Investing

The decision is made. The ECB will also raise interest rates now that inflation is showing few signs of cooling. But this also increases the risk of a classic policy mistake.

The US national debt recently passed the 30,000 billion dollar mark. Since March 2020, the US national debt has increased by 7,000 billion dollars. All those “Treasuries” are ultimately part of one’s portfolio. Certainly now that some major buyers have dropped out this year, it remains to be seen whether enough buyers will remain.

Spreads on both corporate and high yield bonds have increased significantly in recent weeks. Nevertheless, especially the spreads on high yield bonds remain too low. Let’s get under the bonnet to explain why this is the case.

As the chart below indicates, corporate and high yield spreads are highly correlated. However, in recent weeks the spread combinations of both asset classes have been in the orange oval, indicating that high yield bonds are on the low side, compared to what you might expect based on history. The last data point is the pink square.

Financial markets do relatively well when it comes to predicting the future. Collective wisdom is ultimately translated into share prices. Index investors benefit from this collective wisdom and are effectively free riders to the hard work of many. Yet in the stock market, it is not easy to distinguish between what is possible and what is real.

Private markets are no longer the exclusive preserve of large institutional investors. A round of questions to Dutch asset managers point to an influx of families and high-net-worth individuals - or HNWIs - as private equity becomes more widely available as an asset class. Their increased appetite for alternative investments is also noted in Luxembourg.

Dislocation of Europe’s energy supplies, inflation, increased interest rates, Covid lockdowns in China… The list of factors creating headwinds for investors is long. A pair of French boutique-fund managers visiting Luxembourg explained that these problems however do not require strategies to be fundamentally rethought.

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.