Investing

The extent of investor confusion about the outlook for financial markets is clear from the latest Big Money poll by US investment platform Barron’s: a quarter of participants are bullish, a quarter are bearish and half do not know. 

With macroeconomic factors and market sentiment dragging down yields, investors are wondering what to do with their real estate investments. For one of the most capital-intensive asset classes, isn’t rising interest generally a bad sign? “Conventional wisdom saying that real estate would always be a good inflation hedge is nonsense.”

Total assets under management in the European fund industry fell to 14.5 trillion euro at the end of the first quarter from 15.3 trillion at the end of last year, according to the latest European Fund Markets Report by Refinitiv Lipper. 

The negative performance of the underlying markets contributed negative 696.4 billion euro to the decline over the quarter, while estimated net flows summed up to negative 88.6 billion euro by the end of March. 

The Nasdaq is in a clear downtrend. It is still being held up by the ‘generals’, the big tech heavyweights such as Alphabet, Microsoft and the like, but it is important to watch out.

Despite a wider uptake of alternative energy, fossil fuels like natural gas, oil and coal are here to stay for the next decades and the MSCI Global Energy Composite index will outperform both renewable energy stocks and the broad equity market over the next year, JP Morgan Asset Management said in its 2022 Annual Energy Paper.

It was one of the worst stock market quarters in a long time, but Warren Buffett did not stare like a rabbit in the headlights. He seized the correction to buy more than 41 billion dollars worth of promising and punished shares. Result: his investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway outperformed the S&P 500. 

In the first quarter, investors sold off their Chinese shares en masse. Foreign investors who had burned their money in Russia were afraid that a similar scenario would unfold in China, potentially leaving them with stranded assets. But there is a silver lining here, Louis-Vincent Gave, co-founder and director of research company GaveKal, told Investment Officer. “A Taiwan invasion is less likely now than it was a few months ago.”

Hedge funds with a macro or multi-strategy focus were among the best performing funds in the first quarter, shielding investors from geopolitical turmoil, high inflation numbers and shifting monetary policies, according to Preqin, a privately-held London-based investment data company that provides financial data and information on the alternative assets market.

The firm said that, in a historical context, first quarter performance was “certainly disappointing but hedge funds managed to guard investors against major pullbacks.” 

The International Monetary Fund has warned of a more permanent fragmentation of the world economy into geopolitical blocks with distinct technology standards, cross-border payment systems, and reserve currencies. The fund has lowered its growth outlook for the global economy and warned that inflation in many countries is threatening to undermine future growth. “Inflation has become a clear and present danger in many countries,” the IMF said.

Rising interest rates and continuing tension surrounding the Ukraine conflict have brought the issuance of high-yield corporate bonds in Europe to a virtual standstill. “The size and speed of the current interest rate increase is causing companies to stop going public and the market to virtually dry up,” said one specialist.