The Top Class Wednesday Update is happy being bad cop

Sigh. After many months of being careful, I started to do stuff again last week. Edinburgh is generally pretty risk averse and most folk wear masks in shops and so on, but not at lunch events like the one I went to on Friday for obvious reasons. Spool forward four days and here I am, […]
The Top Class Wednesday Update will have one from the third optic on the left

Hello hello, so that’s October half term hols over with and if you were/are having those then I hope they were/are nice and you were/are less of a grumpy sod than I was during mine. In my defence I was on holiday with children, otherwise known as ‘not a holiday’. However, if you are feeling […]
The Top Class Wednesday Update is all about efficiency

Hello, Natalie here. Mr P is off on holiday, enjoying the balmy 7-degree temperatures of somewhere in Scottishland, so it falls to me to update you all this week. I had the genuine pleasure of attending the PA 360 conference in London a couple of weeks back. It was my first proper in-person conference for […]
The Top Class Wednesday Update embraces resistentialism

Have you ever heard of Paul Jennings? You know, the humourist who worked for The Observer throughout the fifties and sixties and who wrote The Great Jelly Of London? I haven’t, but for the purposes of this week’s Update I’ll pretend that I have because it’ll lead nicely into my main topic. Even if you […]
The Top Class Wednesday Update builds back…oh never mind

Some weeks the initial whimsy just defeats you. In a world of government by bantz, where auto-satire is somehow all good, where there are no surprises and where everything everyone said would happen is now happening, where does a humble Updater turn? Probably to the whisky bottle, that’s where – and a bit more on […]
The Top Class Wednesday Update prefers shorter duration bonds

I took no pleasure in that Bond joke. There are some things you just have to grit your teeth and get on with. And when you work in finance and someone releases a Bond film lasting nearly three hours, a bond duration joke is one of them. It’s not glamorous work, but someone has to […]
The Top Class Wednesday Update never runs out of gas

So, so many gas jokes you could make this week – do you go down the industry being full of hot air route, the Mark-Locke-with-a-hangover-after-the-Platform-Awards route, the wasn’t-me-it-was-the-dog route, or simply repeat Marina Hyde’s gag of this morning that if you want a really solid investment you should pop out and buy a Calor Gas […]
The Top Class Wednesday Update will just have a wee slice

It’s our birthday! Happy birthday to us, etc. The lang cat is 11 today; that’s roughly the expected lifespan of one emu and you can’t knock that. I just read the birthday TCWU I did last year about going from working in a windowless basement when I started this thing to…working in a basement with […]
THE TOP CLASS WEDNESDAY UPDATE IS WAY DOWN IN THE HOLE

Back to it, then, and the sound of the industry’s engine grinding back into gear is deafening. We go again, because the game is out there, and it’s either play or get played. We’ll come back to that. It’s our last week of being ten this week – no party last year, no party this […]
THE TOP CLASS WEDNESDAY UPDATE CAPTURES ALL AVAILABLE RETURNS

September comes around again, and to mark the turning of the calendar page there is condensation on the windows this morning. But there’s sunshine too, and a sense of getting back down to it after the interruptions of the summer, not least with the arrival of our newest member of the cat basket yesterday, who […]