Invest & Fund Blog

Part 1: The Bull Case for Fixed Income Alternatives

In this week's blog, the first in a two-part special, we quite simply make a bullish case for looking more closely at fixed income alternatives. When volatility spikes, fixed income becomes attractive for reasons that are almost insultingly simple. The income is contractual, and the timeline is defined. As the

Part 2: What's Actually Under the Bonnet

In Part 1, we made the macro case: why geopolitical volatility, stretched equity valuations, and the ever-present oil risk have sent serious investors back to the fixed income playbook and why the defining characteristics of that playbook (defined returns, finite timelines, contractual income, insulation from daily noise) are exactly what

Truth

In this week's blog, we are leaning into some truths that always make for an interesting read: call it an honest health update on the market, a frank look at what's making life difficult for development finance lenders and why pretending otherwise helps nobody! There's a version of this piece

War Chest

Nine billion is a really, really big number. It’s not the UK's housing deficit. It's not the infrastructure funding gap. It's not even a government budget line. It's the amount of developer contributions, which is essentially money paid by housebuilders as a direct condition of planning permission, currently sitting

Mind The Gap

The ONS published the March 2026 Private Rent and House Prices bulletin last week. Somewhere, a statistician hit send and went to make a cup of tea, blissfully unaware that they had just produced the most compelling argument for development finance since someone first noticed that people need somewhere to

Changing Picture

For most of the past two years, UK government bonds looked like they were finding their footing. Yields had retreated from the January 2025 spike, inflation appeared to be easing, and markets were pricing in two Bank of England rate cuts for 2026. For investors who had endured the volatility

Field Experts: Tax, Wealth & the Art of Making Money Work Harder

Field Experts Episode 1 Russell Dickie CTA is the founder of RJD Tax Advice, a specialist independent tax advisory practice. Field Experts Episode 1 .pdf 929 KB download-circle We kick off our new 'Field Experts' series with a conversation that goes straight to the heart of smart investing. Hannah Davies,

Ten years

When the Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) launched in April 2016, it marked a subtle but significant shift in the UK’s financial landscape. For the first time, everyday investors could place loans and alternative finance investments inside the same tax-free wrapper that had long been reserved for cash savings and

You Spin Me Round

When the Office for National Statistics published its latest private rent and house prices bulletin in February 2026, it was a good chance to look back on some of our predictions from last year in relation to the rent spiral. Maybe it would have been a fairer assessment to call

It's Not What You Look at That Matters; It's What You See

In this week's blog, we have a closer look at the Private Credit market, one in which direct lending alternatives like our sector sit comparatively close to, but from a slightly less affluent house. This is a neighbour with a trillion-dollar smile, with a very expensive car in the drive,

Hyperbolic Discounting

In this week's blog, we picked up on a recent article in The Telegraph arguing that Labour’s proposed plan to build 1.5 million homes essentially amounts to a “war on homeowners,” claiming that rather than solving the housing crisis, it would, in reality, reduce property values by around

Empty

In this week's blog, we have picked up on a counternarrative quietly emerging in the press: quite simply, we don’t need to build more homes, and the housing shortage is simply a direct result of wasted stock. To go a step further than that, it’s also being subtly

Adjustment

In this week's blog, we have a look at a recent article in the Financial Times where the UK housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, stated that London’s high land prices “need a market adjustment.” The comment, understandably, has raised serious eyebrows across the property sector. Is this teeing up expectations

Society

In this week's thought exercise, we turn our attention to the ongoing tussle between the freehold investment community and the government over the ground rent caps introduced by the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024. This is hitting the headlines once again, 18 months after it gained its much-needed Royal

Purpose

Most financial professionals eulogising over the great investors of the 20th Century will eventually boil down any one strategy to simple pragmatism. Long-termism, when it comes to orientation, direction, and compounding, focuses on the likelihood of return through the strength of the assets, not on meaning or sentiment. Yet by

The Roaring Twenties

"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them," said wistful  Andy Bernard in the series finale of the Amercian version of “The Office”. This much ‘memed’ (we believe that’s the correct colloquial parlance of the 21st Century, we

New Year, New Market?

As we welcome 2026, it is customary in the UK for many to have a clear-out, alongside Dry January and the self-deception of gym-based pledges. As we now exist in a world of immediate gratification, we start Christmas in October, we just about have time for Spring cleaning in January,

'Tis the Season

As this is our last weekly blog before Christmas, it's timely to reflect on where the UK peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector stood in 2025 and have a peek at what comes next. In a year dominated by the rise of the great Quangocracy, unaccountable, unelected clever people chipping in their

Reasons to Be Cheerful

In what we absolutely promise is our second and final analysis of this month's budget, and before we move on to a lighter and more joyous festive mood to close out our 2025 run of blogs, we wanted to revisit the outlook presented by the OBR and perhaps paint a

Scheduled Send

As fast as the OBR can press the send button on their report, this week we have decided to fire out an end-of-week briefing of our own, in the first of what will become a two-part exploration of the deeper narratives of this week's extraordinary budget. We asked ourselves: What

Rearranging Deckchairs

Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed offering 50-year mortgages to homebuyers in the United States as part of his housing affordability agenda. On its face, the idea might sound attractive: extend the terms so that monthly payments drop, thereby improving affordability for retail clients, without introducing a

Stability Without Conviction

The Bank of England’s October 2025 Decision Maker Panel (DMP) report provides the UK with a snapshot of how thousands of UK businesses perceive inflation, wages, and uncertainty. While the data covers the economy as a whole, its signals are particularly relevant for the housing and construction sectors, as

Mood

It's perceived that until the cards are turned over on the upcoming budget The Bank of England will continue to be cautious in its decision making, which may have been a sizeable factor in its decision last week to keep the base rate at 4% after a finely balanced vote.

Common People

In this week's blog, we look back to March 2025, when the Government published the Commonhold White Paper, the first step towards fulfilling its manifesto promise to abolish leasehold. The Ministerial Foreword stated: “The government is determined to ensure that commonhold becomes the default tenure…commonhold is not merely an

Defcon 1?

In this week's blog, amid persistent housing shortages, high interest rates, and tightening planning constraints, the UK's housing market finds itself once again at a crossroads, where everyone is looking for answers. The Government's target of 1.5 million new homes within this Parliament seems to have set it up