Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Diversification

Some anecdotal evidence that there's probably going to be some kind of shake up of work and transport in the coming years. The photo on the left was taken the day of the lock-down back in March, when the UK Government told us to cease all unnecessary social contact. The second photo was taken last week (August 2020) They show the station car-park near my office, a car park that, on a working day, is normally full to the brim as people use it to commute into Reading and Paddington by train. As you can see it's quieter now than on the first day of lock-down, meaning there are less people commuting now than 5 months ago; London must be like a ghost town at the moment, particularly during the week! 

I wonder how much longer the rail operators will be able to afford to maintain the infrastructure around the capital and by how much all our pension funds will be affected by reduction in value of all that office property? I can just imagine the big funds writing down big chunks of their asset values unless we get a vaccine pretty soon and even then I can imagine that people won't feel the need to commute all the way into town when they can work just as efficiently from home. Interesting times ahead, might be prudent to do a little diversification work on the retirement fund.

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