Investing

Gamestop and Dogecoin are passé. The world of internet memes – “fast-spreading internet jokes” - has a new hobbyhorse: Nancy Pelosi. The buying and selling of shares by the “Queen of Stocks”, as the Speaker of the US House of Representatives is called on financial meme pages and TikTok accounts, is being closely watched by retail investors.

Investors in emerging markets should completely ignore the 60 per cent worst performing companies when defining their investment universe. These companies bring extra risk, without rewarding you for it. In addition, investing in China is very different at the moment: great opportunities are better left aside in some cases. 

Bond investor Pimco is also increasingly looking to alternatives to traditional bond categories. The fund house sees attractive income-generating opportunities in real estate and private credit and plans to continue investing in these areas. 

That is what Pimco wrote this week in its outlook for the coming years. The asset manager, which invests primarily in bonds, recommends working with flexible mandates in order to be able to make use of the full range of fixed-income opportunities. 

The Luxembourg financial sector has long-discussed the blockchain or as it’s also called “distributed ledger technology (DLT)” as way to strengthen the Luxembourg financial sector. As it was put by Ananda Kautz of Luxembourg’s banks and bankers association the ABBL: “Digital strategy, digital ledger technology, most commonly known as blockchain, has been a key strategic topic for ABBL since many years now.”

In the run-up to the Japanese elections later this month, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised to discontinue “Abenomics”. According to him, the economic programme has not led to broader growth. Lodewijk van der Kroft, managing director at Comgest, said investors need not worry about such statements. “This is election rhetoric for the stage, Abenomics will not be thrown out with the rubbish.”

In the 1930s, aeronautical engineer Theodore Paul Wright (1895-1970) made an important discovery during his study of aircraft production. For every doubling of the total number of aircraft produced, the cost of a newly-built aircraft fell by 15 per cent. 

In 1936, he published his findings in the paper “Factors Affecting the Costs of Airplanes”. He described that we learn by doing and therefore the cost per unit produced decreases as the total number of aircraft produced increases. We know this law as Wright’s Law.

Confidence in Chinese investments has taken a knock following the recent tightening of Chinese regulations. However, fund manager Fidelity International believes the Chinese growth story is intact and there are opportunities for long-term investors as the underlying trends have remained intact despite increased state intervention.

The emergence of distributed ledger technology (DLT), of which blockchain is a form, could bring about a shift from a platform economy to a protocol economy. In this, data is the key to the economy, explained Ralph Wessels of ABN Amro in an article published by his employer on tokenisation, part of a three-part series on cryptocurrencies published by the bank. 

The EU’s ESG investment taxonomies are evolving. Only certain aspects of climate action are currently taken into account, but work is on-going so that the environmental taxonomy covers more areas and will be applied in a subtler fashion.

It is too early to talk about stagflation, but inflation risks are rising and therefore central banks need to be very vigilant about tightening monetary policy early if prices rise and global growth slows.