BNP Paribas Asset Management

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.

80 jaar later willen beleggers dat nog steeds.

Remember: in finance as in other aspects of life, one risk may be hiding behind another! In recent years, with markets oscillating between phases of complacency and spikes in risk aversion, the focus has often been on the volatility of asset prices and less on their correlation.

Men consuming large quantities of fruit and vegetables contaminated with pesticide residues have a 50% lower sperm count than those consuming small amounts.

In June 2015, I published an article entitled “A capital guarantee: but at what price?” in which I explained that in an environment of ultra-low interest rates capital-guaranteed products had lost their ‘raison d’être’.

With many other stock exchanges, particularly in the US, breaking one record after the other, shouldn’t European equities be following suit? Is Europe less favoured by investors? Jeroen Knol, senior fund manager in the European Large Cap Select Equities team, explains why the ‘old continent’ most definitely offers attractive investment opportunities.