Announce a £2.7bn acquisition and watch your stock market value fall by £3.1bn.
NatWest picked a bad day to announce its big move in the fashionable field of “wealth management” – the noise from Westminster created a poor backdrop for UK assets such as gilts and domestic banks. But the main problem with its Evelyn Partners deal is that it is very much of the “one for the long term” variety. The terms are not obviously cheap.
