to read a balance sheet in seven minutes: the lines that actually matter
Most balance sheets present 40+ line items. Six of them determine whether the business is structurally sound. Here are the six.
TriviaThe forgotten 1929 — Britain's parallel financial crisis nobody discusses
The Wall Street Crash gets the textbooks. The UK had its own banking crisis between 1929 and 1931 — different cause, different course, instructive for any student of financial history.
Success StoryThe overseas buyer of the regional football club: an unconventional success
A Middle Eastern principal acquired a fourth-tier UK football club in 2019 for £4m. The club is now in the second tier with infrastructure investment of £42m. The economics work in a way the headlines miss.
TriviaThe Rule of 72, and why every investor should commit it to memory
Divide 72 by the annual return rate; the answer is how many years it takes to double your money. The approximation is almost embarrassingly accurate.
Success StoryThe London coffee chain that refused to scale — and is more profitable than the ones that did
Six stores in 14 years. £8.2m revenue. 28% EBITDA margin. The founder has turned down three institutional offers to roll up the concept nationally.
Market BriefWhy private credit is the asset class of the decade, and what could go wrong
Private credit AUM has tripled since 2018. The structural drivers are real. The cyclical risks are underdiscussed.
TriviaHow fine jewellery quietly became an institutional asset class
Coloured diamonds, signed-period jewellery and museum-grade gemstones have outperformed equities at the top end of the market for two decades. The market is still niche, illiquid, and largely opaque.
Case StudyThe £50m mistake: how one wrong tax election destroyed a generational acquisition
A founder sold his £150m business in 2018 and paid £42m more tax than he should have, because of a single election his accountant did not advise on. The structuring lesson applies more broadly than the specific facts.
PlaybookThe five-minute cap table audit every founder should do quarterly
Most cap-table disasters are foreseeable from the cap table itself. A simple quarterly review surfaces problems while they are still solvable.
Market BriefWhat the Japanese equity discount tells us about market structure
Japanese equities have traded at structural discounts to global peers for three decades. The 2023–2025 reform push has begun to close the gap. The investment implications are different from the headlines.