Market Insight 2020

Looking back on this year, professionally and personally, I think few would say it’s been a forgettable one. The herculean strength in the stock market couldn’t stand in greater contrast to the very real pain being seen in households.

Investor or not, everyone outside of small villages in the middle of the Amazon knows we now have a viable vaccine inbound into our local GP any day now. What most will also know was this news lit a fuse under markets and pushed them higher in November, so high in fact that it broke all records for a one month rally. Unfortunately the problem with record highs is it's a lonely place to be with a lot of potential downside. I want to draw your attention to something which I feel will move markets in the not too distant...

The Investment Week Sustainable & ESG Investment Awards ceremony took to the virtual stage this year in honour of the fund providers, research and ratings teams who have contributed to the significant progress that has been made this year in driving the growth towards ESG investing.

News of vaccines coming in will likely prompt other big pharma companies to announce their successes as we move towards Christmas. Whilst that’s going to be a big boost to newspaper headlines for households across the world, I think on Wall Street, each new entrant announcing their success will lose a little market elasticity in terms of reaction size as investors move to a more pragmatic and measured approach to buying into the COVID relief rally.

Yesterday an understandable sense of euphoria swept equity markets only a week after most of Europe was plunged into a second lock-down. Positive vaccine developments and the near certainty of a Democrat in the White House resulted in the best daily stock market performance since March. Sectors that had been effectively written off in the new COVID world roared back to life; travel related companies such as airlines, cruise ship operators, aeroplane engine manufactures, even cinema groups rallied over 30%! Simultaneously companies that have been the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic lost some of their lustre as investors rotated into...

We have long been advocates of active investing over the alternative of investing passively into the market via an exchange-traded fund (ETF) or index fund. The recent rise in demand for investments that contribute towards positive Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors has been met by a rapid increase in supply of both active and passive investment options. For us, there is a clear danger in going passive in a market which relies on the integrity of the companies it invests in to keep driving change. What’s more, the traditional benefits of holding passive over active investments are not as...

Few would argue the US presidential election has always been the great spectacle of global politics and that’s with career politicians in the running, let alone a defending President with more experience in reality TV than politics.

Q2 has been to the bull market what Q1 was to the bear market. The first quarter saw the MSCI World down 20% in record time (a little over 5 weeks) propelled lower by COVID-19 and a synchronised oil market crash. Inversely, Q2 has turned into one of the best quarters on record for global stock markets with the MSCI World recovering strongly back to pre COVID levels. Irony abounds in this Q2 rally as history will likely show us the second quarter of 2020 was the quarter when the world entered a global recession, not to mention the large...

Being at the “Last Chance Saloon” is essentially having one last chance to find a solution to a problem before it all collapses. “Last roll of the dice” would be a synonym. Whist the phrase is common place, what I didn’t know was its origin. According to history there was a saloon in the 1800's Wild West called the Last Chance Saloon because it was the last place to drink alcohol before a rider entered Indian Territory where alcohol was prohibited.

Navigating through an evolving. Financial landscape during a pandemic

What is your favourite COVID television series? As many around the world hunker down, online streaming has come into its own. Be it new shows or recycled classics, everyone has their preferred “go to” genre to escape the reality of our self-imposed incarceration. Watching the stock market over the past week I was taken with the idea of “The walking dead” which is essentially a group of characters banding together to survive a zombie ridden dystopia. It drew my focus onto the realities of corporate survival in today’s world and what we might be faced with on the other side...

Perhaps you, like me, have been watching these markets rallying back to within range of their previous highs at astonishing pace. So much so that this rebound has been coined the most hated rebound in history. Why? Well, it’s caught most investors off-guard who are underweight equities, there also remain a huge amount of investors short of the market (investors who bet on the market falling) and finally, there are record levels of cash sitting on the side-lines not being invested.

The present financial market conditions represent nothing that we have ever witnessed before and hope we will never witness again. A battle is taking place on the frontline and it’s not only the truly heroic global medical profession that’s fighting it.

Needless to say that the events of the last several months have caused large scale disruptions to lives of the global population. Perhaps one of the only beneficiaries from the enforcement of global lockdowns across the world is our environment.

With global markets staging a healthy recovery last week, investors hold their breath as to where we go from here – higher or lower as the game show likes to say. Central banks and governments the world over have thrown the proverbial kitchen sink at stimulating their economies, so now that silver bullet has been shot, all that remains is for markets to watch the progress of contagion and evaluate how effective the stimulus packages are in offsetting a severe recession.

All of us in business will have been affected operationally by the extraordinary spread of Coronavirus COVID-19 over the past weeks. We wanted to let all of our connections know that as a result of what is our existing business operational integrity, we have needed to take only limited steps to ensure the ongoing functionality and controls over our clients’ assets, their needs and requests, and ongoing efficient portfolio management.

“The value of your investments can go down as well as up". Being investment professionals, you will all be familiar with that phrase because it’s plastered on every piece of literature in the investment industry. Whilst it’s unavoidably true, it’s a cold and sterile statement that entirely overlooks the emotional roller coaster that accompanies a major sell-off.

It’s been somewhat of a melancholy end to the third quarter for active managers. Two pieces of news have surfaced which serve to take the shine off the benefits of active management.