Irregular Roundup, 12th February 2026

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. Or if, like so many people, you aren’t a fan of prog rock, then guess who’s back?

Where have I been?

Back at the end of 2024, I bought a house by the sea. Since then, I have been excavating my old house and moving stuff down from London. That process is now close to complete. 

Top tip – don’t wait 30+ years to move house. On the plus side, the new house is just as nice to live in as we thought it would be, and I have made a big dent in my Swedish Death Cleaning project.

Financially, the main impacts have been:

1. I have much smaller ISA pots
2. I have no money outside tax shelters whatsoever
3. I pay a lot of council tax (three times) until I get rid of the old house

So for the time being, my investing interests will be focused on strategies to improve and/or smooth returns that can be implemented within SIPPs and ISAs:

• Asset allocation, including TAA
• Keeping costs and taxes low
• Leverage

In the wider world, I have noticed a few key issues over the last 18 months:

1. The shockingly inept and wildly unpopular Labour government
2. Myriad tax changes implemented by the said government
3. A slow decline in inflation and interest rates (from 5.25% at the peak to 3.75% in the UK)
4. AI frenzy and the potential for a bubble to burst
5. Gold and silver (but not bitcoin) frenzy
6. Partly as a result of miners increasing in value, the FTSE-100 has roared to new records (and beyond 10K), despite the gloomy prospects for the UK economy
   • Other strong sectors include defence and even banks
7. Trump’s tariffs and a new Fed chairman

Labour watch

Apart from the 40-watt bulb aspect of the intellect of the front bench, the most striking thing about the government is the disconnect between what they say about the need for growth (the best way out of the country’s problems) and what they actually do.

We’ve had tax rises, tighter employment laws, more money for the NHS, nationalisation of the railways, VAT on public school fees, higher benefits (including the end of the two-child cap), a higher minimum wage, and perhaps worst of all, the crazy Net Zero policy that dooms our electricity prices to be the highest in the world. If AI does come to dominate the economy, costly leccy will be a real drag. 

Starmer stumbles on, despite the taint from appointing a “friend of Epstein” as US ambassador (funny which things threaten UK PMs). We have a by-election, and then council elections for him to get through and a heavy defeat in either might bring forward his replacement (by someone even more left-wing – let’s hope that’s a good thing in the medium term.

Tax changes

There have been quite a few, none of them positive:

1. A 2% increase in the dividend, savings and property income taxes (everything non-earned, basically)
2. An increase in CGT from 10%/20% to 18%/24%
3. Employer NICs went up from 13.8% to 15%
4. A cut in the cash ISA limit (for under 65s) to £12K, and talk of penalties for holding “cash-like instruments” in S&S ISAs
   • This might get in the way of TAA implementation within ISAs, and we would need to move to cash on occasion
5. A mansion tax at a pitifully low level (the price of a 2-bed flat in W1 – not a mansion, but rather a sliver of a mansion block)
6. A cut in the VCT income tax relief from 30% to 20%. 
   • The last time this rate was cut I didn’t buy any VCTs for a decade
   • If you have any tax to shelter for the 2025/26 tax year, there’s still time to buy with 30% relief
7. Pensions being brought within the IHT regime
   • This is not a big deal morally, but it will upend years of tax planning for those with descendants (who might have been spending their ISAs rather than their pensions)
8. Salary sacrifice into pensions is also being capped at a paltry £2K pa
9. The end of the winter fuel allowance for anyone with an income over £35K
10. A 3p a mile tax on electric vehicles – very progressive.

We also have the Renter’s Rights Bill, which should be enough to convince anyone that the BTL boom is over.

The triple lock on the state pension has survived. 

• This seems hard to defend in a low-growth economy, but the UK state pension remains one of the least generous in the civilised world.

So has the dreaded fiscal drag from the frozen income tax thresholds. Starting the higher rate at £50K pa is ridiculous. At the same time, none of the problems for those whose income is moving above £100K have been sorted out. 

It’s getting hard to become rich in the UK without inheritance.

AI

AI clearly has the potential to be bigger than the internet, but there are a lot of questions:

• When will we see a return (eg, productivity boost) from the massive investment in recent years?
• Will the current leading firms in the area be the eventual winners?
• Do current high valuations mean that a bubble is about to pop?
• What will happen to any displaced labour?

I’ll write more about this in the future, and in particular:

1. How to monitor for and protect against a crash
2. How AI might affect the investment process itself for private investors

Trump

Trump is rarely out of the headlines, but his mix of tariffs and threats hasn’t managed to derail the markets. His policy to weaken the dollar did succeed in pushing up the gold and silver prices (but interestingly, Bitcoin didn’t follow).

Looking forward, he’s now nominated Kevin Warsh to succeed Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Chair in May. Warsh has historically been a hawk, but many expect him to accelerate the programme of interest rate cuts, as Trump would wish. He might, however, aim to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet. 

He has attacked the Fed for its “data-dependent” approach, which he calls reactive and lagging. He is also a critic of Forward Guidance and the Dot Plot – so we might expect a more proactive and less transparent approach. 

Warsh’s nomination triggered a sell-off in gold (9%) and silver (15%) in reaction to lower future inflation and greater financial stability compared to more “dovish” candidates that Trump had been thought to be considering. The dollar strengthened, and the yield curve steepened.

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That’s it for today – I’m not sure when I’ll write again, but I doubt there will be a fifteen-month gap.

Until next time.