I am confronted by four stories on my newsfeed, all of which I know enough about to have a hunch they matter to me, but all of which worry me!

Let’s deal with them one at a time. I went to my Government Gateway and walked in to find a nice surprise. Thanks for the tip-off, if you are on your way to doing your self-assessment, maybe you like me will be among the 5.5m people who overpay tax from time to time,

I will get that printed and framed and hang it in the toilet.

Next to cryptocurrencies.

My friend Ian McKnight and his friends at Cartwright have been badgering me about them as a way of making money. Where does investing end and speculation begin? I am still getting over the history lessons I had when a teenager about the South Sea Bubble.

This is too political, too financial and too complicated. I keep coming back to cryptocurrency with the hope that i will get it, but I keep finding myself repelled.

I understand my tax and am grateful for my conversations with HMRC but , much as I like Ian McKnight and Sam Roberts for explaining how all this works (and can help our pensions to get paid) , I am not there yet!

So to the push me – pull you of private credit

BlackRock tell me that private equity is attractive because it is “less volatile” than the more transparent quoted bond market. This is a little like the with profits attraction late last century where we could get market returns without the risk until it all went wrong and we got rather less return and a lot of volatility. The FT is making the same noises as we heard before Equitable Life and others got into trouble promising everything all at once.

The amount raised from institutions in this region increased by more than 50 per cent in absolute terms from 2024, in a sign of the fast-growing adoption of private assets in this market. Rohé said institutions in Europe such as pension funds have been shifting away from public equities and bonds towards private assets, partly to manage market turbulence and to find investments whose returns were not correlated with movements in stock or bond markets.

“European institutions are allocating more to private markets as they recognise that we are in a new regime with higher volatility and different correlations between bonds and equities,” he told the FT

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And while we are pushing towards private equity we are pulling away from private credit.

Push me pull you wherever you go!

Whether it’s my self-assessment or your crypto-currency. Whether it’s out distrust of private credit on the way out or the way in to private equity from public markets, we seem to be “push me- pull you”.

I never did properly get it!