Altor Views
Our most popular blog, here at Altor Views you will find a wide range of articles we’ve written that capture the latest interests and developments effecting the financial and investment industry.
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Fortunate Richard
In 1785 a French mathematician named Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour set out to take the mickey out of Benjamin Franklin. He wrote a parody of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack built around a character called Fortunate Richard:…
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Great Expectations
Pip is just a boy when a convict rises out of the Kent marshes, turns him upside down to shake out his pockets, and demands food and a file to cut through his leg-iron.…
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The Most Expensive Year of Your Life
Hetty Green was, by most reckonings, the richest woman in America when she died in 1916. She left behind perhaps $100m, a sum that inflation has since turned into several billion in today’s money.…
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Give With a Warm Hand
I saw a widow recently. She’d booked in to talk about inheritance tax, which is usually where these conversations start and almost never where they end. Before we got anywhere near gifting or trusts…
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A Helluva Lot of Potatoes
In May 1983, eleven runners lined up outside a shopping centre in Sydney for the inaugural Westfield ultramarathon to Melbourne. The route ran 875 kilometres, give or take the drive from London to Inverness,…
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Are You Blocking Out Advice?
I used to advise a busy CEO, it was difficult to get a date in his diary to meet with him face to face. He was one of the most wonderfully generous and people…
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Would You Choose Death?
This is one of those blogs I have debated writing. The subject is not easy and it is emotive. When it was announced that pensions would be liable to inheritance tax from 6th April 2027,…
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What Becomes Of Us
I had a very sad experience in London last week. I went out for dinner one evening and sat a couple of tables down from me was an old man, with a scruffy white…
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The £85 Billion Promise
In 1908, when Lloyd George introduced the first state pension, the qualifying age was 70. Average life expectancy for a man at birth was 49. You can see the appeal. Promise everyone a pension…
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The Day You Have Enough
In 1954, a milkshake machine salesman named Ray Kroc drove out to San Bernardino to find out why a single hamburger restaurant had ordered eight of his Multimixers. Nobody needed to make forty milkshakes…