Investment Insights Q4 2018

<p>In this issue, we mark 10 years since a pivotal moment of the financial crisis, when employees at Lehman Brothers gathered their belongings and filed out onto Wall Street. In today’s climate, with the UK in the midst of Brexit negotiations and escalating trade tensions between China and America, it is easy to feel apprehensive about the future.</p>
4 October 2018

In this issue, we mark 10 years since a pivotal moment of the financial crisis, when employees at Lehman Brothers gathered their belongings and filed out onto Wall Street. In today’s climate, with the UK in the midst of Brexit negotiations and escalating trade tensions between China and America, it is easy to feel apprehensive about the future.

In our lead article, we look back over the past decade and explore how the US economy has rebounded, now enjoying its second-longest period of growth in history. While we acknowledge that the recovery has been slow, we believe this bodes well for its longevity and do not see a recession on the near horizon.

Elsewhere, widely reported troubles in countries such as Turkey and Argentina have pushed yields for emerging market debt to attractive levels relative to safer developed market bonds. We explore the challenges faced by emerging markets and whether today’s yields are worth the risk.

In the US, the dominance of the tech giants is getting some negative attention, but will Donald Trump’s pro-business attitude keep them out of the sights of US regulators? We take a look back at how anti-trust law has evolved through past waves of great technological change in America, and how it might be applied today. 

In our penultimate, we turn to our own investment process. We believe in a multi-asset approach to effectively managing risk. Over the long run, we believe the correlation between equities and our diversifying assets should remain low. Though some strategies will perform better than others in different market conditions, we believe holding these diversifying assets is important in the long term. 

Brexit poses many unanswerable questions: Can a deal be struck with the EU? Will it appeal to a majority in Parliament? Can it be done in time? Is the Irish border problem intractable? The list goes on. Our final article shows how valuable insights can be gleaned from our Brexit decision tree – even if the answer is “we don’t know” at every stage. 

Read the latest edition of Investment Insights.