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The Beach IFA Monday Espresso is your essential five-minute investment briefing, equipping you with everything you need to know for the week ahead. Marlborough's Multi-Asset Solutions Investment Team summarise market events over the past seven days and preview the key events in the week ahead, while also sharing their expert insights.
Monday Espresso Podcast - 30th March 2026
[00:00:00] Rory Dowie: Good morning. Hope you'll have great weekends. It is Monday the 30th of March. My name's Rory Dowie, Portfolio Manager here at Marlborough.
[00:00:07] Rory Dowie: Joining me today is Nick Warmisham, Nick is one of our Investment Analysts on the team, so Nick, firstly, good morning.
[00:00:13] Nick Warmisham: Good morning, Rory.
[00:00:14] Rory Dowie: Three topics today, the Iran situation clearly remains the dominant story across global markets and is evolving all the time.
[00:00:22] Rory Dowie: And then we're going to look to some updates on potentially some upcoming IPOs. That's when private companies take themselves public. SpaceX, Anthropic, and Open AI are all circling IPOs, potentially later this year. And then finally close to home, we'll touch on the UK retail sales, which just post their first decline since November.
[00:00:40] Rory Dowie: But I guess, Nick, first of all, let's start in the Middle East, we saw markets fall again last week. What is the update for our listeners on what's going on in the Middle East?
[00:00:50] Nick Warmisham: Yeah, well, it's been a pretty rollercoaster week to say the least, Rory. So as an overview, we're now about a month into the US-Israel war on Iran, which began on the 28th of February.
[00:01:00] Nick Warmisham: With strikes that among other things, killed Iran Supreme Leader, and this week has been dominated by two very different narratives running simultaneously.
[00:01:09] Nick Warmisham: On one side you have President Trump posting on Truth Social on Thursday evening that talks with Iran are going very well and announcing a further 10 day extension on his threat to strike Iranian power plants, which pushes that deadline to the 6th of April.
[00:01:24] Nick Warmisham: You also have Secretary of State, Marco Rubio heading off to a G7 meeting in France telling reporters that 'progress has been made'.
[00:01:31] Rory Dowie: And I guess on the other side then Nick?
[00:01:33] Nick Warmisham: Well, we're also seeing Iran's foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on state television saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, there are no negotiations with the United States full stop. Tehran has been quite consistent about this too.
[00:01:48] Nick Warmisham: What has actually happened this week is that the US passed a 15 point peace plan to Iran via Pakistan as a mediating country. Iran responded negatively and issued its own five point counter proposal, which includes a full halt to US and Israeli attacks, war reparations, and most significantly for energy markets, Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:02:11] Rory Dowie: Yeah, and as we've spoken about over recent weeks, that last one, there is a non-starter for the Americans presumably.
[00:02:17] Nick Warmisham: Almost certainly, and that's why markets have been so volatile. Every hint of diplomatic progress, like the brief report that Iran might allow non-hostile ships through the straits causes oil prices to fall, but then every sign of continued deadlock pushes them back up.
[00:02:32] Nick Warmisham: Brent Crude spent most of this week hovering between $99 and $103 a barrel, and to put that in context, it was around $73 a barrel at the start of the year. So we're talking about a jump of close to 40% in under two months.
[00:02:47] Rory Dowie: Okay, so still none the clearer, potentially there are some negotiations going on, but both parties seem to be quite far away from some sort of deal.
[00:02:55] Rory Dowie: And clearly a major sticking point is that Straits of Hormuz which we've spoken about over recent weeks, some 20% of global oil passes through those straits.
[00:03:03] Rory Dowie: Okay, moving on, something a bit more forward looking, dare I say, exciting because this week there's been a lot of noise around potential record breaking IPOs.
[00:03:11] Rory Dowie: Nick, what's the update there?
[00:03:13] Nick Warmisham: Yeah, it really has been an exciting week on this front, and I think it's worth stepping back for a moment because what we could be looking at is the most extraordinary IPO year in the history of financial markets.
[00:03:24] Nick Warmisham: So let's start with SpaceX. Reports this month have confirmed that Elon Musk is targeting a June IPO, which would also include xAI, which is the artificial intelligence company he merged with SpaceX earlier this year. As well as the social media platform X, formally Twitter.
[00:03:41] Nick Warmisham: The combined entity is targeting a valuation of somewhere between $1.5 and $1.75 trillion. The plan is to raise around $75 billion through the float, which, if it happens, would be the largest amount ever raised for a public listing bigger than Saudi Aramco, and bigger than anything we've ever seen.
[00:04:00] Rory Dowie: That's an extraordinary number. I guess just to put that in perspective, how does that actually compare to other recent big IPOs then, Nick, you mentioned Saudi Aramco there.
[00:04:07] Nick Warmisham: Yeah, well, putting it in perspective, the entire US IPO market raised around $469 billion across the 10 years from 2016 to 2025. So SpaceX alone is trying to raise $75 billion in a single transaction.
[00:04:22] Nick Warmisham: Now, the company is expected to only float a tiny percentage of its equity, maybe 3 to 5% specifically to avoid flooding the market, but it is still a remarkable moment.
[00:04:32] Nick Warmisham: Starlink, the satellite internet business now has more than 10 million subscribers globally and is very much the financial engine of the business, estimated to generate over $10 billion in revenue last year.
[00:04:43] Rory Dowie: Yeah. Okay. So that's a real big number there potentially from xAI, Elon Musk there and then obviously we've sort of seen Open AI and Anthropic the two artificial intelligent labs, which have their own LLMs things like Chat GPT, and Claude potentially doing that later on this year.
[00:04:59] Rory Dowie: Just keeping an eye on time, Nick, moving on to UK retail sales, bringing it a bit closer to home. The numbers weren't great, were they? I guess, what's the latest there, Nick?
[00:05:09] Nick Warmisham: Yeah, well, the ONS, the Office for National Statistics confirmed this week that UK retail sales declined in February for the first time since November, with consumers reigning in their spending by 0.4%.
[00:05:21] Nick Warmisham: Although this was a bit better than the 0.7% decline economists had been expecting.
[00:05:26] Rory Dowie: Okay, so we had a fall there in retail sales the first, since November, any indication of what was driving that under the surface?
[00:05:33] Nick Warmisham: Yeah, well there were a few things there. Our listeners probably all remember the wet weather in February and that hit household goods sales particularly hard.
[00:05:41] Nick Warmisham: Supermarket sales dipped after a strong January, online sales fell as well, having been strong at the start of the year when January sales discounts were running. And critically, consumers are described as highly selective and event led in their shopping. So there was some buying for Valentine's Day, yes, but not splashing out more broadly.
[00:06:00] Rory Dowie: Okay, so fragile consumer demand in the UK and of course that's before we've had the impact on this war in Iran, which will come in this month's numbers.
[00:06:08] Rory Dowie: Nick as ever lots to take in, but you've made that very clear. I guess to summarise from my perspective, Iran talks happening sort of, but remain pretty uncertain. We'll be watching that next date, April the sixth, which is when that kind of truce from President Trump expires.
[00:06:23] Rory Dowie: We also had SpaceX, Anthropic and Open AI IPO news and I guess that is hotting up and let's keep an eye on that one for the rest of this year.
[00:06:30] Rory Dowie: That could be something quite exciting, should that go ahead and then, you know, closer to home that UK retail sales, as you mentioned there, Nick is under a bit of pressure.
[00:06:39] Rory Dowie: Before I let you go though, what have our listeners got to look out for this week?
[00:06:42] Nick Warmisham: Yeah, well this week we have a host of economic data across the globe.
[00:06:45] Nick Warmisham: A few key points to look out for though is the jobs data in the US and inflation data in Europe.
[00:06:50] Rory Dowie: Brilliant. Thank you very much, Nick. To our listeners, as always, thanks for tuning in and wishing you all a great week ahead.