Giovanni Becchere
Head of Multi-Assets, ABN AMRO Investment Solutions. Based in: Paris, France
“The year has gotten off to a flying start. An initial trade deal between the US and China was agreed in December, which buoyed markets. The global economic slowdown, coming essentially from a manufacturing recession while advanced economies reached their potential growth, is bottoming. Equities’ risk premia continued to be attractive, especially in emerging markets. We keep the portfolio unchanged and continue to prefer equities over fixed income, and maintain our preference for emerging equities and debt.”
Luca Dal Mas
Senior fund analyst, Aviva Investors. Based in: London, UK
“Equity markets made a strong start to the year, however, the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus in China hit investor sentiment, and risk assets reversed their gains while safe haven assets such as gold and government bonds rose. The recent flash PMI in Europe have shown a slow revival in the manufacturing sector while the equivalent services survey was more muted but remained above contraction levels. As geopolitical and trade tensions abated, we used the opportunity to add risk by increasing our exposure to US equities.”
Kelly Prior
Investment Manager in the Multi-manager team, BMO Global Asset Management. Based in: London, UK
“The positive tone of December 2019 came to an abrupt halt in January, thanks to escalating tensions in the Middle East which were promptly overshadowed by the coronavirus outbreak. The UK officially exited the EU rather quietly at the end of the month too. There were mixed returns from markets over the month, with the US making positive headway but Asia and emerging markets losing ground. The best performer was the market neutral Merian UK Specialist Equity fund. The Magallanes Value Investors European Equity fund was the worst performer.”
Ian Crispo
Head of fund selection, Deutsche Bank Wealth Management. Based in: London, UK
“Global markets started the new decade in a good mood as US and China signed “phase one” of the trade deal though concerns about the global economic impact of coronavirus triggered market volatility. The portfolio did very well this month, with most managers ending in positive territory. Our emerging market exposure (both equities and fixed income) suffered, while gold was the best performing holding in the portfolio. We replaced Quantica Managed Futures fund with BlackStone Diversified Multi-Strategy during January.”
Silvia Tenconi
Multimanager Investments & Unit Linked, Eurizon Capital SGR. Based in: Milan, Italy
“In January, the performance of the portfolio was flat. Top contributors were our US and Japanese equity funds, while our European and emerging markets funds posted negative results. The month was a tale of two halves: starting with a strong rally, only to revert to a sell-off mode when news of the coronavirus spread. Emerging and Asian markets were most impacted, while the reaction of developed markets was rather muted. The virus is not changing our positive attitude towards developed market equities, while some caution is needed in emerging and Asian markets.”
Richard Troue
Fund Manager, Hargreaves Lansdown Fund Managers. Based in: Bristol, UK
“The new year saw stockmarkets continue the strong gains we saw at the end of 2019. The outlook, according to consensus, was still pretty good. Then the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus spread from China’s Hubei province to Wuhan and ultimately beyond China’s boarders. Stockmarkets hate uncertainty and with no way to know how serious the outbreak might prove, share prices across the board started to fall. In a month that saw most major stockmarkets fall, bonds and more defensive total return funds came into their own to offset some of the losses from shares.”
Bernard Aybran
CIO Multi-management, Invesco. Based in: Paris, France
“There has been a couple of arbitrages on the balanced portfolio in January, both in line with the changes performed during December last year. On the equity side, the biggest actively managed holding has been trimmed to add to a passive, smart beta, US equity fund. The powerful ongoing momentum market makes it quite challenging for stockpickers to keep up with broader indices, so a systematic approach makes sense. Changes to the fixed income side are mostly based on an asset allocation basis, switching US high yield toward emerging debt.”
Paul Hookway,
Senior Fund Analyst, Kleinwort Hambros. Based in: London, UK
“After the strong end to 2019, the appearance of coronavirus in China unsettled investors. However, we saw no reason to change our asset allocation, but did make an implementation change in the UK. We switched Liontrust UK Growth into AXAWF Framlington UK Fund to give the portfolio a greater allocation to mid and small caps together with a larger bias towards UK domestically exposed companies. These are trading at historically low valuations. We see this changing as the UK has at last a clear direction as a result of Brexit finally occurring.”
Antti Saari
Chief Investment Strategist, Nordea investments. Based in: Copenhagen, Denmark
“We keep our overweight for equities in place. The macro-economic and earnings outlooks have kept on improving slowly. This will allow central banks to keep monetary policy at historically easy levels, which supports equities further. Equity valuations are stretched, but the same can be said about any asset. Moreover, risk premia tend to compress as the cyclical environment improves. The corona-triggered sell-off flushed out some excesses, making the market better positioned for good returns going forward.”
