Returning from a summer absence to face the financial markets provides the normal mixture of pleasure and incredulity at how much – and yet how little – many things have changed. The pile of research material that has built up on the desk ranges, as always, from the profound to the incontrovertibly inane.

As a longtime collector of sentences of meaningless guff that masquerade as investment research, I particularly enjoyed the report of one market analyst who concludes his recent review of the UK market as follows: “We will therefore only know if the market has run out of steam when it shows clearer signs of having done so”. True – but hardly useful information!