While alpha is commonly recognized as a key lever in maintaining or improving funded status, it is often mistakenly limited to purely equity or lower-liquidity investment opportunities. For plan sponsors, this can be a costly misconception. Cambridge Associates’ research shows that active fixed income management can contribute valuable alpha, resulting in significant benefits to plan outcomes.
This publication presents manager performance for 37 asset classes and substrategies, showing the median, mean, and key percentiles of return. Relevant indexes for each asset class are also included to provide market context.
Risk assets excelled in second quarter, driven by improving economic momentum.
Most asset classes pushed higher in May.
Today, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly inflation report for April, which highlighted that prices paid by urban consumers for a basket of goods and services increased by 4.2% relative to the same month last year.
The risk rally continued in April with broad-based gains across most asset classes.
In this paper, we analyze the drivers behind the recent rise in yields and compare the current bond sell-off to major bond sell-offs of the past to assess whether the rise in yields can continue and the implications for fixed income.
This publication presents manager performance for 37 asset classes and substrategies, showing the median, mean, and key percentiles of return. Relevant indexes for each asset class are also included to provide market context.
The 2020 Emerging Markets edition of our annual report on the history of financial markets provides context for the range of returns investors can expect from equities, bonds, and cash; reveals the importance of various components of equity returns; examines the evidence for equity mean reversion; and reviews the relationship between initial valuations and subsequent returns for equities and bonds. It also analyzes the historic economic declines and sharp asset price movements that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Global equity markets advanced in first quarter, as developed markets equities topped emerging markets peers.