Asset Manager

Finance is full of repetitive work, often done manually. Reconciliation, reporting, and various calculations to evaluate assets are part of daily life. But in recent years, the AI storm has arrived.

With euro stablecoins and a digital euro, Europe wants to counter the looming dollarization of the European economy. In consumer payments, the sovereignty of the euro is already under pressure, the European Central Bank warns.

Within one hundred hours, American and Israeli forces struck nearly 2.000 targets in Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei and dozens of senior officials were killed. It is the largest American military operation in the Middle East since 2003. The initial market reaction was remarkably muted, but the oil price tells a different story.

Investors are increasingly focused on what the war with Iran could mean for the global economy. The surge in oil prices is reviving fears of stagflation, as higher energy costs threaten to push inflation higher while economic growth comes under pressure.

Former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker warned that Europe risks losing its remaining seats in the Group of Seven as the continent’s economic weight continues to decline in a rapidly shifting global order.

I recently came across an interesting study about the Fama-French factors, those widely used risk factors that underpin how we evaluate investment performance. The findings should matter to every (institutional) investor.

Even before stock market trading in March had really gotten underway, we already knew this month would end up in the history books. You also have to be particularly creative now to write a column that does not touch on what is happening in the Middle East. So here is the expected topic, but with a twist.

Investors continue to shun EUR cautious allocation funds as fixed income regained popularity.

A large share of the bond markets currently offers yields that look attractive, above the magical threshold of 4 percent. But the war in the Middle East is fueling fears that inflation could move in that direction as well, which would erode much of the real return.

For more than a century, it has been “very unwise” for investors to position themselves against the United States, according to professor Paul Marsh of London Business School. The US is likely to remain dominant in terms of market size in the future, but its outperformance may well be coming to an end, he argues.
Today, US equities account for nearly two thirds of global market capitalization, and the world’s largest bond market sits in the same jurisdiction.