The City Diary

What a load of rubbish ... but Accrington Stanley are top of the recycling league

Remember the milk advert of the 1980s? "Accrington Stanley? Who are they? Exactly!" That's all most of us knew about the place, but it seems there are hidden depths to the inhabitants of the North-west town, whose football team currently languishes in the lower reaches of the Football League.

A recent Coca-Cola-sponsored recycling campaign engaged football teams and their fans up and down the land in an effort to get the people least likely to recycle ie, young men to help the environment. The unlikely trio that topped the turning "trash into talent" league table? None other than Accrington Stanley, followed by Nottingham Forest and Swindon Town. Some would say that given the rubbish served up on the pitch by these three, turning trash into talent is exactly what they need.

A bum note for J-Lo

It's corporate calendar time, when desks throughout the Square Mile are inundated with the bulky and the useless. But among the usual dross, there's usually the odd nugget to catch the eye. One of our favourites this year came from the Edinburgh-based fund manager Martin Currie, whose calendar aims to demystify the sort of jargon beloved by its stock-pickers. Among all the terms you might expect junk bonds, gearing, hedge funds etc comes this little gem: "the J-Lo" (for Jennifer Lopez, pictured). And the explanation? "In the chart of a stock's performance, a rounded bottom". We'll leave the notion of "bottom-up investing" for someone else to explain.

Square Mile shows it's a PC-free zone

The City of London and political correctness have always been uneasy bedfellows.

And if comments on the Square Mile website "Here is the City" are to be believed, views on London's trading floors are little changed from the dark ages. A barrage of comments were posted on reports alleging that the head of Barclaycard's European operation was forced to quit after describing the firm's third-quarter numbers as being "like Muslims some were good, some were Shi'ite". "Another example of political correctness gone mad" was the assessment of one, while another remarked: "If I was at that meeting, I would have laughed. It was a joke.".

Scorn what she says, then do what she says

Its issuance may have gained plenty of column inches but last week's note from Goldman Sachs analyst Lucy Chamberlain, picking Marks & Spencer as the high street's Christmas winner, didn't cut the mustard with some of her retail analyst peers. "I don't know anything about Goldman's research," said one disgruntled rival, before a (partial) retreat. "I might be being a bit arrogant about Goldman but they have very inexperienced analysts and I certainly would not expect them to be ahead of the market." So does the aforementioned analyst disagree with Goldman's young pup? Well, no: "I turned a buyer on Thursday," he huffs.

Eyeballs get distracted

Publishers are ploughing money into their websites these days, lured by the promise of lucrative advertising revenues. But one City-based newspaper seems to be finding out the hard way that an online presence isn't necessarily the Holy Grail. Its "interactive" forum for readers has, so far, attracted a measly five posts since it was launched a month ago, all of them apparently from spammers.

What a write-off

The most pointless piece of research last week had to be the "news" that companies risk damaging their brand and reputation by using handwritten promotional and marketing literature. The report comes with a "comprehensive analysis" of writing styles. Gecko, the firm behind the extensive survey of 30 shops in Leeds, will next be issuing a survey examining what Catholics think the Pope's religion is.

Viewers fail to pick up the scent of Fox Business

He typically has the golden touch when it comes to delivering what an audience wants, but Rupert Murdoch's Fox Business Network is, so far, proving the exception. The dumbed-down channel, launched at a not inconsiderable cost of $200m (103m) last October, is pulling in an average of just 6,000 viewers each day some 277,000 less than the network's arch rival, CNBC.

But it gets worse. Last year, Fox Business ran a "scoop" incorporating extensive analysis that revealed Steve Jobs' Apple had bought an 8 per cent stake in process-maker AMD. Unfortunately, the buyer was actually the Abu Dhabi government. Embarrassingly, this blooper has become something of a YouTube favourite, with 7,539 viewers so far comfortably ahead of the audience for Fox Business.

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