There is a corner of the FT that continues to do sterling work as financial journalists, having alerted us to, inter-alia, Wirecard, Greensill, Softbank, (especially with We Work but also some of the other egregious actions of the former Deutsche Bank traders) and now also Ark Investment Management, the active ETF fund house that has grown dramatically in the last few months (not coincidentally we suspect since founder Cathy Wood resolved her dispute with her minority owner/chief US distributor).

The following is the text of an article submitted to Australian Financial Review – albeit with a title added by us. We do this on a regular basis, but since it is behind a paywall many of our readers can not see it and so we reproduce it here. The AFR article will have been edited, so this is a ‘rougher’ version (as well as slightly longer)

In reviewing the behaviour of markets in the first quarter we can use the prism of our Model Portfolios as well as the general benchmarks to try and capture the important elements of what happened, partly for review, but also hopefully for some forward looking insights and perspective.

As March ended and closed out the first quarter, it also marked the anniversary of the equity and Credit market lows triggered by the Great Covid Panic of 2020.

Normally on April 1st in the UK we would expect to see various spoof articles in the paper and on the TV, but on the basis that almost everything announced over the last 12 months might previously have been considered utterly unbelievable, it’s difficult to see how anyone could come up with something sufficiently ridiculous as to actually compete with what passes for real life in 2021.