Hello and welcome to episode 518 of the Money to the Massies podcast with your resident expert,

as always Damien Bay and me, Andy Leagues. Damien, welcome back. And actually, it's been a couple of

weeks since we've been here in the studio. Yeah, so it's good to see your smiling face again, Andy,

because people might not realise, although we had a break last week on the podcast, Andy and I

haven't recorded a podcast together for a few weeks now because we did record in advance of our holidays.

So it's good to see you, Andy.

I mean, I had a nice break.

I went away to Manawka for a week, which was lovely, great weather and had a really good time with the family.

And I know you were away too, but unfortunately you got the flu as well, didn't you? So it's equally good to see you back up on your feet. Yeah, I did get the flu. And, you know, it's one of those things when you run down. Because on holiday, as much as you do enjoy yourself, you're kind of flitting about here, there and everywhere, trying to make and maximise the time with the family. So yeah, just towards the end of the holiday, I come down with it. But I'm all good now and all raring to go. And there's nothing better than recovering from the flu because you kind of feel the best you've ever felt. Oh, and by the way, you also lose the weight that you put on during the holiday, which is an added bonus for me.

I always wonder whether it's a case of, I find going on holiday stressful.

It'll be people listen to this podcast who think I'm odd, but because you're trying to get everything done and you've just had a bit of insight there as to one thing that I have to do

is we tend to record a number of podcasts in advance. It does mean that work becomes very intense just before you go away. So sometimes I actually do go on holiday and feel a little bit rough anyway. But moving on from that, what's on this week's show? I'm going to be doing something slightly different. We've done that quite a lot recently. I feel like I'm always saying we're doing something a little bit different, but we've not talked about investing in terms of investment markets and what's been going on

for quite some time. So I did have the Damien's midweek markets, which then became a monthly

feature. Now, we haven't done that for a while because we parked it, but I want to do a bit of

an update on investment markets, what's been going on this year.

So if you're looking at your portfolios and you've seen a lot happening and things that are perhaps slightly different to what you're used to, for example, UK equities have had a great year so far.

I want to sort of discuss what's been going on with the markets and what I'm looking at going forward and perhaps

what could be the big market move as the triggers the catalyst in the coming weeks and months

as we head into the year end. Okay, so that's it. Holidays are done. We're back into the

swing of doing the podcast and actually it's perfect timing for doing an investment piece,ien because everyone else has also been on holiday and kind of parked that for a little while

and now's a perfect time to get back into investing, see what's happening with the markets and you're

going to tell us what's been going on. So Andy's right because we do see this summer lull and just as

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