The Olympics are over! What on earth am I going to do? No more quick trips up the stairs to the legendary FT canteen to catch the final seconds of a British athlete I've never heard of winning gold in a sport I barely understand. No more sitting on the sofa attempting to explain the keiren to young children. True, I have tickets to three Paralympic events, but I fear they will struggle to touch the highs of the past two weeks. When you've got Australian newspapers saying London 2012 was better than Sydney 2000, you know it was a triumph!
My favourite Olympic moments were not Bolt, Ennis, Hoy, Phelps or Farah - awesome as they all were. They were the ones where the unexpected happened and the underdog came good - Jade Jones in the taekwondo, Chad de Los in the pool and fittingly, in the final event, Stephen Kiprotich from Uganda, who came from nowhere to trounce the Kenyans in the marathon.
It seems the Olympic feel-good factor even infected the markets - the FTSE100 notched up almost 4 per cent over the fortnight, in what is usually a weak month for equities, although that's more to do with expectations of more unconventional monetary policy than sporting triumphs. And what better way to attempt to 'get back to normal' than to use one of our stock screens to find some stock-market Olympians? Algy Hall does just that, replicating a large-cap screen we first ran last year.
On a more downbeat note, Stephen Wilmot looks at the prospects for investment trusts in the commercial property space - and sees only widening discounts and languishing share prices. There's plenty of value here, but not many catalysts for a re-rating.
Finally, our 29 Olympic gold medals came at a price, of course - hundreds of millions of pounds was invested in elite sports in the run-up to the Games. And for individuals, sending a child to private school or university can represent a similarly Olympian challenge. If you plan to get grandparents to help out, here's how to go about doing it.
There'll be a column from Simon Thompson tomorrow (he's writing it now!) but The Trader is on holiday this week and next. And don't forget that you can see our round-up of quality weekend press tips here, and catch up on all today's key corporate news and tip updates in the article below.
