Watson’s Weekly Themes for the week ending May 9th 2025

This is a collection of THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS that I thought may give you further inspiration to improve your commercial awareness knowledge. Of course you may completely disagree with what I say – and that’s all good! What is key, though, is that you must try to back your opinions with concrete facts, have an identifiable line of thought and reach actionable conclusions.

Feel free to use the themes identified below as a launch pad for your own research. What I’ve said here is not at all comprehensive – it’s more of a train of consciousness! However, you can use this to identify areas of interest that are specific to you and then expand on them whether this is for study purposes, job interview purposes or to provide food for thought for your broader career in general.

It seems to me like he’s got everyone fearing the worst and so when he announces trade agreements, they SHOULD give markets a bit of a boost. Should he announce them all at the same time or drip feed them? Also, how will conflicts be avoided (e.g. does a trade deal with UK but doesn’t want the UK to strike a deal with China. Will this negate the benefits of a UK/US deal?). FWIW, it seems to me that his masterplan may be about shocking the world and showing them the “worst-case-scenario” and then doing bilateral deals with individual countries who, having seen what can happen, scramble over themselves to get to the negotiation table. By doing it this way, he gives himself ultimate wiggle room whereas if he does some kind of multilateral deal it will take longer to negotiate and be less flexible (from his point of view). Also, negotiations will arguably be quicker – and all of this makes him look like a hero, someone who gets things done and someone who does what they set out to do. The problem is that America’s lost the world’s trust in the process and so countries will a) not 100% believe the deal will be robust and b) continue to try to minimise exposure to the US

The solar panel car parks idea sounds great, but given we’re trying not to buy Chinese how much more is it going to cost us? Trump is already hammering in the final nails in the coffin of wind power in the US and now the UK government has lifted restrictions to onshore power generation you do wonder whether offshore is going to lose momentum. Either way, we’re still going to have to make sure we improve energy storage to ensure consistent power supplies.

How much of residential conveyancing is vulnerable here realistically, for example? I would have thought that law firms are generally going to want to see it fail but consumers are going to want to see it succeed! I am assuming that a more realistic scenario in future is going to be human run, AI assisted. However, given that many lawyers charge by the hour, will this change the fee model?

What about our movie/TV industry? AMC Entertainment’s bigger-than-expected loss just highlights ongoing difficulties in the movie industry. It seems that there are issues throughout the entire thing from production to distribution to the end customers being able to afford to go to cinemas. The fact that AMC’s box office Q1 results were the lowest they’d had since 1996 (excluding the Covid years) is not a good signal – particularly if US consumers are yet to feel the full force of Trump’s tariffs on their discretionary spending power.

Apple looking around at alternatives to Google has got to hurt. Also it’s interesting to see the success of Applovin because this highlights the success of a company that helps companies target mobile gamers. Presumably this “skill” could be transferred elsewhere. Targeted advertising is defo the way forward – particularly as ad spend appears to be weakening (just look at S4’s results, for example).

Britons are flocking to the US because of weaker dollar and better deals on accommodation because Canadians and Europeans are giving it a swerve. This is in stark contrast to what the hotel companies and US airlines are saying. Is the US pessimism overdone?