But is the narrative about what triggered this sell-off correct? Most of the commentary has focused on the US and a key set of jobs figures released in Washington on Friday. These, it has been widely claimed, sparked fears of a US recession, which then spooked markets around the world.

It’s an interpretation that the world’s securities traders and investment bankers would rather like to be true. The more pressure they can put on the US Federal Reserve to loosen policy as far and as quickly as possible, the happier they will be.

• US jobs data increases expectations of interest rate cut

Not enough focus has been on what happened in Tokyo two days earlier, on Wednesday. This was when the Bank of Japan lifted its base interest rate from a range of 0-0.1 per cent to 0.25 per cent. This merited little more than a small story in the financial pages at the time.

Japan may still be the fourth biggest economy in the world but it does not get the attention it once did. It’s increasingly regarded as a sleepy curiosity and a policy outlier, a nation whose weird demographics and deflationary pressures set it apart from the rest of the world.

But that rate rise was remarkable. First, it was only the second tightening of policy in 17 years. Second, it was a surprise: just a third of analysts had predicted it. Third, it was accompanied by eye-catching remarks from the central bank’s governor, Kazuo Ueda, that he wanted to push up rates still further in future.

The yen soared, of course. It had already been on a tear in the previous few days and Ueda’s comments gave it fresh wings. In the space of three weeks to Monday it ended up strengthening from 161 yen to the dollar to 145 yen.

That had two big effects. It suddenly made prospects for Japan’s big exporters significantly less promising, but more immediately it triggered a crisis for hedge funds and other investors which for years have been able to borrow yen super-cheaply to invest in higher-yielding assets both domestically and in the rest of the world — a gambit known as the carry trade.

Higher borrowing costs and that resurgent yen seem to have sparked a scramble to unwind those trades, with investors forced both to unload assets whatever the price and then convert the proceeds back to yen, again whatever the price. Margin calls on what were in effect leveraged bets then amplified the stampede.

“You can’t unwind the biggest carry trade the world has ever seen without breaking a few heads,” was the verdict of Kit Juckes, chief currency strategist at Société Générale.

This, therefore, was a Japan-centred sell-off, not a US-focused one, though the US data may certainly have exacerbated things. Over the space of two trading days on Friday and Monday, the Nikkei 225 index was down by a thumping 17.5 per cent. The more broadly based Topix slumped by 17.8 per cent.

Those were far bigger dives than in the US, where the S&P 500 dropped by a relatively modest 4.8 per cent over the same two trading days. Or the UK, where the FTSE 100 was down by a mere 3.3 per cent.

• Stock market jitters as global sell-off gathered pace — as it happened

Those US employment numbers were downbeat, with only a net 114,000 new jobs created. That was lower than the typical run rate of 180,000 a month for the past ten years, but it was still net employment creation and it was only one month’s numbers. US growth has if anything been picking up, from an annualised 1.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2024 to 2.8 per cent in the second quarter.

The warnings expressed about a possible recession therefore seem very exaggerated, though a modest slowdown is likely. Expansionary fiscal policy in the US should keep the economy moving, even if it may slow from a canter to a trot.

Some of the more excitable investors, however, have seized on the figure to insist that the Fed must move quickly to cut rates, some talking about a larger than expected half-point cut next month or even an emergency reduction outside the normal meeting timetable.

It’s a new version of the so-called tapering tantrums of ten years ago, the name given to the tendency for Wall Street to have a fit of vapours whenever the Fed suggested it might start to reduce or “taper” the size of the gigantic monetary injections into the system.

Perhaps this version is more of a sulk than a tantrum. Traders and economists have been predicting the first loosening of US monetary policy for months now, but the Fed has not budged. That’s not unreasonable, given that US inflation is still above target while unemployment remains low.

The Bank of Japan has already moved to placate the Japanese markets. Its deputy governor Shinichi Uchida declared yesterday that it would not raise its policy rate any more while markets remained unstable. The Nikkei has now recovered by 11.6 per cent from its Monday nadir.

It is not the job of central bankers to protect share traders from nasty losses. The Fed must not let itself be “bullied” by the markets, Mohamed El-Erian, the former Pimco boss, has rightly said.

It is their job, however, to investigate and mitigate sources of financial instability. The yen carry trade seems to have been just that, though no one has much idea how widespread it has been or how much has already been unwound in the past few days.

The Bank of England in its latest financial stability report didn’t mention it at all, though it did warn vaguely about “further signs of hedge fund leverage”. It’s the inevitable curse of policymakers to be wrongfooted by the risks they don’t spot rather than those they do.

One other point: Japan is still the world’s second biggest share market after the US, accounting for 5.9 per cent of the MSCI World Index. The UK weighting is 3.8 per cent. For anyone with a low-cost passively managed pension pot (which is most of us), what happens to Japanese shares may well be more important than what happens to British ones.

Patrick Hosking is Financial Editor of The Times

At first my insurance company, Esure, was quick to respond but I am now four months on, my car is not fixed and it feels as if Esure has lost interest and is waiting for me to give up and drop the claim.

I filed a claim and Esure deemed the car to be repairable. The worst damage was to the rear bumper, broken rear light cluster and fog light. However, there was also cosmetic damage of scratches down to the metal on the rear panel and a deep scratch to the alloy wheel. I decided to pay an extra £200 charge on top of the £250 excess to allow me to choose my own repairer.

Since then Esure has been dragging its feet. My chosen garage submitted a quote to Esure for the cost of repair work on April 12 and Esure told me its engineers would review it within five working days. I have heard nothing since. I have been chasing them every week, have submitted a formal complaint and am still nowhere nearer to getting it fixed. In addition, Esure received the CCTV footage on a USB stick via tracked delivery on April 18. To my knowledge it hasn’t even looked at the footage yet, let alone begun any investigation.

My car has failed its MoT due to the damage sustained in the incident. I am without a car, relying on the extra expense of public transport and completely at the whim of Esure.

Jill replies

I asked Esure why your claim had ground to a halt. This galvanised the insurer into action, and within three days the repairs to your car had been authorised, you had been offered £300 in compensation for the delay and you had been given a courtesy car.

It has also looked at the CCTV evidence. Last week Esure told me that although it couldn’t see the registration number of the vehicle that hit yours, it could clearly see that you were not at fault — and it will eventually be able to identify the at-fault vehicle and driver because the vehicle is clearly marked as belonging to the NHS.

Your car was initially mended enough to pass its MoT and the cosmetic repairs were completed last week. Your no-claims record, which was eight years, has been updated to nine years and Esure is refunding you £161 to make up for basing your renewal premium on the incorrect number of no-claims years.

Esure acknowledges that it should have been faster to act and apologises for the delay you have faced. This was partly caused by the difficulty of tracing the vehicle and liasing with the NHS without knowing which specific vehicle was involved in damaging your car.

• Compare car insurance deals

Currys showed no care after my husband died

My husband died suddenly and unexpectedly in June, and I had a monstrous list of tasks to go through alongside organising the funeral and all financial issues. Most companies were really kind and supportive during this time until I came across the appalling Currys.

All I wanted was to change our £7-a-month TV care and repair plan to my bank account because my husband’s account was closed. To do this I initially called and they told me to email with my request in writing, which I did.

I was eventually contacted and asked to send an original marriage certificate, my husband’s death certificate and a copy of our will. The marriage certificate costs £25 and the death certificate £12.50 per copy. I thought this excessive for a £7-a-month TV repair service and so called into the Currys shop where we took the plan out.

The assistant said he could not help directly with my request but would call the care and repair plan desks because he agreed that the demands did seem over the top. The customer care team said they needed a copy of my husband’s death certificate and they would then switch the plan over to me. I sent Currys the £12.50 death certificate as requested.

After several weeks I received an email from the Currys care team saying that they could not make the requested change until I re-sent the death certificate and the original receipt of the purchase of our TV even though they already had all our plan details to hand and the death certificate. I told them to just cancel the service plan because dealing with them was exhausting, petty and frustrating.

• Where has my £65,000 pension gone, L&G?

Jill replies

I asked Currys to reinstate your plan in your name, refund you for the cost of the certificates it had asked for and take a hard look at the demands it was making of bereaved customers. It seemed very heavy handed to ask for death and marriage certificates simply to switch payment details for a £7-a-month repair plan, and I could see absolutely no reason at all why it should need to see your husband’s will.

The next day you told me that Currys had called you early that morning with an apology and offer to pay £37.50 for the death certificate and marriage certificate you had obtained, plus a £50 gesture of goodwill. Currys has also put the plan into your name, with the monthly premium coming from your bank account.

Currys told me that it needs only copies of requested documentation and had stated in emails to you that you shouldn’t send in original documents. It requires a copy of the death certificate and one other form of evidence such as a copy of a power of attorney or marriage certificate to confirm that the person who has contacted it has the relevant permission to assume responsibility for the care and repair plan, but it does not know why your husband’s will was requested. It is still trying to find out why its staff member asked for that and says that it will re-educate teams if necessary within the business to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

“First and foremost, we’d like to sincerely apologise to Mrs H for the situation that has occurred regarding the care plan, especially during what must have been a really challenging time,” a spokesperson said. “It appears our colleague’s communications with Mrs H did not make the requirements clear, and created confusion as to which documents she was required to evidence. For this, we wholeheartedly apologise.”

Booking.com left me £350 out of pocket

I have a holiday let property in Belfast that I let out through Booking.com. It called me today, which I assumed was due to all the messages and emails I have sent about trying to get reimbursement for a last-minute cancellation it allowed for a guest.

Instead Booking.com said it was calling to help me to update the fine print because I didn’t state I would want to know who would be in my property.

The guest cancelled when I asked her who would be staying at the property, because the details on her booking did not match her subsequent messages. I have had approximately 500 stays in my property with a rating of 9.6/10 with Booking.com and 4.9/5 with Airbnb. I take it very seriously and cannot believe Booking.com would cancel a stay on a guest’s say-so simply because I asked them who would be staying at the property. I have asked other guests the same question on numerous occasions.

Booking.com cancelled this particular guest’s booking at 5pm on the day of check-in, found them another property and collected their commission while I was out of pocket by approximately £350, not to mention the hours I have spent chasing a refund. I know it isn’t a lot of money but it is the principle of the thing. I have a mortgage and with the cost of living crisis every penny counts.

Jill replies

The guest who cancelled had booked for four people, but told you there would be just two guests — herself and her partner. You said: “I was concerned as this didn’t match up with the four guests she booked for and there was a concert in Belfast called Belsonic and I feared there may be a party [in my property].”

This might sound an extreme reaction, but landlords and those who clean and prepare properties for them live in fear of stag, hen and concert parties who have been known to trash the places where they are staying. You live in the Netherlands, making it even more difficult to intervene if a guest becomes problematic.

You also said you need to know for insurance and safety purposes: “If there was ever a fire, a firefighter could lose their life searching for someone who wasn’t actually staying in the property. I know this is very unlikely but is an example of the importance of knowing.”

All good points so I asked Booking.com to refund you. It did.

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In an unusual takeover attempt in the sector, Cycle Pharma has gone directly to shareholders of Vanda Pharmaceuticals with a $8-a-share cash approach.

Cycle was founded in 2012 by James Harrison, 50, a former investment banker and private equity executive, who remains its chief executive and retains more than half of the share voting rights.

The company has offices in the global life sciences hubs of Cambridge in Britain and Boston in the United States. It employs 120 people, just under half of them in Britain. It has six marketed products, with treatments focused on neurological, rare metabolic and rare immunological conditions, most of which are genetic. It generated core operating profit of $40 million last year on revenue of $109 million.

Cycle said that it had made its takeover proposal to the board of the Nasdaq-listed Vanda on May 24. The approach was made on the same day that Vanda rejected a separate, sweetened unsolicited approach from Future Pak of $7.75 per share. The company said its offer had been pitched at a 98 per cent premium to Vanda’s closing share price on April 16, the day before an initial $4.05 approach from Future Pak.

The British business said it would have “preferred to reach an agreement privately”, but was going public with its proposal “to encourage Vanda shareholders to express their views on this proposal to the independent directors of Vanda”.

It added: “Cycle’s proposal represents a better outcome for shareholders, who would receive all-cash upfront value exceeding that of Future Pak’s cash portion of its latest offer announced May 7, 2024. It would also benefit patients, as Cycle has a proven commercial strategy in the US, a strong distribution footprint and an established track record of delivering medicines and individualised support to patients suffering from conditions with high unmet medical need.”

Vanda, which is based in Washington DC, responded, confirming the “unsolicited, non-binding indication of interest”, which it would “carefully review and evaluate”.

⬤ GSK, one of Britain’s biggest drugs companies, has announced its latest bolt-on acquisition, acquiring Elsie Biotechnologies, a San Diego-based private biotechnology company, for up to about £39 million. Tony Wood, chief scientific officer at GSK, said: “By bringing together Elsie’s expertise and our internal capabilities, we can design and develop oligonucleotides [which modulate gene expression] for difficult-to-treat diseases of scale with larger patient populations.”

Labour this weekend signalled a new intent to break an impasse in talks with British Steel’s Chinese owner, Jingye, that has clouded the future of its vast works in Scunthorpe for more than four years.Now, Jingye has helped hone in on a compromise by committing to bankroll the hugely loss-making operations until the second half of 2025 at least.

British Steel is one of only two manufacturers of strategically important “virgin steel” in the UK, alongside Tata Steel at Port Talbot in Wales. Tata is in more advanced talks of its own with the government over a similar bailout.

Jingye acquired British Steel in March 2020 after it collapsed into bankruptcy a year earlier. The company operates two blast furnaces and employs 4,000 people at its Lincolnshire steel plant.

Bosses want to switch from the company’s loss-making blast furnaces to cleaner electric arc furnace (EAF) production, at a cost of £1.25 billion. Doing so would reduce carbon emissions by 75 per cent, British Steel has claimed.

But Jingye is not prepared to make the switch without significant public subsidy and is in talks to gain access to £600 million of taxpayer aid.

Unions warn that even if the deal is approved about 2,000 jobs would be lost, because EAF is far less labour-intensive than traditional production methods.

Some of the Scunthorpe production would also be moved to British Steel’s Teesside plant, where a new EAF facility is scheduled to be built.

Talks dragged on under successive Conservative administrations, with officials wary of the commitment of British Steel’s Chinese backer and concerned about a slew of red flags raised by the company’s auditors.

However, the change of government has injected new impetus into negotiations, with a number of options now under consideration, according to sources close to discussions. These are thought to include plans to invest in carbon capture and storage and to continue running blast furnaces until the new EAFs are in operation.

“We’re working in partnership with trade unions and business, including British Steel, to secure a green steel transition that’s right for the workforce and safeguards the future of the industry in Britain,” a government spokesman said.

Meanwhile, recently filed accounts will allay some of the fears within Whitehall over British Steel’s finances. The accounts show that Jingye injected £100 million of equity into the business last October and confirmed to the British Steel board that it “will provide financial support, should it be required” until at least July 2025. British Steel has received over £200 million in loans from Jingye.

The delayed accounts related to the year to December 2021, but were signed off on July 18, 2024 — after Labour came to power.

Commentary in the financial statements said the new government “understands” the cost pressures facing British Steel. “Formal funding” talks with Sir Keir Starmer’s administration are taking place, the company added.

A government spokesman said: “Decarbonisation does not mean de­industrialisation, which is why we’ve committed to £2.5 billion of investment to rebuild the steel industry and support communities for generations to come.”

Sources close to the talks said that a deal to rescue British Steel is unlikely to pre-date a similar bailout of Tata Steel.

British Steel declined to comment.

Tata’s Indian owners had struck an agreement with Rishi Sunak’s government to close its two blast furnaces in Port Talbot and switch to EAF production, but the deal was not signed before Sunak called Britain to the polls in early July.

Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds convinced union leaders to drop strikes at Port Talbot days into taking up the role. Industrial action threatened to poleaxe the deal agreed under the Conservatives that would have led to the longest-serving south Wales steelworkers receiving up to £100,000 each in redundancy.

Reynolds risks coming into further conflict with unions over Labour’s plans for the steel sector. Union leaders say taxpayer aid should only be provided on the proviso that blast furnace production continues.

British Steel and Tata argue that blast furnace production in the UK is loss-making and therefore uneconomic. Continuing blast furnace production in the medium to long-term would also be at odds with Labour’s green pledges. The Port Talbot works, for instance, accounts for roughly 20 per cent of all of Wales’s carbon emissions.

I found myself gripped by the women’s lightweight double sculls last week (not a sentence I have often written). It was won by two young Brits — Emily Craig and Imogen Grant — in a display of “calm synchronicity”, to quote British Rowing. Their interview following the medal ceremony was remarkable for its warmth, genuine friendship and mutual support, encapsulated by the way in which each talked only of the other’s remarkable qualities. Their unaffected sentiment and joint appreciation of the “give and get” of their journey to winning shone brighter than their gold medal.

It seems to me to offer a parallel for how good (in every sense of the word) companies do business today — not only in the display of exemplary teamwork but also in the desire to see others succeed, and knowing that a partner’s success is also your own. Many of us have witnessed unsavoury episodes, generally in deals, where each party is determined to extract an uncompromising “win” from the other, with insufficient regard for the companies in play or the people who work in them.

There are also those situations (listings come to mind) where businesses are “ramped” — talked up beyond any reasonable expectation of performance if investor frenzy, created through overheated market sentiment, was taken out of the equation.

And perhaps the saddest outcome is when a good, established company, needing new money to compete or new owners to succeed a family leader, gets sold too cheaply because the buyers fail to understand its real worth — which, more often than not, is the care and dedication of the people who work there, producing quality goods for valued customers.

Confrontation versus collaboration — which feels right to you? What is going to achieve the optimal result for all stakeholders? What brings out the best in people? Confrontation feels such an old-fashioned, short-term way of doing things. The resentment of the losing party doesn’t go away but continues to simmer.

Courtesy, respect and fairness through collaborative ways of working can — and, in my view, generally do — bring the long-term win. For all parties.

I am quite often asked to come in as chair when a founder takes their first private equity cheque; I have started businesses and have also worked with a number of private equity firms. The first phase of a new partnership throws up some interesting challenges, generally confrontational and with the glow of deal love receding fast.

Founder: “This enterprise is my creation — only I understand it and never tell me what to make or do.”

Private equity house: “Your margins are too low, your labour costs are too high and you spend too much.”

These are exaggerated stereotypes, but a truth is there. Resolution requires finding the widest possible crossover in the Venn diagram of the two positions, where collaboration and mutual understanding will flourish, allowing the enterprise to grow purposefully and prosperously. As the definition says: “A Venn diagram uses overlapping circles … highlighting how the items are similar and different.”

That’s the power of collaboration: seeing and appreciating both similarities and differences, learning from each other and reducing friction and barriers to understanding. “My way or the highway” never achieves that end. This isn’t world peace (but maybe a step towards that); it’s a productive, challenging and interesting way of working to get the best out of each individual and the team as a whole.

It also allows an unhindered focus on what the enterprise is trying to achieve, looking up and out, not down and into disagreements or ego-driven demands, which wastes so much energy. It requires the ability to listen, to reflect and to understand and move past failures. It also requires the smart use of data to back up a position and to remove reliance on “I think …” rather than “the evidence shows …”. Both attitude and content have to be present: “The argument/discussion point I am evidencing is clear and I will present it calmly and knowledgeably, and genuinely invite input. On such collaborative ways of working, winning well is created.

Emily and Imogen won well. Imogen: “The loss in Tokyo [the host for the last Olympics, where the pair missed out on gold by 0.5 seconds and on bronze by 0.01 seconds] was part of our story … We’ve put so much work into this and we are such different and better people this time around that there was a certain inevitability to the racing.” Collaboration and content. Bravo.

Dame Karen Jones co-founded Café Rouge and was chief executive of the Spirit pub group. She is a non-executive director at Deliveroo, Whitbread, the Crown Estate and Mowgli Street Food, and chairwoman of Hawksmoor

The government has set a goal of having 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity installed by the end of the decade, up from about 15GW on the system at present. However, the country will not meet the target until 2048, based on the present pace of new wind farms being built, an analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research suggests.

Stepping up the amount of offshore wind capacity on the grid is crucial to meeting the government’s target for decarbonising the electricity system by 2035. Labour has set an even more ambitious goal of achieving next zero by 2030.

Britain has also lagged behind other European countries in developing the manufacturing capacity for every big component of the wind supply chain, despite having one of the most mature renewables industries in the world. If the huge market for wind installation had been exploited to the same extent as by other European nations, including Spain and Germany, an additional £30 billion could have been generated between 2008 and 2022, the report claims.

Simone Gasperin, an associate fellow at the institute, said: ‘‘The UK has missed out from becoming a world leader not just in wind power but also in wind manufacturing. This has cost thousands of jobs, billions for the economy and is putting future net zero targets for wind deployment at risk.”

The UK could reduce its import and energy dependence, while reviving its manufacturing industry, by producing more wind components domestically. To capture the potential economic benefit, at least one additional blade factory, two new nacelle and tower factories and two extra foundation factories would need to be built in less than five years, it is claimed.

An investment of £3.2 billion in British manufacturing facilities could generate tens of thousands of direct and indirect jobs, particularly in small and medium-sized businesses, the think tank argues.

The American chipmaker’s shares were down by more than 20 per cent in pre-market trading in New York after it announced a drastic cost reduction plan on Thursday night and warned that its revenue for the current quarter would be lower than expected. It also said that it would suspend its dividend.

The California-based Intel plans to cut 15 per cent of its workforce, with the majority of the job losses to be completed by the end of this year. It wants to cut its operating expenses and to reduce capital expenditure of more than $10 billion in 2025.

• How China aims to overpower the West’s technology supremacy

“I need less people at headquarters, more people in the field, supporting customers,” Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s chief executive, said.

Shares in Intel have already lost almost 40 per cent of their value this year amid investors’ concerns that it has fallen behind in the AI chip race. The company has suffered from weaker demand for its traditional data centre chips and increased competition in the personal computer market.

Intel said it expected to bring in revenue of between $12.5 billion and $13.5 billion for the quarter, short of analysts’ previous average estimate of $14.35 billion.

“Our objective is to come back with the dividend, to pay a competitive dividend over time, but right now, focusing on the balance sheet, deleveraging,” Gelsinger, 63, said. “Deleveraging and capital investments are, we believe, a greater shareholder return right now than paying a dividend.”

Intel’s shares were down by $6.57, or 22.6 per cent, at $22.48 in pre-market dealing on Wall Street.

In a survey of 1,001 voters polled for the Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, 42 per cent said they trusted Harris with economic management, compared with 41 per cent for the former president. It is the first time that the Democrats have polled better than the Republicans on the economy in more than a year.

Last month President Biden, the incumbent who announced he would not be seeking re-election, polled seven percentage points lower than Trump.

The appointment of Harris, 59, as the Democratic candidate has shaken up polling in the past three weeks, with surveys showing a narrowing in the popularity gap with Trump. The Democrats under Biden, 81, had struggled to generate a positive campaigning message on the economy, after inflation hit a 30-year high in the autumn of 2022 at 9.1 per cent. Consumer prices inflation has fallen back to 3 per cent, but voters had consistently favoured Trump, 78, over the Democrats on managing the economy amid concerns about the cost of living.

The US economy has been one of the best performers in the world over the past year, stimulated by government and consumer spending. The Biden administration has boasted a record 15.7 million new jobs created since late 2020. Markets endured a sharp sell-off last week amid fears of a US recession driven by poor jobs numbers. Speaking to CBS, the Bank of America boss Brian Moynihan said “you could dispirit the American consumer” if the Fed did not start cutting interest rates soon.

The next US president will face a series of big policy decisions, including whether to extend the 2016 Trump-era tax cuts that are due to expire next year. Trump has said he would continue the tax-cutting regime and would impose a 10 per cent tariff on all imports to the United States and a 60 per cent tariff on Chinese goods.

More American voters trust Trump on relations with China, at 43 per cent, compared with 39 per cent for Harris.

The polling also found that Harris’s broader popularity had increased since she was announced as the presidential nominee, with 46 per cent of surveyed voters saying she had performed well as a vice- president, compared with 41 per cent who approved of Biden’s performance as president.

The microchip makers Nvidia (stock market ticker: NVDA) and Intel (INTC) plunged from peak valuations by 22 per cent and 57 per cent respectively on fears that artificial intelligence (AI) might disappoint.

Even rising revenues and profits at the iPhone-maker, Apple (AAPL), and software giant Microsoft (MSFT), my most valuable and ninth-most valuable holdings respectively, were not enough to prevent their share prices slipping 6 per cent and 13 per cent below recent peaks. Hopes that AI features might be added to new iPhones as soon as next month, prompting some of the 270 million customers who have not bought a new one for four years or more (including me) to upgrade, helped support AAPL’s price, which remains 20 per cent higher than it started this year.

More generally, Mr Market has lost his taste for digital tales of jam tomorrow. However, one of my more esoteric shares is proving to be an important exception to that trend.

EssilorLuxottica (EL) is not a household name in Britain, but this €95 billion Franco-Italian giant makes nearly a third of the optical lenses in the world. That’s why I paid €96 in March 2019, as reported here at that time, for shares that cost €209 at the close of business on Friday and are my sixth most valuable holding.

My original reason for investing was that fewer folk are willing to put up with poor eyesight, which used to be regarded as part of growing old, now that we spend so much of our lives looking at small screens on computers and phones. So an ageing, online and wealthier population is likely to buy more eyewear for the foreseeable future.

• Best investment platforms for beginners

That long view came into sharp focus four years ago when EL teamed up with Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms (META), to make “smart glasses” that now enable users to take photos and videos, listen to music, take calls and live stream online. The version on sale in America also includes access to Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant, so wearers can ask for more information about whatever they are looking at.

Unlike earlier “wearable technology”, the digitally enhanced specs look just like any other sunglasses. More specifically, they are the latest iteration of the long-established Ray-Ban Wayfarer, which is probably EL’s best-known brand alongside Oakley. So buyers of the new kit can hope it makes them look less “geeky nerd” and more like Muhammad Ali, the charismatic fighter who helped these shades to become global bestsellers.

This year EL extended the new technology aspect of its eyewear by launching glasses that double up as inconspicuous hearing aids, addressing another widespread disadvantage of old age. The online video glasses are called Ray-Ban Meta and the hearing glasses are dubbed Nuance Audio.

Then stock market chatter began to suggest that Meta might buy a stake in its eyewear partner. Zuckerberg told analysts in April: “If we want everyone to be able to use wearable AI, eyewear is a bit different from phones or watches in that people are going to want very different designs. So I think our approach of partnering with leading eyewear brands will help us serve more of the market.”Last month Francesco Milleri, chief executive of EL, told institutional analysts that Meta had contacted him to discuss becoming an investor. He added: “We are informed of this kind of intention. We are proud that the company that know us very well now after years of partnership is convinced that our company, our group, can grow.”

Here and now, this business enjoys a gross profit margin of 64 per cent and sits on cash reserves of €598 million. Although the dividend yield is a modest 1.9 per cent, payouts to shareholders increased by an annual average of 14 per cent over the past five years, according to the independent statistician LSEG Data & Analytics.

• How to invest £10,000

It is important to remember that dividends are not guaranteed and can be cut or cancelled without notice. However, if EL’s rate of increase in payouts to shareholders proves sustained, that would double our income in five years.

So this business looks like an attractive combination of one that meets real human needs, already makes good profits and has the exciting potential for new technology to create additional products and profits in future. Against all that, there is always the risk that a competitor will find a way to make something similar, better and cheaper.

Most immediately, the shares are no longer cheap, having doubled since I first told you about them, and are now priced at an eye-stretching 41 times corporate earnings. That still remains lower than the price/earnings (P/E) ratios of NVDA, the online retailer Amazon (AMZN), and the electric car company Tesla (TSLA), where — despite last month’s double-digit price slumps in all three shares — the P/E ratios remain 53, 68 and 63 respectively.

So I think there might be further to go for this Franco-Italian firm, making high tech specs. It’s the exceptions that make investing interesting. Or is this happy shareholder looking through rose-tinted glasses?

A tale of two sales slumps

Food and drink will never go out of fashion, although investing in them is not risk-free, as two shareholdings reminded me last week. Both businesses blamed cash-strapped consumers for falling sales, but their share prices reacted very differently.

Let’s do the bad news first, because I know some of you enjoy my pratfalls more than my profits. The drinks giant Diageo (DGE) reported sales only 1.4 per cent lower in the year to June, its first shrinkage since the Covid crisis, but the share price slumped by 7 per cent.

I am not crying into my beer because I transferred DGE shares from a paper-based broker into the “forever fund” at £21 in September 2013, as reported here. Even after the price has nearly halved in two terrible years, they still trade at £23.77 with a 3.4 per cent dividend yield.

Then the world’s biggest fast-food business, McDonald’s (MCD) also reported its first sales decline since Covid, but the share price actually went up by 4 per cent on the day. This is my fourth-biggest shareholding, since I paid $95 in July 2014, as reported here at that time, for shares that cost $272 on Tuesday and still yield 2.5 per cent dividend income.

Many factors played a part in these different outcomes but here’s one neither business mentioned. MCD can rely on millions of US shareholders, investing to pay for retirement, who are happy to “buy on the dip”. DGE has a smaller fan club of retail investors, who suffer stamp duty, or a tax on share purchases, that is absent in America.

That’s two reasons why I tend to favour Yankee blue chips over the Brits. It also illustrates the importance of investing internationally to diminish risk by diversification.

Full disclosure: Ian Cowie’s shareholdings