If you find a rich husband I guess it’s a great investment
If you find a rich husband I guess it’s a great investment, but it’s not about money for me. It’s about taking a chance and finding happiness.”Drawing Down the Moon charges from £950 to over £4,000 for a year’s membership, depending on the level of service. “People consider it on a par with any big expenditure in their lives,” says Ms Balfour. “It’s an investment in their future.”People are prepared to pay such prices because the agency checks the identity of its members, unlike most online options, she says. “Particularly if you’re a woman you would rather go to a personal agency because you know everybody has been interviewed People don’t always tell the truth on an internet agency. Unless they do this they won’t meet enough people to satisfy their choosiness.”Ms Balfour has also seen a boom “In the last year it seems to have mushroomed. I would say there has been a good 50 per cent rise in all four of the businesses.
The rise of internet dating has raised people’s consciousness about the whole thing and everybody knows somebody who is doing it.”So how much does it cost to bribe Cupid? Certainly you don’t have to fork out as much as Ms Brown and the 17 others who have opted for the bespoke onesaturday dating service, which started last summer But for Ms Brown, such expenditure made financial sense. People go into relationships much more for the emotional connection and so are much more fussy than they used to be, so they have to meet many more people before they find the right one,” says Ms Balfour, who also runs Only Lunch (one-to-one lunch or dinner dates), as well as the internet dating sites and .”All the old-fashioned matching institutions like the interfering aunt, the church, the local community, factory life or balls have evaporated People have got to take it into their own hands. China’s burgeoning economy usually gets a mention, but cheap money and speculative greed play an important role. If your idea of investing in soft commodities is buying a litre of fresh pressed orange juice at a supermarket chill counter then think again Right now “softs” are hot. Coffee, sugar, cocoa, corn, orange juice, soya beans and rapeseed oil, to name but a few, are all in demand Many are hitting five and 10-year price highs Various explanations are offered for this.
“The truth is that you don’t need to know anything about the underlying physical markets,” says Peter Blogg, a director at CMS WebView, which provides online price data to commodity brokers. “Derivative contracts were first developed around farm commodities like coffee and grain. Investors can trade these without ever owning the underlying physical assets. These markets are driven by cash momentum.”Such contracts confer on the purchaser the right to buy or sell a fixed quantity of a commodity at some future date but at a price fixed now. They can be held to expiry, or “closed” early or sold to anyone prepared to buy them This makes them very flexible And commodity prices are volatile (see charts).
