Latest news with #RichardBernstein
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Scottish TV in crisis as demand collapses amid economic gloom
Scottish TV has been plunged into crisis as economic gloom hits advertising revenues and demand for new shows. Scottish Television (STV), which holds the Channel 3 licence in Scotland and is the country's largest commercial broadcaster, has warned that its revenues and profits would be 'materially' below expectations this year. Shares in the broadcaster plunged by as much as a third to their lowest level in more than 12 years in response to the update, pushing its market value below £90m. ITV, which licences many of its programmes to the Scottish channel, was also down 2pc. STV suffered a 10pc drop in advertising revenue in the first six months of 2025, which it said was in line with expectations following strong trading in the same period last year during the Euros football tournament. But bosses warned the market had since deteriorated further, with ad revenues plunging by a fifth in July. In addition to the advertising downturn, STV warned of a significant slowdown in its production division, which is the largest in Scotland and is behind shows such as the BBC's Blue Lights and upcoming Sky drama Amadeus. Studio businesses are considered a key area of growth for broadcasters as they grapple with a decline in traditional TV viewing. But rising costs and tough competition from streaming rivals result in many channels having to cut back on programming spend, leading to fewer commissions. ITV last week said it was slashing its programming spending as part of a wider cost-cutting strategy, while Channel 4 is also investing significantly less in making TV shows. Focus on Britain STV said that while it is working on projects for US streaming giants including Netflix and Apple, it remains primarily UK-focused, meaning it has been 'disproportionately' hit by a drying up of demand in the domestic market. STV forecasts production revenues of between £75m and £85m for the full year, well behind its targets of £200m by the end of the decade. Overall, STV said it was lowering its full-year revenue forecasts to between £165m and £180m with a profit margin of around 7pc. Richard Bernstein, the head of fund manager Crystal Amber, which was previously the largest shareholder in STV, described the profit warning as 'vicious'. He said: 'We've been tracking the company and saw today's warning as inevitable: it was over a year since its last new studio commission, we think the worst is yet to come.' In May, STV announced that it would combine its traditional TV and streaming businesses into a single division, aiming to streamline the company for the digital age. It also announced plans to launch a new Scotland-focused commercial radio station while doubling revenues in its studios unit. Bosses said they were ramping up cost-cutting plans with a further £750,000 in savings identified, bringing the company's total target for the year to £2.5m. Further cost-cutting is expected next year. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Sign in to access your portfolio
Bloomberg
11-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Bloomberg Masters in Business: Richard Bernstein
Barry speaks with Richard Bernstein, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Richard Bernstein Advisors. Rich has over 35 years′ experience on Wall Street, most recently as the Chief Investment Strategist at Merrill Lynch. Prior to joining Merrill Lynch in 1988, he held positions at E.F. Hutton and Chase Econometrics. They discuss the growth in his firm, the overall macro investment environment, and state of markets today.
Economic Times
07-07-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
Skip the AI FOMO, cash in where no one's looking: Bernstein backs old-school payouts and warns AI may be the next dot-com bubble
ChatGPT's role in market surge Live Events Cycles do not last forever Why dividend stocks matter now Utilities quietly hold their own (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel Richard Bernstein, Chief Investment Officer at Richard Bernstein Advisors , sees too much heat in the artificial intelligence trade. In a note dated 30 June, he drew a sharp line between today's AI rush and earlier booms that went too far.'Investors seem universally focused on 'AI', which seems eerily similar to the '.com' stocks of the Technology Bubble and the 'tronics' craze of the 1960s,' Bernstein wrote. He added that while AI dominates headlines, 'we see lots of attractive, admittedly boring, dividend-paying themes.'Since OpenAI's ChatGPT appeared in November 2022, the numbers have been hard to ignore. The S&P 500 has gained 54 percent. The Nasdaq 100 has soared 90 percent. Some valuations have pushed back to levels last seen just before the dot-com crash or even the market peak in has made investors pile into anything labelled AI. But Bernstein says that might not be smart money at this stage. He made clear he is not calling the exact top. Still, trends do not run forever.'The best time to invest in something is when it's out of favour — not after a massive rally has occurred,' he laid out how investor moods flip as markets change. Early in a bull run, fear rules. People look for dividends and lower-risk bets. Once they feel bold, they chase high growth stories instead.'At the beginning of a bull market when momentum and beta strategies are by definition most rewarded, investors' fears lead them to emphasise dividends and lower-beta equities,' he said. 'In later-cycle periods when dividends and lower beta become more attractive, investors' confidence leads them to risk-taking and momentum investing.'His take? We are no longer early in this cycle. 'We clearly are not at the beginning of a bull market and, as we've previously written, the profits cycle is starting to decelerate,' he where does that leave investors who do not want to get burnt? Bernstein says boring can be smart. He points to dividend stocks, especially in the utilities sector, as ready for a fresh companies pay steady sums to shareholders. Some pocket the money. Many reinvest it back into the stock, which helps their position grow over time.'One of the easiest methods for building wealth has historically been the power of compounding dividends,' Bernstein said. 'Compounding dividends is boring as all get out, but it's been highly successful through time.'People might assume high-flying tech leaves old utility stocks in the dust. Bernstein says that is not quite true.'In fact, compounding dividend income has been so successful, that the Dow Jones Utilities Index's returns have been roughly neck-and-neck with NASDAQ returns since NASDAQ's inception in 1971,' he do not need to pick single stocks to get in. Funds like the SPDR S&P Dividend ETF and Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF spread the bets and deliver a mix of steady message is not about ditching technology altogether. It is about seeing the pattern. Big fads rise fast. They fall just as fast when the shine wears off. While the AI hype carries on, he thinks dividends could quietly do the heavy trick, he suggests, is to look where others are not. Sometimes the most boring corner of the market can end up paying the best.
Globe and Mail
07-07-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Market Factors: Buy utilities and let others stress about markets
In this edition of Market Factors, a Wall Street strategist suggests buying defensive stocks and forgetting about chasing growth stories. A prominent sentiment indicator brings bad news and a physicist makes a remarkable discovery about dense crowds of people. Prominent Wall Street strategist Richard Bernstein thinks equity investors should more or less throw in the towel on risk assets, buy utilities and collect dividends and stable earnings. In a recent report called A bird in the hand, Mr. Bernstein writes that 'Investors' guidelines regarding the basics of building wealth seem distorted by the current speculative period.' In his mind, investors have lost the plot – scrambling to chase the riskiest sector returns while forgetting the time-honoured route to wealth. Mr. Bernstein notes that the returns of the stodgy U.S. utilities sector is neck and neck with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite since 1971. Investors in utilities, to state the obvious, don't have to endure anything close to the volatility experienced by Nasdaq investors. The logic transfers to the domestic market in remarkable fashion – returns for utilities and the broader S&P/TSX Composite Index are virtually the same. Since 1990, as far back as my data goes, the average annual return including dividends for the S&P/TSX Composite is 7.98 per cent. For utilities it's 7.69 per cent annually. Domestic investors in utilities would likely have slept a lot better than speculative investors over the past 35 years. They'd be mostly unaffected by the wild swings in the benchmark caused by Bre-X Minerals Ltd. as well as Nortel Networks and the rest of the late 1990s technology favourites. Utilities investors generated the same returns for the period, making the risk-adjusted returns better than the overall benchmark by orders of magnitude. It's not difficult to understand Mr. Bernstein's timing in writing his piece. U.S. valuations are very extended while investors are pushing the market higher despite risks presented by arbitrary tariff policy, a potential threat to Federal Reserve independence and military conflicts in the Middle East. Risk tolerance might be higher than it should be, in other words. There is one important caveat here and that's interest rates. From September 1990 to 2020, the Government of Canada ten-year bond yield fell from 11.2 per cent to 0.5 per cent, and has since retraced some ground to 3.4 per cent. Every move lower made the dividend yield on utilities stocks more attractive. The trend now is likely flat to higher so the tailwind from steadily declining rates is no longer in effect. Even with this in mind it is tempting to move assets to utilities and worry less about the course of broader equity markets. Citi's Levkovich index, named after the late strategist Tobias Levkovich, has entered euphoria territory, signaling a high probability of a market pullback. The Levkovich index comprehensively measures investor sentiment using NYSE short interest, GDP growth, profit expectations, inflation, bond spreads, two-year Treasury yields and the New York Federal Reserve recession probability index The Levkovich index is contrarian – at extremes the equity market is likely do the opposite of investors' expectation. The median forward 12-month S&P 500 performance when the index is in the euphoria range, for instance, is -9.7 per cent. The probability that equity returns will be positive in the 12-months following a euphoria reading is a meagre 29 per cent. A new study published in Nature showed how fluid dynamics can be applied to predict the oscillations of movements in densely packed crowds. The crowds must be really packed in tight for it to work – four people or more per square meter. The insane, chanting Spaniards at the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona were used for the study. Previously, attempts to model the movement of large crowds extrapolated the activity in small crowds. Didn't work. The successful study was done by physicists who treated people in crowds as more mindless, like water molecules, instead of accounting for 'active-matter hydrodynamics' or individual choices or forces. Videos of the crowds in Pamplona were found to feature 'asymmetric orbital oscillations' at predictable intervals. Speaking of videos, Nature produced an excellent one on the topic here. This study is not entirely a diversion for investors. Benoit Madelbrot's study of cotton pricing is only one of many examples of academics continually attempting to render the complexity of asset prices, which seem on the surface to be as random as the movements of large crowds, into predictable formulas. Looking for our updates on market movers, analyst actions, stock technicals, insider trades and other daily, weekly and monthly insight? Click here to visit our Inside the Market page. David Berman explains why Deere has been a strong, off-the-radar, recent outperformer David Rosenberg says he's profoundly disappointed in the U.S. budget bill, and has some portfolio tips on how to position for the ticking demographic time-bomb Tim Shufelt brings us up to date on the domestic economy - and reports that, rather surprisingly, it's not broken yet The net change in employment for June on Friday is the domestic economic data highlight for the coming week. Economists expect a loss of 1,500 jobs. The unemployment rate for June will be released the same day and one tick higher to 7.1 per cent is expected. There are no earnings releases of note on the schedule. U.S. wholesale inventories for May are out on Wednesday and a drop of 0.3 per cent month over month is forecast. The FOMC minutes will also be released Wednesday where we'll find out if any governors were leaning towards cutting rates. The earnings calendar is also light south of the border for the coming week. Conagra Brands Inc. (US$0.587 per share expected) and Delta Air Lines Inc. (US$2.066) on Wednesday are the only two of note. See our full earnings and economic calendar here
Economic Times
07-07-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
AI stocks could crash like Dot-Coms, says Wall Street veteran — suggests these safer bets instead
AI stocks are beginning to resemble the dot-com bubble, warned a seasoned Wall Street investor, Richard Bernstein, as per a report. Bernstein, who is the CIO of Richard Bernstein Advisors, based on his analysis, said that it may be time for investors to step back from the hype and consider something a bit less thrilling but possibly more rewarding in the long term, according to Business Insider. He wrote in a post that, "Investors seem universally focused on 'AI' which seems eerily similar to the '.com' stocks of the Technology Bubble and the 'tronics' craze of the 1960s. Meanwhile, we see lots of attractive, admittedly boring, dividend-paying themes," as quoted in the report. ALSO READ: Trump's tariff drama is fake and just for TV, says White House source in bombshell leak Since ChatGPT went live in late 2022, the stock market has experienced dramatic gains, particularly in tech stocks, and the S&P 500 has jumped 54%, and the Nasdaq 100 has increased 90%, as reported by Business Insider. Even valuations are at levels that haven't been reached since the peak of the dot-com bubble—or even the 1929 market peak, according to the report. Even though Bernstein said he is not calling a top, but has pointed out that trades eventually go the other way, and the best time to invest in something is when it's out of favour, not when a major rally has already occurred, as reported by Business explained that, "At the beginning of a bull market when momentum and beta strategies are by definition most rewarded, investors' fears leads them to emphasize dividends and lower-beta equities," adding, "In later-cycle periods when dividends and lower beta become more attractive, investors' confidence leads them to risk-taking and momentum investing," as quoted in the report. Bernstein pointed out that, "We clearly are not at the beginning of a bull market and, as we've previously written, the profits cycle is starting to decelerate," as quoted in the READ: Xi Jinping losing his grip? Signs emerge of chaos in China's military and political circles Bernstein highlighted that currently dividend stocks could be ripe for appreciation and also shared that he especially likes utilities stocks, which are known for issuing dividends, as reported by Business Insider. He also suggested that, "One of the easiest methods for building wealth has historically been the power of compounding dividends. Compounding dividends is boring as all get out, but it's been highly successful through time," adding that, "In fact, compounding dividend income has been so successful, that the Dow Jones Utilities Index's returns have been roughly neck-and-neck with NASDAQ returns since NASDAQ's inception in 1971!," as quoted by Business Insider. Is Bernstein saying the AI stock boom is over?Not exactly. He's not calling the top, but he believes the risks are rising, and it's a good time to be cautious. What's the benefit of reinvesting dividends? Reinvesting allows your investment to compound over time, essentially earning money on your money.
