A lousy summer, an unsatisfactory conclusion to The Ashes, for us, wrapped up warm for the first day of the football season, and a job following the quoted real estate sector. Happy? Hmm…

So, rates up means REITs down, but the volatility over the past few months and indeed year has been like little else I’ve known. Mid-July and the CPI “print” shows inflation falling faster than the market anticipated. Sector is a sea of blue, with certain shares up 5% in the blink of an eye as UK interest rates are immediately forecast to peak at below 5%. Happy days! A few weeks on and the latest GDP numbers are released. The economy apparently rocketed, with the outturn being +0.2% better than the 0.1% economists had been forecasting. The sector falls 5% because interest rates are now being forecast to reach 6% at the peak. Trying to make much sense out of those intra-day movements has left me and many others not just depressed but very confused.

Just to give a sense of how confused, I posed a question in a note recently:

Name the company whose shares have, YTD, risen 20% in the first 6 weeks of the year before falling 21% by the end of the 1st quarter before rallying 18% in a month before falling 17% in 2 months, before rising 18% in a month, to being in freefall as I type in mid-August to be down 7%.