We have felt obliged to comment in the past on the curious beast that is The Hut Group, or THG as it is known, not least because it seems to defy every aspect of corporate governance that any one caring about the G in ESG might consider important, but also because of its relentless PR onslaught in the UK financial press and its (in our view egregious) use of a ‘tech status’ to persuade UK retail investors that an online e-tail business was worth 7x sales.

The dirty little secret of Monetary Policy in much of the west is that it has actually long been really a form of fiscal policy. When you have a population with large amounts of floating rate debt, changing the cost of financing that debt is effectively the same as directly boosting or shrinking disposable income.

September turned out to be true to type, increased risk aversion in and around the triple witching mid month led to a spike in the price of put options (expressed as a higher VIX) and a modest amount of downward pressure on markets as the delta hedging by the market makers induced some further selling from systematic min vol funds.