Asset Allocation Update US REITs may outperform ordinary US equities The recent resilience of US real estate investment trusts (REITs) seems to reflect both easing concerns about the Omicron variant and a net decline in long-dated Treasury yields. Although we expect... 13th December 2021 · 4 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Is US households’ voracious appetite for equities sated? US households and nonprofit organizations (NPO) lost their appetite for equities last quarter. If they don’t get it back, it may not augur well for the stock market. 10th December 2021 · 3 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Taking stock of potential corporate tax reforms This Update answers several questions on the Biden administration’s latest proposals for US corporate taxes as well as the global tax deal recently agreed among the world’s major economies. The... 19th November 2021 · 8 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Why we still aren’t convinced the S&P 500 is in a bubble Even though the S&P 500 has risen by almost another 25% or so this year, we are still not persuaded that the US stock market is in a bubble that is about to burst. 12th November 2021 · 4 mins read
Asset Allocation Update We expect LatAm equities to trail those in EM EMEA We think that MSCI’s Emerging Markets (EM) Latin America Index will continue to underperform its EM EMEA Index over the next couple of years, albeit not to the same extent as it has in 2021 so far. 12th November 2021 · 5 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Reading the runes of relative valuation within the US stock market One reason to think that the performance of the US stock market will underwhelm, at least in the long run, is that some of the gaps between the valuations of its most highly and lowly valued companies... 4th November 2021 · 3 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Correlation between US equities & Treasuries not set in stone While many observers seem to have been surprised by last month’s joint sell-off in US equities and Treasuries, there is no reason in principle why the two assets should be negatively correlated. It... 11th October 2021 · 4 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Infrastructure & reconciliation unlikely to mean Q1 rerun While the large fiscal stimulus passed in the US in the first quarter of this year appears to have been a key reason why equities there outperformed Treasuries at the time, we think that the... 6th October 2021 · 5 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Revisiting the relative valuations of US equities and bonds Although the pull-back in the S&P 500 last month was probably influenced by a sell-off in Treasuries (see here), we don’t subscribe to the view that stocks are in a big bubble that bonds are bound to... 1st October 2021 · 3 mins read
Asset Allocation Update Putting risky asset valuations into context This Update compares the valuations of the twelve different “risky” asset classes that we cover on our Asset Allocation service, both relative to one another and to the yields of “safe” assets, as... 13th September 2021 · 5 mins read
Asset Allocation Update EM assets & the risk of higher inflation We think that there is a risk of a period of moderately higher inflation in some major emerging markets (EMs) over the coming years. If that came to pass, it would probably be bad news for local... 3rd September 2021 · 4 mins read
Asset Allocation Update What the S&P 500’s valuation may mean for future returns Although the US stock market’s valuation is nearly as high now as it was at the height of dot com mania, we don’t expect the return from it to be as bad in the next decade as it was in the 2000s. 26th August 2021 · 6 mins read
Asset Allocation Update On the relative valuations of US housing and equities Despite growing talk of another bubble in the US housing market, its valuation remains far less stretched than that of the US stock market and is not alarming in our view given the prospects for... 18th August 2021 · 4 mins read
Asset Allocation The asset allocation implications of China’s slowdown The further slowdown we expect in China would probably be a headwind for some “risky” assets that are particularly sensitive to its economic cycle. It also informs our view that China’s sovereign... 4th August 2021 · 4 mins read
Asset Allocation More thoughts on the effects of inflation on asset returns The muted reaction in the markets so far to today’s above-consensus surge in US inflation presumably reflects a view that it won’t have as much of a bearing on economic growth or monetary policy as... 13th July 2021 · 6 mins read
Asset Allocation Update What’s behind renewed US equity outperformance? It has become harder to make the case that the stock market in the US will fare worse than those in the rest of the developed world, now that the “rotation” trade has fizzled out. Nonetheless, we... 7th July 2021 · 4 mins read