Private credit strategies such as private direct lending funds and public business development companies have become popular among pension plan sponsors seeking yield enhancement over their public fixed income allocations. Understanding the key characteristics of both will better enable them to choose the best fit for their plan.
Performance was mixed in second quarter as several crosscurrents painted an uncertain outlook.
For investors that typically rely on high-quality government bonds as a counterbalance in equity-heavy portfolios, poor recent performance, higher cash yields, and uncertainty about inflation are difficult hurdles to overcome. However, they are not a reason to underweight government bonds. The outlook for government bonds is more constructive, and we expect them to outperform cash over the next one to three years.
The current macroeconomic and market environment creates an attractive opportunity for credit opportunity managers. We believe managers with flexible capital, strong sourcing efforts, and structuring skills will find ample investment opportunities and will deliver strong returns in the coming years.
Risk assets generally declined in May, with real assets posting the lowest returns across broad categories.
The 2022 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.
Asset performance is highly sensitive to the global business cycle. In this chart book, we highlight the significant shifts in performance distributions across the global business cycle for major asset classes, including equity regions, styles, sectors as well as for fixed income, real asset and currencies. Ultimately, understanding the distributions of asset performance across business cycle stages and considering where the global economy is headed are key inputs in a rigorous investment decision-making framework.
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 2022 Europe ex UK 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.
Risk assets generally advanced in April.