Displaying items by tag: international

2024 has proven to be a much more challenging year for financial markets than 2023. Entering the year, the consensus was that the economy would continue to weaken, inflation would keep trending lower, and the Fed would be proactive and aggressive in cutting rates. 

Clearly, this has not happened. Amid this new paradigm, allocators are understandably looking to make appropriate adjustments to portfolios. Here’s why they should consider increasing exposure to active strategies.  

With fixed income, active investing can allow for precise exposure to a specific theme. For instance, those who don’t believe that inflation will keep trending lower may want to have higher exposure to short-duration debt. Another benefit is that active managers are able to quickly change strategies depending on how events develop, which makes them particularly useful in the current environment. This means that holdings can be optimized for the current environment of ‘higher for longer, but then managers can quickly pivot once the Fed actually starts cutting rates.

Active strategies can also be useful in other asset classes, such as international equities, which currently appeal to many investors due to favorable valuations relative to US equities. With active management, there is more focus on bottom-up, fundamental-focused analysis, which can result in more alpha in less efficient markets. Further, it can also lead to more diversification and risk management than is typically found with passive investing.

Finsum: The first quarter of 2024 has had several unexpected developments. Here’s why allocators should consider active management to navigate this tricky environment. 

Based on research published by Mattison Public Relations in London, more than half of the companies in the FTSE 100 now have board-level ESG committees. The data was compiled by reviewing the latest annual reports from all 100 companies. While the overall percentage was 54% of FTSE 100 companies, the research showed that the percentage varied by industry. For instance, 100% of oil, gas, and mining companies had board-level ESG committees, while only 13% of the non-bank financial services sector had these committees. Companies in the non-bank financial services sector include insurers, asset managers, and retail investment platforms. Within the 54%, 56% were made up entirely of non-executive directors. This would allow those companies to add directors with ESG expertise to provide greater oversight of the companies' ESG performance.

Finsum:Based on recent research, 54 companies in the FTSE 100 now have board-level ESG committees to evaluate a company’s ESG performance.

Inflation may be peaking, or at least that is what Treasury bulls are thinking. A rally started at the 20-year note and worked its way to shorter term rates this week: the 30-year yield fell 13 basis points and the ten-year yield fell by 12 basis points. Declining yields were driven by investors flooding into these treasury markets. Still, investors are pricing in a half-point rate increase by the Fed in the next two meetings with an almost 100% chance of reading the tea leaves in the options markets. The rally was really suppressed by Bank of America’s Forecast which said inflation peaked in March and will be on the decline. Similar patterns took place on the long end of the government bond market in the Euro areas as well with Germany and the U.K. seeing their yields fall.

Finsum: The flood in the TIPS market suggests that bond investors still see some persistent inflation in the near term. 

(New York)

JP Morgan put out an interesting recommendation to investors recently. They said the best place to make money in the recovery might not be in the US, but rather in international stocks. According to Gabriela Santos, global market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management, “When you have a cyclical recovery like we expect in 2021, it’s really international’s time to shine … We think it’s really important for investors to have a balance between U.S. equity exposure and international exposure as we go into the year of the vaccine for 2021”. The key argument here is that international indexes are more dominated by cyclical stocks than tech, and those are the share poised to really gain as the vaccine plays out.

FINSUM: This is all pretty basic. International indexes have not recovered as much as US stocks, and are composed of companies that are likely to start outperforming at this stage of the recovery. Europe in particular seems to be a good bet.

(London)

US market valuations are eye-watering. By several measures the S&P 500 is as richly valued as it has ever been. With that in mind, overseas stocks, especially in Europe, appear to be a good bet. For example, while US stocks are now well ahead of their pre-COVID peaks, the Stoxx Europe 600 is still down 9.2% since its high in February. Since March, the S&P 500 has rebounded by 60% while the Stoxx Europe 600 has only seen a 40% rise.

FINSUM: So European benchmarks are more exposed to the banks and industrials, which were more hurt by COVID than US tech companies, which dominate American benchmarks. That said, now that a vaccine is in site, there is a big chance for appreciation in Europe that seems much less likely to occur in the US.