There is no bigger issue in the fund management circles that I frequent than the question of whether it still makes sense to hold the big global franchise stocks that have served investors so well over the past few years. In a world of artificially low interest rates, driven by the hair-raisingly experimental unconventional monetary policies now being pursued by the world’s main central banks, global businesses with strong free cash flow, balance sheets, an established competitive advantage and a consistent dividend track record have become the darlings of all fugitives from the return-free QE-squashed world of government bonds.

The primary job of any professional investor in bonds used to be to worry about what might go wrong, just as it was for equity investors to hope that things might go well. Today, you would think, there is even more reason for bond investors to worry when a vast swathe of fixed interest investments are priced to deliver negative real returns, now and into the future. One of the many strange features of today’s markets is that bond investors nevertheless seem to have transmuted into the market’s optimists.

“I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will”. That was one of the first epigrams from Warren Buffett that caught my attention twenty years ago when I was researching a thesis on the Sage of Omaha’s stockpicking methods at MIT. What belatedly dawned on me the other day was that something similar might just as easily these days be said about the fund management business: “Try to buy a fund whose investment style is so simple that your kid’s computer could run it. Because sooner or later, one will”.

Market watchers have reason to be disappointed by last week’s news that Intrade, a popular online betting exchange, is to close the accounts of all its US-based customers. The announcement follows a decision by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to file a complaint against the company which runs the site, alleging that it has illegally been operating an unregulated options market. Non-US citizens can however continue to use the site, which offers punters the chance to place bets on a variety of political and economic outcomes.

For a few months twenty five years ago I had the opportunity to work alongside the newly chosen Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in his days as the corporate treasurer of Enterprise Oil. Like everyone else who worked with him at the time, I retain a vivid memory of a smart, humorous and clued up individual who, while blinking owlishly behind his spectacles, never appeared phased by any question thrown at him. I certainly do not recognise his own self-deprecatory description that he is a bit “thick”.

In a complex and inter-related financial world, when so much information is flying across wires, fibre optic cables and satellite channels on a daily basis, the need to rely on heuristics – simple rules that govern your responses to the majority of everyday situations – is becoming ever greater. It is just as well then that research across a range of social sciences continues to provide regular confirmation of how powerful and effective such simple rules can be.

“Thinking, fast and slow” by the Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman continues to ride high in the business book bestseller lists. I dare say therefore that copies have found their way into the hands of managers of investment firms. But how many of them, I wonder, have reflected on the implications for the businesses in which they are involved – and how many, alternatively, have quietly binned the book as too disturbing to risk leaving lying around the office?

The damning money-weighted rates of return analysis carried out by Simon Lack in his book The Hedge Fund Mirage has prompted a useful debate about the true returns recorded by hedge funds. Industry lobbyists have not had much luck in undermining his critique, which is hardly surprising as the data, interpreted correctly, is essentially unanswerable (the conclusions you draw from the data is another matter).

Like John Ralfe, the pensions consultant well known to these pages, I was sufficiently struck by the Bank of England’s claims about the impact of quantitative easing to take a deeper look at their calculations, and in particular at their estimates of how the first two rounds of QE have affected the performance of the stock market. Given the attention that is currently been given to the next moves by the Federal Reserve and the issue of whether the European Central Bank is going to join in the QE business more wholeheartedly than it has done in the past, the subject could hardly be more topical.