What Should Investors Expect From Developed Markets Equities in 2016?
2015 looks likely to go down as a year to forget for many investors, and 2016 may bring only slight improvement.
Investment Planning
Outlook 2016: Do You Know Where Your Risk Tolerance Is?
Every year, we take a fresh look at the themes and drivers likely to influence capital markets and, along with our valuation analysis, inform our asset allocation recommendations. Heading into 2015, we identified five trends that influenced our advice: US dollar strength, weakening commodity prices, elevated US equity valuations, extremely low sovereign bond yields, and…
Risks and Opportunities From the Changing Climate: Playbook for the Truly Long-Term Investor
Considering climate factors is an economic risk management and opportunity capitalization issue core to prudent investing for the long term.
Investment Publications Highlights: November 2015
November’s publication summarizes three articles on China. The first suggests that the country’s GDP growth rate is unlikely to decline severely, the second argues that the government’s policies to stabilize the economy probably will promote a more sustainable growth path, and the third highlights how China’s slowing growth may limit global growth.
Behavioral Risk
In 2009, we published a paper titled “Behavioral Risk” that described the universal tendency to make poor investment decisions in times of crisis because individuals typically allow instinct and emotion to override objective analysis of the pertinent data. The ideas in the paper remain as pertinent as ever. To return investors’ attention to this important topic, we are republishing the paper with comments that reflect the ideas in light of the current environment.
Now That Emerging Markets Equities Are Very Undervalued, Should Investors Increase Overweights?
No. We continue to advise small overweights to Asia ex Japan or emerging Asia relative to US equities, but would not suggest investors add more substantial overweights unless they have an exceptionally long time horizon and the ability to tolerate substantial volatility. The risks to emerging markets are well known. Commodity weakness, a slowdown in…
Private Investments: Filling a Pension’s Return Void
Well-diligenced private investments in a skillfully constructed portfolio are important growth drivers that have helped pension funds deliver superior performance and increased the probability of meeting or exceeding long-term required returns.
Revisiting Fixed Income Investing When Interest Rates Rise
Investors should be wary of modifying their bond exposures solely based on what they think interest rates might do, and focus instead on bonds’ role in the portfolio and on mitigating risk/return asymmetry at current yields.
VantagePoint: Fourth Quarter 2015
Advice in Brief The consensus view that a global recession is not imminent seems reasonable, but the possibility cannot be ruled out. This keeps us looking for bargains, but leaving the bar high, as most assets are not cheap and what is cheap is generally cyclically oriented. Asian emerging markets or Asia ex Japan equities…
Investment Publication Highlights: September 2015
September’s publication summarizes two articles addressing sustainability issues in an investing context. The first suggests that security analysts who consider a broad dataset beyond financial data in making investment decisions may develop unique insights, and the second argues that firms with good performance on material sustainability factors outperform firms with poor performance.