It’s a particularly soggy morning out there today but at least this heavy rain is coming now and not over the long weekend, something that will be of particular comfort to those making the annual pilgrimage to Splashy Fen!!!

The VAT hike is no longer which is a welcomed headline in an environment where the cost of living is already a major challenge. Now if something can just be done about this incessant rain!!!

It’s Wednesday morning and for those of you clever enough to have taken Friday off we’ve already arrived at the end of the week!!! April is always heavily disrupted by the barrage of public holidays but the last two weeks of the month have almost been a joke.

Sometimes you just have to shake your head at the questionable thought processes of others. Japanese authorities recently had to rescue a Chinese student from Mount Fuji after he made an emergency call complaining of altitude sickness. Four days later they had to rescue him again as he went back up the mountain to find his phone.

It’s the end of an era as Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, confirmed that he will be stepping down as the head of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year. Seriously big shoes for his successor, Greg Abel, to fill even in he has been groomed for the job since 2021 and has spent 25 years working at Berkshire.

It’s probably quite difficult to wipe the smirk off Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s face at the moment, this as the arrival of China’s Deepseek AI model in January was touted as the death knell for Nvidia’s rampant growth forecasts. But yesterday Saudi Arabia committed to buying “several hundred thousand” of their most advanced GPU’s over the next five years which is a monster of an order.

We wake this morning to major news out of the Middle East, news that will dominate headlines for the next few days at least while also putting pressure on the Rand as a risk asset. Israel has attacked Iran and a retaliation is all but certain.

The game has changed in the Middle East with America now being directly involved in the Isreal vs Iran conflict. The world is on tenterhooks as we wait to see what Iran’s response will be, but for the time being the reaction in the currency market has been surprisingly muted.