Russ Mould is AJ Bell's Investment Director. He has a Master's degree in Modern History from the University of Oxford and more than 30 years' experience of the capital markets.
He started out at Scottish Equitable in 1991 as a fund manager, where he had responsibility for the Nordic and Swiss equity markets. In 1993, Russ joined SG Warburg, now part of UBS investment bank, and worked there as an equity analyst covering the technology sectors for 12 years. He has also worked on IPOs and M&A deals. Russ was voted best analyst in the semiconductor sector in 2001 by Institutional Investor and reached the level of Managing Director in 2003 when he became head of UBS' global semiconductor research effort.
A member of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (MSCI), Russ is responsible for providing written and video content for customers and clients. He also helps to build the company’s profile in print and broadcast media as part of AJ Bell's wider PR and brand team, working alongside the Investment Committee.
Russ joined Shares Magazine as technology correspondent in 2005 and took on the post of Editor in 2008. He was appointed as AJ Bell's Investment Director in 2013 following the company's acquisition of Shares' parent company, MSM Media. Russ regularly creates content across the AJ Bell website, including the Daily Market Update and Chart of the Week, and he hosts his own 'Breaking the Mould' weekly video series.
Outside of work, Russ is a qualified cricket coach, Italian speaker and avid fan of Doctor Who and NFL.
16 February 2021
Can the miners dig the FTSE 100 out of its dividend hole?A 55% hike in BHP’s first-half dividend and the restoration of payments to shareholders at Glencore are putting welcome cash back into the kitty for investors in the UK stock market. The miners’ dividends will help to fill the large hole left by BP and Shell in particular and increases from the diggers underpin consensus forecasts for an increase...
11 February 2021
All eyes on dividend payments as Big Five Banks prepare to report their resultsUnchanged or increased payments from Smurfit Kappa, CCH, AstraZeneca and RELX in the past week mean FTSE 100 firms have declared dividends worth £5.2 billion in February, more than offsetting the £2.5 billion of cuts announced by BP and Shell. That provides some welcome relief to income-seekers and sets the scene for the Big Five banks, the first...
10 February 2021
Market trends after one year of COVID are clear but Pfizer Monday changed them allIt seems remarkable now just how relaxed financial markets were during the early stages of the covid-19 outbreak in Asia and even Italy, but confidence ebbed rapidly from late February onwards once they grasped the gravity of the situation. Share prices plunged for a month and even though some found their footing, plenty of others in the worst...
8 February 2021
The Super Bowl Rule: Will Buccaneers’ win signal in fresh surge in US stocks?Gamblers who sided with the favoured Kansas City Chiefs will have lost their money as the defending champions lost the fifty-fifth Super Bowl to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their quarterback Tom Brady, the most successful player in the National Football League’s history.
But stock market investors may be pleased to see Brady grab an unprecedented...
4 February 2021
Shell tantalises shareholders with promise of a first-quarter dividend increase in 2021Shell’s fourth-quarter and full-year results were undeniably ugly, as both offered huge losses, but the oil major’s promise of a dividend of $0.1735 a share in the first quarter of 2021 would represent an increase in the pay-out on both a quarter-on-quarter and a year-on-year basis.
Shareholders must now decide whether that promised payment...
1 February 2021
Come back Sir John Barnard, all is forgiven: social media traders start surfing silverFirst GameStop, next up silver seems to be the message on social media as the precious metal’s price hits a six-month high at just under $29 an ounce and traders look to storm a new market.
Whether it will be quite so easy to shunt around silver as it was GameStop remain to be seen, especially as Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brothers came a cropper...
28 January 2021
Five questions investors need to answer before the Gamestop game comes to a stopAlthough the past few days’ frenzied activity in Gamestop is putting hedge funds, shorting and short-squeezes firmly back in the headlights, the most shorted stocks in America (and the UK) have been massively outperforming the wider benchmarks since last November. This suggests that this was a professional hit first – hedge funds forcing other...
25 January 2021
Race for dominance of the fast-fashion markets heats up as ASOS and Boohoo look for bargains of their ownConfirmation that ASOS is looking to buy certain assets from the fallen Arcadia group, notably Topshop, and Boohoo’s response that it is now the proud owner of Debenhams’ brands in readiness for launching them on its own online platform both show that the pace remains as relentless as ever in the world of fast fashion.
Both firms are looking to...
12 January 2021
easyJet joins British Airways as it gets state-backed bailoutFew industries have been as hard hit during the pandemic as the airline business and its leading players are still scrambling for months to shore up their finances so they can come through the turbulence unscathed. easyJet’s management and shareholders will therefore be very grateful for the new, five-year £1.4 billion loan provided by a group of...
5 January 2021
Entain declines to entertain bid from MGM ResortsEntain is pushing back on an all-stock bid from MGM Resorts and even the prospect of an approach partially funded by cash does not seem to be moving the FTSE 100 firm’s board to recommend the proposal. But money talks even more loudly in the betting industry than it does in others and it would be no surprise if the predator were to put a bigger...
23 December 2020
World Investment Outlook 2021: Chapter two – USA PoliticsDonald Trump continues to contest November’s election result but without much success at either state or Supreme Court level. He is unlikely to go quietly into the night but December’s Electoral College vote in favour of Joe Biden, by a score of 306-232, puts the Democrat in pole position for inauguration day on 20 January 2021.
Intriguin...
23 December 2020
World Investment Outlook 2021: Chapter three – Europe PoliticsFrench diplomat Jean Monnet, one of the European Union’ founding fathers, once asserted that "Europe will be forged in crises” and 2021 could be an interesting test of that.
Even if the EU appears to have staved off a major clash with Poland and Hungary over its €1.8 trillion budget plan and €750 billion COVID recovery scheme, relations...
23 December 2020
World Investment Outlook 2021: Chapter Four – Emerging Markets PoliticsAzerbaijan and Armenia may have signed a truce with Russian peacekeepers but this was a rare example in 2020 of tempers cooling rather than fraying. The EU applied sanctions to Belarus over the sixth consecutive election victory for President Lukashenko, the US hit Turkey with sanctions after Istanbul’s $740 billion arms deal with Moscow...
23 December 2020
World Investment Outlook 2021: Chapter Five – Asia PoliticsThe Chinese Communist Party’s removal from its constitution of limits to Presidential terms back in 2018 tightened Xi Jinping’s grip on power. His drives to enforce party and public discipline on the domestic front and reassert his country’s position on the world stage have both continued at full speed. A military spat with India in the...
23 December 2020
World Investment Outlook 2021 – Chapter Six: Japan PoliticsIt was doubtless a frustrating way to go, but politics has always been that way. One short year ago, Shinzō Abe was looking forward to hosting the Tokyo Olympics in July 2020, perhaps the crowning moment of his career, having just become Japan’s longest-serving, modern-day Prime Minister (PM). The Olympics were postponed and Abe had to...
17 December 2020
FTSE 100 dividends forecast to grow by £10.9 billion in 2021There is no doubt that 2020 has been tough on income seekers. In total, 53 current or former members of the FTSE 100 index have cut, deferred or cancelled over £37 billion of dividend payments in calendar 2020 thanks to the covid-19 outbreak and subsequent recession.
Yet the news flow is starting to improve. Fifteen FTSE 100 firms have either...
15 December 2020
London’s woes weigh on Shaftesbury’s rents, dividends and share priceBen Affleck is planning to direct ‘The Big Goodbye,’ a film based on a book about the making of the classic 1974 Roman Polanski and Jack Nicholson movie ‘Chinatown,’ but investors do not seem to be looking at Shaftesbury, the owner of large chunks of London’s Chinatown, with anything like the same degree of reverence or affection. Even though...
10 December 2020
The FTSE 100 has a chance to challenge its all-time high in 2021The FTSE 100 is back where it was in summer 2016, and still languishes below the peaks of 2007 and 1999, while the pound trades near five-year lows against the dollar and close to a ten-year trough against the euro. It is therefore deceptively easy for value-seeking contrarians to make a case for a UK stock market which has underperformed and feels...
8 December 2020
GB Group shows it is still in the right place at the right timeOctober’s trading update had already hinted that these interim figures from cybersecurity specialist GB Group would be strong and they have not disappointed. The company is well placed in what remains a rapidly-growing industry as identity and location detection and fraud protection become ever more important as more and more of the world’s...
2 December 2020
Why the Santa Rally is more fact than fictionIn his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson the American writer Mark Twain cautioned about October, saying: ‘This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.’ Yet even he might have to admit to December’s festive charms, as it is...
1 December 2020
FTSE 100 bosses still outlast football managers despite management merry-go-round in 2020You would have thought that investors would have wanted managerial stability in 2020 of all years, given the challenges which have been thrown at companies from all angles, but David Lamont’s arrival as the new chief financial officer at miner BHP Group today marked the forty-fourth change in either chief executive or head of finance at FTSE 100...
25 November 2020
Run of takeovers suggests UK stock market is still cheapThe confirmation of a bid for AA, an approach to GoCo and a raised offer for Elementis make it 14 takeover deals in just over a month, to suggest that someone, somewhere thinks there are some UK-listed companies going cheap. The average premium offered for the targets is 46% so any investors who owned some of them will be feeling pretty happy with...
18 November 2020
Bitcoin: up and up it goes (until it blows…again?)Gold is holding firm around $1,900 an ounce and silver is hanging on to what looks like an upward trend at just shy of $25 an ounce but it is Bitcoin that catches the eye, which is now trading above $18,000, only a fraction below its December 2017 highs. The cryptocurrency is up by more than 150% this year and can point to a 60% gain since August...
2 November 2020
Second English lockdown fails to spark fresh FTSE sell-offThe UK’s stock market seems to be taking the imposition of a second lockdown in England pretty calmly, all things considered, and there are three possible reasons why this may be, even if at first sight a fresh halt to most economic activity is not likely to helpful to companies’ profits, cash flows or valuations.
The first is that the bulk of the...
23 October 2020
Centamin runs into more trouble on the yellow brick roadYou would have thought that sitting on a gold mine would be a path to instant riches, especially when the precious metal’s price is trading near its all-time high, so shareholders can be forgiven for being frustrated by the latest profit warning from Centamin. Production difficulties at the Sukari mine in Egypt – and management’s completely...
20 October 2020
Gamesys winning run continues with latest strong trading updateIt may not be a household name but Gamesys is one of the ten best performing stocks in the FTSE 350 index in the year to date and the leader amongst betting and gaming service providers and its upbeat third-quarter trading update helps to show why`. Sales rose 31% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis in the third quarter, after advances of 27% in...
14 October 2020
FTSE 100 banks look to avoid living down to low expectations with Q3 resultsJP Morgan Chase and Citigroup got the third-quarter reporting season for the US banks off to a good start, as both easily exceeded consensus forecasts, thanks in the main to a big drop in provisions for bad losses on their loan books. Shareholders in the Big Five FTSE 100 banks will be hoping for similar good news after a terrible year so far for...
13 October 2020
How much good news is baked into Apple’s share price ahead of the latest product launch?Apple’s shares are rolling higher again as investors get excited about the latest round of product launches, including a hotly-anticipated 5G phone, but the stock’s history suggests that the markets have a classic habit of buying on the rumour and then selling (or at least pausing for breath) after the fact.
In the six months before the firm’s...
12 October 2020
FTSE 100 dividends are forecast to fall £18 billion in 2020After further dividend cuts and reductions in analysts’ estimates, FTSE 100 dividend payments are forecast to fall 24%, or £18 billion, in 2020 after an 11% drop in 2019, leaving the total at its lowest level since 2012. That means the FTSE 100 is currently expected to yield 3.5% for 2020, increasing to 4.2% in 2021.
Dividend forecasts for the year...
7 October 2020
Banks struggle to persuade investors (and regulators) that better times lie aheadThe release of third-quarter results from US Main Street banks JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup on Tuesday 13th October and then Bank of America and Wells Fargo on the 14th will be important both as the starting point for America’s third-quarter reporting season and a precursor for the results that are due from the FTSE 100’s Big Five banks at the end...
5 October 2020
Picture darkens at Cineworld as pandemic punctures film release schedules againCineworld’s annual report for 2018 described that year as ‘transformative’ for the group, thanks to the £2.3 billion acquisition of US cinema owner and operator Regal Entertainment and it was absolutely spot on – but unfortunately not in the way that was intended, not least because the purchase price came with an extra £1.6 billion in inherited...
30 September 2020
Presidential debate revives bad memories of hanging chads and sliding marketsWith Joe Biden leading in the polls, President Trump seems determined to take to heart Dylan Thomas’ cry ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and his aggressive stance and apparent determination to challenge the election result – should he lose – will put financial markets on edge. The prospect of a contested result will stir bad memories of the...
23 September 2020
Rising dollar dulls the appeal of goldGold bugs may be getting nervous that they are about to be squashed by a rising dollar, as the precious metal’s price is now trading back below $1,900 an ounce. Precious metal miners Fresnillo, Polymetal, Hochschild and Centamin are all languishing at the bottom of the FTSE 350’s performance today. A bouncy buck is traditionally seen as bad for...
17 September 2020
Central bank policy pummels banking stocks (again)HSBC, Standard Chartered, Barclays and NatWest are all toward the bottom of the performance list in the FTSE 100 in early trading after the latest monetary policy statements from the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan, as both authorities promise to anchor interest rates at record lows. The Bank of England, already debating the merits of...
15 September 2020
Why has the UK stock market done so badly since the 2016 Brexit vote?Whatever their views on the political, economic and social rights or wrongs of Brexit, and whatever their views on the Government’s latest negotiating tactics and Parliamentary manoeuvrings on the topic, all investors have no choice but to agree on one thing – the UK equity market has been a terrible performer since the Brexit vote on 23 June 2016...
9 September 2020
What could make ‘value’ stocks finally outperform tech and ‘growth’ once more?Warren Buffett once noted that ‘A pack of lemmings looks like a bunch of rugged industrialists compared with Wall Street when it gets a concept in its teeth’ and those investors who piled in to tech stocks must now ask themselves why they were buying and what they should do after three days of sharp falls.
If they were just buying because they...
2 September 2020
Barratt makes sure its balance sheet stays as safe as housesBarratt’s confirmation of its decision of 6 July to cancel both its planned second-half and special dividends for fiscal 2020, saving some £375 million in the process, may surprise some but the house builder’s reticence to lavish cash upon investors – at least for now – makes sense for several reasons. The early share price gains suggest that...
18 August 2020
Coal burns a hole in BHP’s dividend while Persimmon rebuilds its pay-outA plunge in profits at its coal and petroleum divisions have prompted miner BHP to cut its second-half dividend by 30%, although income-seekers will take some comfort from house builder Persimmon’s return to the dividend list.
As the first-half results season draws to a close, 31 FTSE 100 firms have cut, cancelled, suspended or deferred their...
14 August 2020
Should you recession proof your investment portfolio? Stocks and funds to considerInvestors need to be a bit wary of piling into so-called recession-proof stocks for two reasons.
First, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz once noted, ‘the only perfect hedge is in a Japanese garden’ and something can still go wrong at a company even if its business is, in theory, fairly insensitive to the cycle. Competition can arrive, the regulator...
11 August 2020
Derwent London’s dividend provides another capital returnAnother dividend hike, which adds to a formidable run of increases that runs back well over 20 years, suggests that Derwent London has every confidence in its £5.4 billion portfolio of prime properties in the nation’s capital, even if investors are still unsure of the long-term outlook for office space. To back up management’s dividend decision...
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29 July 2020
Investment bank can’t help Barclays beat the bad-loan bluesWho on earth would want to be a bank in the current environment? Banks are the fourth-worst performing sector in the FTSE All-Share this year (out of 39) and Barclays’ interim results show many of the reasons why: rising bad loans thanks the pandemic and associated economic downturn, pressure on net interest margins thanks to record-low interest...
27 July 2020
Gold could shine brighter still as precious metal reaches new record highGold’s potential as an investment arouses strong emotions. Some investors love it as a potential hedge against inflation, some against deflation and some against unforeseeable disasters and market dislocations, while others detest it, viewing the precious metal as a barbarous relic or inert useless lump. But with gold reaching a new all-time high...
9 July 2020
Recruiters offer a little ray of hope for second halfTrading updates from recruitment specialists Robert Walters and PageGroup reveal just how tough the second quarter of 2020 has been for jobseekers. Robert Walters’ gross profit fell 33% year-on-year and Page’s net fee income by 47%, on a constant currency basis. Both firms also saw a fall in headcount at their own businesses. However, both...
8 July 2020
Stamp duty sugar rush for the housing marketToday’s statement was always likely to focus on ‘good’ news items designed to stir the UK economy from its economic slumber. We got that in the form of a big VAT cut for the hospitality sector, new job creation programmes and a headline-grabbing reduction in stamp duty.
However, the Chancellor was clear stabilising the public finances and paying...
6 July 2020
14 FTSE 100 firms have broken their ten-year dividend growth streaksThe pandemic and economic downturn have taken their toll on the FTSE 100’s elite list of serial dividend raisers. Just 14 firms can now point to a record of at least ten consecutive increases in their annual dividend, down from 25 at the start of the year, and that includes three newcomers - Pennon, Legal & General and Intermediate Capital.
The...
3 July 2020
Land Securities primed to restore dividend paymentsThe Restoration of the monarchy under King Charles II is seen by many historians as the end of the joyless times of the Commonwealth and a return to jollier ones under Old Rowley and his merry gang of courtiers, so equity investors will be hoping that Land Securities’ decision to restore its dividend in 2020 is a sign of better times to come for...
25 June 2020
Shareholders left wishing they could return Royal Mail to senderToday’s full-year results from Royal Mail, which live down to very low profit expectations, confirm the cancellation of the dividend and acknowledge the firm’s failure to move with the times, mean the debate over who got short-changed and by how much when Royal Mail was floated by the Cameron-Osborne administration in autumn 2013 is over. As it...
17 June 2020
Berkeley builds up land bank even as it returns more cash to shareholdersThe record of the management team at Berkeley Group, and chairman Tony Pidgley in particular, at calling the housing cycle is second to none so investors will be intrigued to see the group build up its land bank for the second year in a row, even as it continues to return plenty of cash to shareholders via dividends and buybacks.
Even if the cash...
16 June 2020
Ashtead keeps dividend streak alive as it focuses on cashReports of a $1 trillion infrastructure plan from the White House in the USA could make it a doubly good day for investors in Ashtead, as the equipment hire specialist is already pleasing them with an unchanged final dividend for its financial year to April. That means the full-year payment is up very slightly on last year, to both confound...
11 June 2020
UK banks sit bottom of the global pileBoosted by governments’ plans to ease their respective lockdowns, as well as fiscal and stimulus programmes designed to support the global economy, banking stocks had been on a roll worldwide, at least until the US Federal Reserve’s statement yesterday, but the UK was a notable exception to that trend, as performance from the Big Five FTSE 100...
