Tanks a lot for that advice

Back in November, Boris Johnson told MPs that “the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European land mass are over, and there are other, better things we should be investing in”. Clearly nobody passed the memo on to Vladimir Putin, and the sight of a 65km-long convoy of Russian armour rolling across Ukraine might be enough to make BoJo wish he’d stuck to writing witty little columns instead of running the UK through a period of plague and war.

Canadian research house BCA Research has added to the general levity by estimating the current chance of the world being vaporised in a nuclear apocalypse at 10%, while urging its clients to stay bullish on stocks and ignore existential risk since there’s not much point in fretting about your portfolio when an ICBM is coming your way. Somewhat more constructively, investors are lobbing the ESG handbook out of the window and piling into stocks in the defence industry, on the grounds that blowing stuff up suddenly looks a bit more useful than rolling out another environmental mission statement.

BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon have all hit record share prices in the wake of Uncle Vlad’s Awfully Big Adventure. The German chancellor has announced a one-off €100bn investment in its military, and annual defence budgets look set to rise significantly across Europe.

BAE Systems, Europe’s largest defence contractor, has a heritage that includes the Spitfire. It should be well placed to benefit from the urgent need to bolster the continent’s defences.

There’s not much point in fretting about your portfolio when an ICBM is coming your way