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November was full of volatility, and that's more than leaked into December, but Goldman warned investors about buying the dip hoping for a post Christmas rally. The biggest two threats Goldman sees are ongoing, the new omicron Covid 19 variant and the newfound inflation hawkishness by the Fed. The bear wave has hit a variety of asset classes whether its tech or bitcoin, and their risk appetite is low. The street is mixed however as some indications of omicron is it won’t be severe and Fed actions haven’t taken hold just yet. The VIX is still above its short and longer run moving averages which should keep investors cautious.

FINSUM: There is really no reason to move drastically right now, the Fed will be more transparent in the next couple of months.

Environmental, Social, and Governance standards have, up until this point, been an opt-in style strategy to give an edge in debt and equity markets, but that could all be changing. The CEO of Norges Bank Investment, the world's largest stock owner, says that corporate life is only going to be more difficult for firms that don’t meet ESG standards. Market pressures are going to rapidly change and firms will have a difficult time raising finances, maintaining employees, and retaining customers if they aren’t part of a green future. Norges plans to utilize its market power to apply a lot of pressure, one such way is by giving companies expectation documents. They believe companies won’t be profitable in the long run if they don’t commit to ESG.

FINSUM: This strategy of pressuring companies through divestment has been shown to not necessarily be effective in holding them accountable and transitioning them into a greener world.

The low yields in the bond market have made it relatively uninteresting to the average investor, but there is a revolution underway. The bond market has been dominated by traditional techniques and old school investors, but many of the quants and hedge funds that overturned the equity market are eyeing the bond market. Systematic corporate bond investing is expanding and firms are taking advantage of trends in government debt or pricing anomalies in bond derivatives. Driving this trend in the bond market is swaths of data that are a part of how trades are now realized. Companies like Blackstone Credit are prepared for the shift into a more systematic trading environment in bonds, and other companies are ramping up their tools to accommodate this shift. FINSUM: Hard to acquire data, and a less liquid market have made bonds less desirable for quants, but the information age is rapidly changing that standard.