Do you want the good news or the bad news on the UK retail sales front?
The good news (if you are a retailer) is that retail sales were up in March.
The bad news is that retail sales were down in March.
Year-on-year, retails sales volumes were up 2.7%, the 35th month in a row that sales volumes have showed an annual increase.
Month-on-month, volumes were down 1.3%, a bigger fall than economists had expected.
“This fuels concern that the economy is stuttering as heightened uncertainty ahead of June’s EU referendum leads to increasing business and consumer caution. March’s dip in retail sales may well also reflect less favourable purchasing power of consumers given recent softer earnings growth” suggested Howard Archer, chief European and UK economist at forecasting unit IHS Economics.
Or it could be that Easter, that religious holiday that moves around the calendar like a bored child fidgeting on the sofa, was to blame, as it arrived too early in the year for people to replenish their spring wardrobe.
Volume sales of textiles, clothing and footwear fell 2.3% month-on-month and 6.2% year-on-year “as they were clearly hit by the cooler weather deterring people from buying for their spring/summer wardrobes,” Archer ventured.
Public finances figures were also a bit like the curate's egg, seeing a substantial improvement in March, albeit not as much as chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was forecasting way back at the time of the UK budget in … er … March.
Public sector net borrowing excluding public sector banks was £4.8bn in March, below the £7.4bn in March 2015 and the consensus forecast of £6.0bn.
Borrowing totalled £74.0bn in fiscal year 2015/16, overshooting the Office for Budget Responsibility’s March Budget forecast of £72.2bn by £1.8bn.
“The risk of a much bigger overshoot this year has grown as the economy has slowed. With the fiscal projections also resting on optimistic assumptions for revenues from tax avoidance measures and savings from the welfare budget, we continue to think that the Chancellor will have to implement even more austerity than planned to achieve a budget surplus by 2020,” predicted Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.
There was a brief opportunity to make some money trading the shares of Tern PLC (LON:TERN), the technology-focused investment company.
Its shares initially fell to 10.5p from last night's close of 11.625p, giving it a market cap of little more than £7mln, in the wake of an announcement concerning its flagship investment, Cryptologic.
The share price fall was presumably occasioned by news that Tern is pumping £1mln into the company to give it the wherewithal to grow the business, but Tern was not the only company injecting cash; Alsop Louie Partners, a San Francisco based venture capitalist specialising in security software, is investing US$500,000 at a price that values Tern's stake in Cryptosoft at around £6.1mln.
For comparison purposes, the stake at the end of 2015 was valued at less than £1mln.
As our American cousins don't quite say: you do the arithmetic.
Shares in Tern are now up 5.2%, valuing the company at £9.1mln.
Another small-cap attracting interest in the morning session was Midatech Pharma PLC (LON:MTPH), the fast-growing drug development company.
It said a study it is conducting on a treatment for an inflammatory eye disorder delivered some encouraging results.
Its pre-clinical work was designed to assess the efficacy of drug candidate OpsiSporin in treating uveitis, and found the drug candidate delivered a strong dose response profile at 15, 50, 150 micrograms per eye.