BNP Paribas Asset Management

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.

Robert Haugen, who discovered the low-volatility anomaly in 1972, wrote numerous articles and books to try to popularise what he called the ‘hidden factor’. To some extent, it was only the advent of smart beta investment strategies that turned his dream into reality, as low volatility is central to the smart beta approach.

Momentum is unloved: being a good follower is rarely seen as a strength, and few asset managers would brag about using momentum as an investment factor, even though they know that ‘the trend is your friend’.

Recent bad news for the US economy seems to have been positively interpreted by financial markets. The sudden drop in the ISM manufacturing index and the labour market report for August were disappointing.

The end of the year is often a time of lists. It is also a time to look back as well as ahead and wonder what of 2015 will recur in 2016. Each year brings its own particular crop of words and vocabulary which reflect events or particular themes – in short, the prevailing ‘Zeitgeist’. As avid followers of what’s going on in the financial services industry and asset management in particular, here are some of the buzzwords that strike us as reflecting the events and themes of 2015 in asset management.

After the 3 December policy meeting, the ECB announced several measures to support the eurozone economy and bring inflation closer to its target.