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.
20 June 2022
How Brexit vote has shaped markets six years onIt is almost six years since the UK’s Brexit vote on 23 June 2016. As the Government prepares to scrap its own Northern Ireland protocol, GDP growth figures totter and energy and food security become hot topics, investors and savers are still trying to pick through the noise to work out whether they are better off or not.
The pandemic, Russia’s...
16 June 2022
How UK shares have fared during rate hike cycles as Thursday's BoE decision awaitsThe Bank of England may be moving more slowly than the US Federal Reserve when it comes to raising interest rates, but the UK’s central bank is still expected to raise the cost of borrowing for the fifth time when it meets on Thursday,
There have been eleven previous upcycles for UK interest rates since the inception of the FTSE All-Share index in...
10 June 2022
Inventory woes as Target misses again, highlighting risk to US profit forecastsA second profit warning in three weeks from US retailer Target would have been no surprise to anyone who could read a balance sheet, because the firm’s inventories were growing so much faster than its sales.
Unless customer purchases picked up speed – a risky bet, given surging fuel, food and energy costs – Target was in danger of having to...
27 May 2022
Snap share price badly bruised by Apple’s new privacy policyYou can tell a share price is in trouble when even a drop of 25% is hard to spot on the chart and Snap’s pre-market plunge is just such an example.
The self-styled camera company’s stock now trades below the March 2017 flotation price of $17 and is down by some 80% from its September 2021 peak after a profit warning for the second quarter that...
19 May 2022
US margin debt falls again as investors’ appetite for risk recedesAccording to the latest set of data from American market regulator FINRA, margin debt – the amount of money borrowed by either professional or private investors in the US – has just fallen for the seventh time in ten months. Even the pandemic could not force such a retrenchment, so perhaps this is a sign that the mood music is changing.
Meme...
19 May 2022
KKR fires up a bid for power plant play ContourGlobalPower utility ContourGlobal has hardly blown out the lights since its listing on the London Stock Exchange in November 2017 but a bid from private equity for the power utility offers a reminder of valuable lessons for investors.
First, cash flow is king. Second, investing for yield and income can bring its long-term reward to patient portfolio...
11 May 2022
BP’s plans mean FTSE 100 share buybacks are on track to set new-all time high in 2022The debate over BP’s bumper profits and the rights and wrongs of a windfall tax looks set to continue but the facts of the matter are that the oil major’s latest plans to return cash to its investors mean the FTSE 100’s members are poised to set a new all-time record for share buybacks in 2022.
BP’s plan to buy back $2.5 billion of stock in the...
6 May 2022
Why Wednesday’s post-Fed rally may have been a bear trapWhen Jack Nicholson was playing The Joker in Tim Burton’s first Batman film in 1989, he was so well paid that he reportedly told a fellow cast member after just a week’s shooting, ‘Ah well, that’s another Matisse.’ Financial markets are starting to rack up some big numbers, too, but in this case the money is flowing out, not in.
After Thursday’s...
5 May 2022
Tough times ahead for Next and Shell profit beats expectations amid windfall tax talk“Markets have been fearing interest rate hikes for some time, so it is understandable to question why equities soared after rates went up. It’s also more confusing when you consider the Federal Reserve pushed through twice the level of rate hikes you would normally expect from a central bank meeting,” says Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell...
28 April 2022
Five questions that Amazon must answer in its first-quarter resultsAmazon’s fourth-quarter results for 2021 were weak, guidance for the first-quarter of 2022 was poor and the gambit of a stock split coupled with a $10 billion share buyback has subsequently failed to support the shares.
They are down by more than a fifth from their all-time high of last July, to technically leave them in a bear market, and in...
