Felix Armstrong

Felix Armstrong covers the financial and corporate stories behind the UK’s retailers, hospitality groups and property companies for City A.M., focusing on how boardroom decisions, market pressures and prices filter through to investors and everyday consumers.

Retail giants, turnarounds and takeovers

As City A.M.’s retail reporter, Armstrong’s core patch is large retail and consumer-facing brands, with a steady run of stories on earnings, restructurings and deal activity. His coverage of the Debenhams owner’s “successful transformation” and narrowing losses fits a broader pattern of tracking turnaround narratives in embattled high street names, detailing how strategy shifts show up in the numbers. He follows prospective listings such as the owners of Boots hiring advisers to get the chemist “into shape” ahead of a potential London float, explaining what a flotation would mean for the business and its investors. He also reports on contested dealmaking, including Hugo Boss urging shareholders to reject Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group’s £1.7bn takeover bid as “inadequate”, framing the row in terms of valuation, control and the wider consolidation in fashion retail. Across these pieces he stays close to corporate documents and investor messaging, but writes in clear, accessible prose that keeps non-specialist readers in view as he traces how strategic decisions on the high street intersect with capital markets.

Cash ISAs and the shifting savings market

Armstrong extends his beat into personal finance when retail stories overlap with household money decisions, particularly savings and tax. His reporting on Brits “flocking” to cash ISAs after tax hikes details how households deposited £4.2bn into cash ISAs in May, following a record-breaking £12.3bn net inflow in April, and sets those flows against changes in the tax regime. Pieces like this track volumes and timing in detail, showing when savers move into particular products and what that says about confidence, inflation expectations or the appeal of cash versus other assets. He writes personal finance coverage under City A.M.’s money and services strands, linking product-level data to broader themes such as fiscal drag and the search for yield. This gives his retail beat a distinct financial edge: consumer-facing stories often come with an analysis of how households are responding with their savings and spending rather than stopping at company-level performance.

Food inflation and the cost of the work lunch

Another recurring thread is consumer prices, especially food inflation and what it means in practical terms. When City A.M. highlighted a surprise fall in food inflation, Armstrong broke down which food items were still rising or falling, using fresh data to map the cheapest and most expensive work lunches. He uses everyday examples such as sandwiches or meal deals to illustrate inflation figures, turning price indices into clear, comparative snapshots of what office workers now pay for lunch. These explainers sit alongside his more conventional corporate coverage, but they share the same attention to data and direct language, showing how headline inflation numbers translate into the weekly shop and workday routines. The result is a set of pieces that connect macroeconomic trends to concrete consumer experiences, giving his retail beat an unusually granular view of how pricing shifts play out on the ground.

London listings, property and wider features

Armstrong also writes on the health of London’s capital markets and the companies listing – or leaving – there, bringing a retail perspective into broader market coverage. In a feature on the accelerating exodus from London’s stock market, he recounts how long-standing listed firms are quitting the exchange as the summer holidays approach, using specific examples to show the pace and pattern of departures. Alongside this, his role includes property and hospitality stories, where he follows operators and landlords through market cycles, regulatory pressure and changing consumer habits. He has reported on franchising issues, attending a parliamentary roundtable and speaking directly with participants in a high-profile franchise fairness campaign, which gives his work an on-the-ground, sourced feel even when the subject is policy-heavy. Beyond hard finance and corporate news he writes occasional lifestyle and arts features, and has bylines in national outlets including The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, adding cultural and general business context to his core specialism in retail and services.

Across this body of work, Armstrong’s coverage is distinguished by its blend of corporate reporting, market analysis and consumer-facing explainers. He consistently anchors stories in specific data points or deal terms, then carries them through to what they mean for shareholders, savers and shoppers, giving City A.M.’s retail and finance coverage a tight connection between boardroom decisions and everyday economic life.