All about investing since 2007! Loves to explain but more to learn. Named best UK investing blog at the SHOMO Awards. Blog posts and tweets are NOT advice.

London
Joined January 2009
The marginal rate of tax on UK banks is 46.4pc, against just 27.9pc in New York. Yet Labour is toying with the idea of restoring the 8pc surcharge. Ministers speak the language of growth, but don't seem to understand the first thing about it. My column telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
29
127
8
596
16,273
How our model passive portfolio is doing well despite the biggest bear market for bonds in the history of US/UK markets… monevator.com/the-slow-and-s…
1
1
6
896
This is a Boomer world, the rest of us are just living in it
2
1
4
811
London takes a hit as super rich worth $160 billion exit the UK bloomberg.com/news/features/… via @BenStupples
46
190
75
11,314
152,880
Just because the money has effectively fallen out of the sky, that doesn’t mean you should flush it down the toilet. monevator.com/why-you-should…
2
1
6
1,522
Artists: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it. Mathematicians: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it. Economists: LONG HAVE I AWAITED THIS HOUR! DESTROY ME, EFFICIENCY, AND LET UTILIZATION-ADJUSTED TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY RISE ON THE WIND OF MY ASHES!
108
1,208
100
15,428
414,336
Monevator retweeted
Unbelievable.
NEW - Pensions minister Torsten Bell confirms that pensioners who ‘just exceed’ personal allowance when state pension rises WON'T have to pay small amounts of tax this parliament “In line with the commitment made at Budget 2025, pensioners who only just exceed the personal allowance will not have the administrative burden of paying small amounts of tax in this Parliament. “Chx will set out further details on how that commitment will be delivered at the Budget.”
1
8
221
5,500
Monevator retweeted
I read through some of this report and holy hell are we way past the point of no return… A few things that stood out to me: One guy helped build a surveillance system capable of monitoring ~25 MILLION SIM cards. And “monitoring SIM cards” undersells it. The system could collect calls, texts and voice, recognize the same person’s voice EVEN IF THEY SWITCHED SIM cards, flag people using VPNs, create watchlists, connect people to government records, and generate intelligence reports on basically any phone number…… They even removed the warrant requirement. And this was apparently ONE Claude subscriber using AI as his engineering team. The really crazy part is the finished system runs locally on his machine. Anthropic banned him, but they can’t just switch the system off now that it exists………..and if that’s not bad.. A group in Yemen was using Claude like a team of missile engineers. They had different Claude instances doing different jobs like coding, researching, another checking the work etc. while they worked on guidance systems for rockets and missiles. They actually fired a guided rocket. It failed. So they went back to Claude hours later to figure out why. That is the part that gets me. AI isn’t just giving someone information from the internet anymore. It can sit inside the actual computer and → test → fail → fix → test again until their rocket works. Then … it gets worse somehow ..Russian hackers are starting to automate almost the entire hacking process. Finding targets. Phishing them. Stealing passwords. Getting inside systems. Pulling out data. And when security software detected their malware, AI agents could modify it, rebuild it and try again until it stopped getting detected…….That completely changes the game because historically defenders could discover malware, block it, and force the attackers to spend time rebuilding everything. Now the rebuilding can happen automatically. So cybercriminals basically had AI doing the hacking for them. Anthropic says in one operation, AI agents performed “nearly all” of the work. One company went from initial access to massive data theft in hours. In another case, one stolen developer credential turned into full control of a company’s cloud storage in around 3 hours. So you no longer necessarily need a giant sophisticated hacking team. You need a person who knows what they want done + agents capable of figuring out the details. K… then…Governments are already using AI to industrialize propaganda too. Anthropic found Iranian state operations using Claude to create fake personas, rewrite government messaging so it looked like it came from independent sources, translate it across languages, and distribute it across social media. Basically the old propaganda machine, except now you can generate thousands of believable “people” and pieces of content for almost nothing. And then there’s biology……. Anthropic found people using its models for research involving bird flu adapting to mammals, toxin redesign, and other stuff that has legitimate scientific uses but could also become extremely dangerous. Some were actively finding ways around Anthropic’s safeguards. One system would literally send prompts Claude refused to ANOTHER AI model that was more willing to answer them. Anthropic is very clear that this does not mean all of those researchers intended harm. But that almost makes the larger problem harder..the same knowledge that could help prevent the next pandemic can potentially help someone create one. I think this is the actual takeaway from the entire report is that AI doesn’t have to invent some completely new form of evil. It just has to make things that previously required 50 engineers, hackers, intelligence analysts, or scientists possible for 1 person. And models are getting cheaper, more autonomous and way better at running offline where nobody can shut them off. THAT is what I think people should be paying attention to.
We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date. It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them. We disrupted every operation in the report, and used the lessons from them to strengthen our safeguards. Where appropriate, we also shared what we found with authorities and other AI companies. These cases are not typical: we’re highlighting some of the most sophisticated misuse we’ve seen. But they’re especially important to discuss, because they show us where AI misuse is headed, where our safeguards work, and where they need to improve. We’re publishing this report so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms, and so we can give the public a clearer view of how emerging threats develop. Read the report: anthropic.com/threat-intelli…
32
548
46
2,939
376,280
Monevator retweeted
Starting to see how Trump bankrupted everything he touched.
84
298
19
4,808
101,614
since becoming president again, Trump has promised: -$5000 stimulus checks via "DOGE dividend" -$2000 stimulus checks via "tariff dividend" -$1000+ checks via "savings" from expiring ACA subsidies -$5000 "dividend" if Rs win midterms no checks have been issued
Trump: "If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate...I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000."
1,448
11,448
851
34,251
2,998,767
Monevator retweeted
Yesterday morning I took my mum to the GP feeling unwell and they found a satsuma-sized lump. She was given a referral for suspected gynaecological cancer and sent for an urgent blood test. What happened next shocked me. This is what NHS privatisation means in practice👇1/🧵
298
2,007
300
4,459
721,145
The UK is levelling up post-Brexit in the same way that a lawnmower levels up the lawn
🚨 NEW: A billionaire who ranked third in The Times list for Britain’s highest taxpayers has left the UK amid speculation of tax rises He is worth around £2.6bn and paid £330m in tax last year
1
1
6
2,424