Ronald van Genderen

Emerging markets excelled in the second quarter, driven by Taiwanese and Indian equities, despite Mexican setbacks. Ronald van Genderen concludes this edition of the Morningstar Fund Radar with insights on promising strategies like Robeco QI Emerging Conservative Equities.

In the US, a select group of seven stocks have garnered much attention since last year for their impact on stock market performance. This illustrious group, known as the Magnificent Seven, includes Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. Collectively, these tech giants accounted for 32.5 percent of the S&P 500 index as of the end of April 2024.

Ecology funds, which invest in companies addressing environmental challenges, peaked in 2020 and 2021 but later saw declines in returns and assets under management.

Emerging markets continued last year’s trend in Q1 2024. And that is not good news for emerging market investors, as it meant another significant underperformance versus developed countries. Although the return of the MSCI EM index was 4.71 per cent in euros, making it positive in absolute terms, it is a considerably worse result than the 11.37 per cent achieved by the MSCI World index.

In a turbulent year like 2022, investors needed refuge, which was almost nowhere to find. Investments in oil showed outstanding performance, as one of the few areas in the financial markets. And then there were precious metals. Not all metals performed equally well though, and positive returns were mostly measured in euros.

Investment themes come and go, but investing in water has stood the test of time. Water can be central to many of the sustainability challenges facing the world. Investors seem to increasingly recognise this in recent years, creating a strong inflow of new investor money.

The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation marks its second anniversary next month. Although it was quickly adopted as a sustainability label, its actual purpose was to provide a framework for communicating the extent to which sustainability plays a role within an investment fund. Adjusted rules that took effect in January 2023 caused a stir in the sustainable fund landscape.

Last year was another disappointing year for emerging market investors. The MSCI EM index yielded more than the MSCI World index, although the underperformance was less dramatic than in 2021. A summary of key events and a ranking of the five best-performing funds.

Europe’s economy is heading for recession. The war in Ukraine, an energy crisis, rising inflation and rising interest rates are increasingly starting to hamper economic growth. With cyclical sectors in particular are expected to be affected, as they are the most sensitive to the state of the economy. However, the impact of an economic slowdown can be different for each sector. In any case, the price performance of the various sectors this year shows no in any case, no unambiguous picture and there is also a large dispersion in returns.

This week’s Top 5 by Morningstar looks at the performance of funds that invest in Chinese A-shares in the year to date. A-shares are shares of mainland China-based companies that trade on the two Chinese stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen. Since 2003, select foreign institutions have been able to purchase these shares through the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor programme.