Record breakers 🇬🇧📈

Happy Monday. Welcome to 2026, and good luck with your resolutions for the new year.

As you might expect, the most common resolutions are the same each year, typically around health or finances - losing weight, getting fit, and saving (or making more) money. But, did you know that 80% of people drop their New Year’s resolution by the end of February!

One of the main reasons for abandoning the “new year, new me” initiative is that they are typically too vague to begin with, thus trickier to stick to. So in full business newsletter mode, define your resolution clearly (if you have one), and set some good old KPIs to see you achieve it.

MARKETS

Data: Google Finance, 5-day Market Close

Notable UK earnings this week: Stay tuned for UK earnings returning next week.

Notable US earnings this week: Constellation Brands (STZ), RPM International (RPM), Jefferies Financial Group (JEF), Acuity (AYI).

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PROJECT WATCH

🌊 Inter-connector between Ireland and Wales marked priority. Read more

🏗️ Kier to begin work on £85.6m Darlington civil service hub work this month. Read more

BUSINESS & FINANCE

Costa’s flat white elephant
Most of us are crawling back to work this January, swearing off celebratory fizz, committing to 10,000 steps a day, and pretending that £5 flat whites weren’t part of the reason our wallets are emptier than our willpower. But Costa Coffee - a UK high street staple with a caffeine addiction of its own - has just served up something espresso-ly bitter: operating losses doubled in 2024 to a frothy £13.5 million.

Once hailed as the warm, reliable hug of the commuter crowd, Costa now looks more 'past-its-prime' than a forgotten mince pie. Pre-pandemic, the coffee giant brewed up annual profits close to £100 million. Now, even with the backing of soft drink behemoth Coca-Cola, they’re spilling red ink faster than a dodgy cafetiere.

Parent company Coca-Cola, which paid nearly £4bn for Costa back in 2018 (remember those optimistic, pre-lockdown days?), is reportedly so undercaffeinated about the future that it’s seriously toying with selling up - possibly for just half that. Talk about grounds for regret.

So what’s gone wrong? A medley of bitter beans, it seems. Rising costs of coffee (thanks to global climate hiccups and war-related shipping snags), inflation turning oat milk into liquid gold, and the not-so-small army of indie cafés serving flat whites with a side of rustic charm and compostable bamboo forks. You can get genuine latte art and sourdough envy vibes elsewhere, and often for less.

Record smashing FTSE 100
While most of us were still working off the last of the Quality Street and regretting our third cheeseboard, the FTSE 100 decided to kick off 2026 with a bang - soaring past the 10,000 mark for the first time in its 40-year history. Who needs dry January when the City’s already serving up a bubbly financial milestone?

Within half an hour of opening on the first trading day of the year, the UK’s top-drawer index tipped its hat to history. Shares from Rolls-Royce and Fresnillo drove much of the early gains - because nothing says “hope” like heavy machinery and smelting.

Let’s not forget the role of Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who’s been banging the investment drum harder than a teenager discovering Arctic Monkeys for the first time. Her policies are actually being credited with some of the FTSE uplift, particularly the £12,000 cap on tax-free ISA cash. Basically: “stop hoarding money like it’s the 1930s and chuck it in the markets - we’ve got a budget to balance”.

POLITICS

Council clock-off kerfuffle
Four-day weeks? Not on this government’s watch. Local councils dreaming of a Friday duvet day got a stern letter from Whitehall’s top hall monitor, Steve-not-Reed-the-room, warning that anything less than five full days of civic slog amounts to part-time pay for full-time faff.

South Cambridgeshire dared to try it - and saw housing performance sag faster than a tired surveyor’s trousers. Meanwhile, Scotland trialled it and got happier staff and better results, but clearly, morale is no match for ministerial mistrust. Fridays are for bin collections, not bubble baths - so sayeth the state.

Tractors, tax and tactical retreats
Inheritance tax reform came face to face with pitchfork politics - and blinked. After a year of rural rage and more “No Farmer, No Future” signs than a National Trust car park, the government’s £1m threshold got hoiked up to £2.5m. Cue cautious cheer from the National Farmers’ Union and a chorus of “not quite good enough” from all sides.

Labour MPs grumbled about being made to vote for the thing just weeks ago, only for ministers to sneak out the U-turn with the decorum of a ferret in a postbox. Good news for family farms. Less so for Labour’s group chats.

Cabbie karma: fare play restored
Mini cab giants misusing a niche tax dodge meant for package holidays have finally had their fares brought back down to earth. The Tour Operator’s Margin Scheme (designed for actual tour operators, not Barry in a Prius) has now been locked up, and black cabs are cheering like it’s New Year’s Eve in Soho.

The Treasury expects to bag £700 million a year - enough to help with NHS waiting lists, cost of living, or at least half a pothole. It’s a win for fairness, taxis, and everyone who’s ever been ghosted by an app driver who was ‘just around the corner’.

ACROSS THE POND

Tesla loses EV top spot
Tesla relinquished its lofty perch as the world’s leading electric-car manufacturer to China’s BYD in 2025, after weathering two bleak years of descending vehicle sales. BYD has outpaced its competitors, selling a whopping 2.26 million electric vehicles - a 28% jump - while Tesla’s count slipped to 1.64 million. The EV scene feels like the football pitch destined for extra time and penalties.

Elon Musk’s brainchild is feeling the bitter wind of change, struggling amidst fierce competition, the US’s tax credit gridlock, and that cheeky spat with Donald Trump - clearly, there’s trouble in paradise. Add in Europe’s regulatory hurdles for Tesla's Full Self-Driving tech, like navigating a London Tube map on New Year’s Eve.

BYD has officially put down the electric gauntlet, having already trumped Tesla quarterly - shifting from an undercurrent to a current wave. Tesla’s pivot towards AI and robotics might be fascinating yet feels a tad evasive - but the EV top spot doesn’t sound like something Musk will want to lose without a fight, 2026 is set to be a thriller.

US captures Maduro
Nicolás Maduro, the former bus driver turned presidential staple of Venezuela, saw his reign hit the breaks in dramatic fashion. Long associated with economic gloom, breadline queues and elections dodgier than three week old mince pies, his leadership faced more criticism than a celebrity memoir.

The US, having long wagged its finger at this oil-drenched land of missed opportunities, changed gears with a stunning military operation to detain Maduro and his other half, whisking them off to the Big Apple to face charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump, in his return show of sorts, claimed Yankee rights to momentarily control Venezuela.

Predictably, the global chorus was anything but harmonic. While some hail the capture as a spectacular full-stop on an authoritarian saga, many - particularly legal boffins and staunch Venezuelans - are ringing alarm bells about international norms and the precedent this escapade might set. As the dust refuses to settle, power dynamics in Caracas are more cliffhanger than the season finale of Downton, with the vice-president hastily appointed as interim leader by the Supreme Court while Maduro samples US hospitality.

TECH

Auto-pilots & algorithmic oversights
Uber and Lyft want to replace London cabbies with Chinese robotaxis, partnering with China’s Google, Baidu, beginning this year. The government hails it as a vote of confidence in autonomous travel.

Meanwhile, Disney’s own driverless oversight earned them a $10m fine for allegedly mislabelling children's content on YouTube. Turns out hundreds of videos weren’t flagged as kid-focused, leading to illegal data collection and targeted ads.

Disney knew about it as early as 2020, but the digital dwarves kept whistling while they worked. The FTC wasn't enchanted. Now Mickey’s under court orders to behave online, proving that even the House of Mouse isn’t above the law - especially the one that’s been around since 1998.

Drones, distractions & the death of the ping
Drones and mobile phones are facing their own form of grounding. From 1 January, anyone over whatever the weight of a 10-year-old is flying a drone over 100g outdoors must pass a Civil Aviation Authority theory test and get a Flyer ID.

Up north, Inverness Royal Academy is putting phones on mute - permanently. Scotland’s biggest Highland school becomes a full “no-phone zone” from February, asking pupils to leave their devices at home or keep them off unless medically needed.

It’s part of a wider Scottish trend: sealed phone pouches in Edinburgh, classroom bans in the Isles, and a growing sense that the real classroom distraction isn’t the whiteboard - it’s WhatsApp. Whether this signals a revolution in attention spans or just a rise in secret smartwatch texting remains to be seen.

WORLD

Cave creatures & cryptic curios
Move over, Nessie. The San people of South Africa may have out-legend-ed us all, sketching a tusked beast that looks suspiciously like a dicynodont - a hefty, tusky veggie-saur that roamed the Karoo 250 million years ago. The kicker? They painted it a decade before Western science clocked it. Turns out, while Victorian naturalists were still fumbling with pickaxes, the San were already doodling deep time with divine flair. Proof that sometimes, prehistory’s best interpreters didn’t wear lab coats - they carried ochre.

Beijing’s birth control backfire
China has slapped a 13% tax on condoms, presumably in a bold attempt to seduce the nation into breeding via economic foreplay. Contraception is taxed, while childcare and weddings get a fiscal cuddle. Because clearly, nothing gets the libido going like a spreadsheet. Love may be free, but latex isn’t. When it comes to romance, Beijing might want to rethink its bedside manner.