With the leaves turning outside my window, I’m reminded of a cartoon in Private Eye magazine last autumn. A gilet-wearing hedge fund dude, flat white in hand, gazes up at the trees and swoons to a passer-by: “Isn’t Q4 the most beautiful time of year?”
It’s also a million-dollar question for equity investors as we ponder the final three months of 2025. Will markets be beautiful, ugly, or perhaps just bleurgh and forgettable? Or perhaps a bit of everything?
For me it’s now a £600,000 question. My portfolio has just passed that milestone thanks to a 17 per cent rise since January. Getting here from half a million pounds took 515 days. For reference it took 907 days to make the first hundred grand.