Image source: Getty Images For years, JD Sports Fashion (LSE: JD.) wasn’t just the self-styled ‘King of Trainers’, it was pretty much king of the FTSE as well. I watched the trainers and athleisure seller’s shares grow and grow, agonising over whether I’d left it too late to hop on board, before deciding I had and moving on. The board had big ambitions, opening thousands of stores worldwide, particularly in North America and Europe. Its multibrand model covering footwear, apparel and accessories drove sales and allowed the group to scale aggressively. It generated loads of cash too, which allowed it to expand by…
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Image source: Getty Images Having crashed 57% since November 2020, the Persimmon (LSE:PSN) share price has been the second-worst performer on the FTSE 100 over the past five years. Post-pandemic interest rate hikes have choked off the demand for new houses and stubborn supply-chain inflation has eroded the group’s margin. However, with the cost of borrowing starting to come down, I think investors could consider adding the stock to their portfolios. Green shoots of a recovery Since the base rate reached a post-Covid high of 5.25% in August 2023, the Bank of England has made five cuts of 0.25% each.…
Image source: Getty Images Duolingo (NASDAQ:DUOL), the world’s largest language-learning solutions provider, is proving to be one of the most popular US stocks on the Trading 212 investment platform. Since 18 October, there’s been a 61% increase in the number of investors holding the stock in their accounts. And yet it could be one of the biggest losers from the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. According to research undertaken by Microsoft, interpreters and translators are the most vulnerable. Apparently, there’s a 98% overlap with AI and their roles. If fewer people are going to have a career as a linguist, it…
Image source: Getty Images Thoughts of a stock market crash are relatively rare at this time of year. The ‘Santa rally’ usually pushes stocks up over the festive period, rather than down. The type of news that might cause a mad panic in the markets is rarer during the last months of the year. ‘Tis not the season, you might say. Alas, we live in interesting times. The speculation over a bubble in US tech grows and grows. We also have one of the latest Autumn Budgets in living memory, with rumours of painful tax rises doing the rounds in…
Want a sure-fire way to injure New Yorkers? Open a last-mile warehouse.The e-commerce boom that began during the pandemic has led to a different kind of ailment in industrial neighborhoods with double-digit-percent increases in injury-causing traffic crashes near new last-mile warehouses, Comptroller Brad Lander charged in a report released on Monday.Eighteen of the facilities opened since 2015 — 11 since 2020 — clustered in neighborhoods like East New York and Red Hook in Brooklyn and Maspeth in Queens. The majority of these sites — most of which are owned by Amazon – have made area streets more dangerous due to…
Image source: Getty Images With the FTSE 100 inching within touching distance of 10,000 points, UK stocks have had a bumper year, so far. But as we approach 2026, things are beginning to look increasingly unstable. With so many mitigating factors at play, I decided to see what experts think could happen to the UK market in the coming year. Moderate growth potential Unsurprisingly, analysts are cautiously optimistic. The broad consensus suggests the FTSE 100 could reach 10,134-10,778 points by the end of next year. That equates to potential growth of 10%-13% from current levels (including dividends). Schroders expects UK…
Image source: Ocado Group plc A crash is commonly defined as a loss of 20% or more in a short period of time. While some investors are fretting about the potential for a wider stock market crash, Ocado (LSE: OCDO) has had its own one. The Ocado share price fell 22% in a single day yesterday (18 November). That sort of fall is unusual. However, it adds to longer term concerns for Ocado shareholders. The share price has tumbled 46% since the turn of the year – and a staggering 93% in five years. However, the FTSE 250 share has…
Image source: Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) can do a lot of things, but picking dividend shares isn’t one of them. The problem is that basic AI tools can’t do real analysis — rather, they simply regurgitate information from their massive data sources. Somewhere in that data may be a few good picks, but the information’s often out-of-date or from an unreliable source. Considering how much inaccurate information is on the internet, more often than not the responses are riddled with errors. For example, when I asked ChatGPT what dividend shares I should buy for retirement, one of its picks…
Aviva (LSE: AV.) shares have grown 104.6% in the past five years, equating to an annualised return of 15.33%. That’s pretty decent for an income share. When you include dividends, that jumps to an eye-watering 281% — a 31.15% average return a year. No other British multi-line insurer comes close to that performance. Created on TradingView.com But just because the last five years have been good, that doesn’t mean it will continue. In fact, that’s even more reason to assess whether the growth’s rational and sustainable. Strategic repositioning Several smart business decisions have helped drive the company’s recent growth. Most…
Image source: Getty Images I’m pretty happy with the size of my Stocks and Shares ISA and Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) right now. Thanks to regular savings and strong investment returns in recent years, I’m on track for retirement. Of course, like everyone else, I’d like to have more money stashed away – that would provide more financial security. So for a bit of fun, I asked ChatGPT how I could double the value of my portfolio. ChatGPT’s strategies The advice ChatGPT gave me was quite generic in nature. Its three main tips were: Increase my returns Increase my contributions…