BNP Paribas Asset Management

The Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) raised its target range for the federal funds rate in March for the third time since December 2015. Here we consider how the Fed may go about ‘normalising’ its balance sheet.

The global economy is producing an unsustainable level of CO2 emissions. However, 194 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement at COP21 in December 2015, with the objective of limiting the rise in global temperature to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

The financing of the energy transition by issuing green bonds has reached a fresh milestone now that France, a prominent proponent of climate change mitigation and environmental protection efforts, has issued the largest and longest green bond to date.

President Trump recently passed his first 100 days in office. They were anything but quiet, with not only a series of high-profile political rows, but a number of failed attempts to deliver on his priority election promises. The topsy-turvy character of this period has had financial market observers watching closely as to what might happen next, and what the economic implications might be.

Environmental degradation and industrial and real-estate development are among the factors reducing the space available for conventional agriculture and encouraging the emergence of new methods that are better suited to these changes including aquaponics.

The surge in confidence in the US among consumers, producers and homebuilders has spread to small business owners.

“Beleggers moeten zich voorbereiden op een overgangsfase nu de kwantitatieve verruiming over het hoogtepunt heen is.”

The pharmaceutical (pharma) sector is a major focus for investors, not just from a financial viewpoint, given its weight in equity indices, but also in the context of public health – the essential societal role of taking fundamental research, materialising it into drugs, and making those drugs available.

Factor investing is popular. As frequently happens when the consensus advocates a particular approach to investing and it becomes part of mainstream thinking, some pundits express the view that it’s being overdone and will inevitably be spoiled by its success.

Following a series of posts discussing factor investing with a focus on premiums derived from exposures to the value, quality, momentum and low-risk factors in equity markets, we now focus on the issue of factor timing, i.e. the idea that individuals are capable of forecasting when a given factor premium may turn negative.