Gen H Market Watch — March 2026

Market Watch is a monthly briefing from Gen H's product and distribution team. We spend our days watching the same markets you do. This is how we're reading things, what we think it means, and what we'd do about it.

472 mortgage products disappeared in 48 hours this month. The Bank of England's next move flipped from near-certain cut to near-certain hold in days. That's the fifth major direction change since 2020, and the pattern is worth paying attention to.

The Bank of England changed its base rate 89 times in the 1980s. Zero times in the 2010s. The 2020s are tracking closer to the 1990s: frequent changes, genuine uncertainty about direction, shocks arriving from all angles. Before COVID, mass product withdrawals didn't happen. Since 2020, they've happened five times. The BoE's own chief economist put a name to it last October: the "NASTY" era, Not As Tranquil Years (Huw Pill, BoE, October 2025).

The brokers who served their clients best this month weren't the ones with the deepest market knowledge. They were the ones whose setup let them act fast. That's worth thinking about, for networks and clubs as much as individual firms.

Energy, trade, geopolitics. They're all feeding volatility into the same place: gilt yields, swap rates, mortgage pricing. European gas price volatility in 2024 was 50% above the 2010–2019 average. Trade policy uncertainty hit record highs. BoE MPC member Catherine Mann warned that "the drivers of the Great Moderation may be unwinding" (November 2024). There's a credible optimistic case: the OBR forecasts CPI returning to target by late 2026. But even if rates settle, the calm predictability of the 2010s probably isn't coming back. Where rates land matters less than whether your brokers' workflows can handle the lurches on the way there.

Most brokers knew what was happening this month. The gap was whether their setup let them act on it, for every affected client, fast enough to matter. Do clients hear from their broker before they hear from the news? When a product gets pulled, can the broker immediately say which of their clients are on it? And can they actually reach those people fast enough to do something about it? For a solo broker, that might be as simple as switching on alerting features they're already paying for. For larger firms, it's whether the whole team responds the same way. And for networks and clubs, it's whether the support you provide helps brokers spot when things change, not just find products in the first place.