China landed a rocket booster at sea, a Norwegian robot learned to pick a screw off the floor, and Britain spent the weekend somewhere between grief and farce and hyperscalers are bleeding cash (or are they?) Here’s what’s coming in the next few weeks of Investor’s Daily.

I sat down on Sunday with about nine different things I wanted to write to you about and no honest way of squeezing them into one essay.

So, before we begin, let me apologise.

I can’t cover everything today.

There are simply too many fascinating stories unfolding at once. We’ll tackle them one by one over the coming weeks.

But before we get into the investment opportunities, it would be tone-deaf not to acknowledge the shocking murder of Ann Widdecombe.

According to police, a 28-year-old man has been arrested. Nobody yet knows the motive, and the police have asked people to stop speculating. There is talk that it may have been politically motivated, but as I write this we simply don’t know.

Any murder is abhorrent. If this does prove to have been politically motivated, it would mark the second political killing in Britain in little more than a decade. That isn’t normal.

Meanwhile, the political circus has carried on regardless.

Nigel Farage resigned his Clacton seat on 8 July after the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner opened an investigation into whether he failed to declare a £5 million gift from a Reform donor. He’s now facing off against a bloke in a bin costume.

Funny as that sounds, it says something rather bleak about the state of British politics. (Then again, that’s rather the point of Count Binface.)

You may even have seen the Ipsos poll putting Count Binface ahead of Farage, 33% to 21%.

That’s not satire.

That’s real life.

It asked British adults nationally who they would prefer to win, not who Clacton is actually voting for. Farage took the seat with 46% in 2024 and he will almost certainly hold it.

The poll does not say Reform is finished. It says one in five Britons wants him back in Parliament, which is a slower and nastier problem for him than a novelty candidate.

Then there is Andy Burnham. He had 322 of 403 Labour MPs behind him on the day nominations opened, so barring something extraordinary he is leader on the 17th and prime minister after seeing the King on the 20th.

No general election. He has said so himself.

He has also said there is “room for movement on tax.”

I take him at his word.

He has ruled out changes to the headline rates of income tax, VAT, and National Insurance, which leaves one obvious place to look: capital gains tax.

Beyond that, I’d expect more taxes aimed at wealth that can’t simply get up and leave. Property. Land. Assets fixed firmly inside Britain’s borders.

That’s the backdrop we’re investing against today.

It’s hardly cheerful.

But here’s the thing…

Markets don’t stop creating wealth because politicians become more creative about taxing it.

If anything, periods like this tend to create some of the best opportunities. Capital is remarkably adaptable. It flows to wherever it is treated best, and investors who recognise those shifts early tend to do very well.

Which brings me to the first of those nine ideas I wanted to write to you about…

The machines had a much better week than we did

But the good news is there’s still things like ISAs and SIPPs that you can tax effectively use for investments.

So make the most of them while you can, any future changes typically are grandfathered which means it won’t change the scenario on what you’ve got when the changes are made…typically.

And if so, if investing is a big deal to you, which I assume it is, then here’s what has been going on with everything opportunity related in just the last few days.

On Friday, China launched a Long March 10B from Hainan and recovered the first-stage booster vertically on a platform at sea.

It is the first orbital-class booster China has ever caught. 

The next day, Japan’s JAXA flew its RV-X vehicle at Noshiro. Eleven metres up, sixteen metres sideways, upright landing, all in about 55 seconds.

It’s not exactly SpaceX level, but that is roughly the hop SpaceX’s Grasshopper was doing in 2012, and the point is to prove you can before you start to go up and up and up.

Then Friday, a Norwegian company called 1X showed the world a hand.

A robot hand.

1X builds the NEO humanoid and is backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Samsung Next. Its new tendon-driven hand has 25 degrees of freedom, a human hand has 27 degrees of freedom.

Money, Money, Money

Then Bank of America published this chart…

Source: BofA Research Investment Committee 

For fifteen years the hyperscalers were the finest cash machines capitalism ever built. Asset-light, printing north of $250 billion a year between them. The chip makers were the cyclical also-rans.

That has inverted.

Hyperscaler forward free cash flow has gone below zero for the first time in the dataset, while the semiconductor basket has run above $400 billion. BofA calls it a generational transfer in free cash flow, and for once the research-house language earns its keep.

People will say this looks like how a bubble bursts. Nope. This is what a company that makes a truck load of cash looks like when it invests everything it can into the most transformational technology we’ve ever seen.

And then as all this takes place, we’re seeing a huge pull back in hyperscalers (many are down 20%, 30% on the year), we’re seeing a huge 20% pullback in semiconductor stocks, and the market is as volatile as it’s ever been.

All of the progress, AI advances, and development going into this is happening at breakneck speed while the political establishment is fighting against Count Binface.

Needless to say, they’re so out of tune and blind to what’s taking place that anyone paying more attention to politics right now than where to invest capital has got rocks in their head.

Good news is you’re reading this, which means you’re ready for some new opportunity. And that ye shall receive.

Next time I’ll dive more into the robotics side of things. I’ll be looking at 1X Neo and the hand they delivered, what it means for humanoid robotics and some ideas about where to invest.

After that I’ll pick apart China, Japan and believe it or not, Australia’s role in reusable rockets and the commercialisation of space and whether or not that makes SpaceX a good buy.

And then it’ll be a focus back on the hyperscalers, which of them looks like deep value, which of them might be overpriced, and why Meta is on a tear higher right now.

Lots to cover, so make sure to check your inbox for my next few editions of Investor’s Daily.

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Investment Director, Southbank Investment Research

PS I spent this week digging through a government report that almost nobody else seems to have read. Buried inside it is a claim that, if it ever comes to pass, could reshape Britain’s economy for decades. I’ve put together a full presentation explaining why I think it matters—and the companies that could benefit most. You can watch it here.