John Stepek

No, I think that, actually, I was looking at kind of markets this week, so the UK particularly.

And something I noticed was there was a couple of kind of significant sort of profit warnings.

And one was from Chris Nicholson, which is a house builder.

And basically last month they said it looked as if things were fine.

And, you know, the end of last month, so the war had been, you know, running for about a month.

And they said it's basically okay, you don't need to worry.

And then this month they came out with a trading update that basically said well actually no, things have actually turned down quite a bit and now it doesn't look as if we're going to sell any land this year and also our profit is going to be much lower than we expected because we're going to have to rein everything in.

And the share price fell something like 35% in the day.

And then you had big consumer goods group, Reckitt Benckiser, they came out and their share price has been falling since February, but on the day they fell by another 5% because they said the disruption in the Middle East

has hit our sales, like for like sales are much lower than they expected and I think what this kind of drives home is that the market is now at the point where it can't really put a price on stuff until it starts to see the impact coming through and I think that's the problem we sort of sit there and like it's so reflexive it's like we look at the prices and we say well the market's not reacting so it can't be that bad but the market is waiting to get data from the real world because

It's kind of like, well, you know, how do we know what's going to happen next?

There is no way to put a price on it.

So I think we're just going to keep seeing this as the bad data feeds through.

Maybe some of the kind of impacts that we thought we were going to see earlier on will start to happen because basically you need a kind of prove it moment, particularly because everyone's got conditioned.

Well, I guess it ties in with this overall thing that, you know, whatever, the 2010s were like the long duration decade.

Basically, time didn't matter.

And that was partly tied up with interest rates.

But, you know, the kind of far future, if you were going to make a load of money in the far future, that was worth as much as making a load of money tomorrow.

So you bought the companies that were going to make a load of money in the far future because the future seemed predictable.

Because I think the predictability horizon of the world generally has shrunk to,