Monthly Market Reports
Each month, investment journalist David Stevenson compiles an overview of markets for UKSPA subscribers. You can see reports from previous months below.
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December 2020
My favourite new golden rule is simple to understand – “don’t get too hung up on politics as an investor”. Precisely because we all have our own biases, we then tend to project them on to geopolitics and elections. Take the US presidential election which Democratic candidate Joe Biden now seems to have won.
November 2020
Much as we stock market observers love to babble on about valuations, I’ve long been aware that this is largely a futile exercise. My favourite trick is to go Robert Shiller’s stockmarkets data website, and call up the CAPE data for US equities. Hey presto – a complete train wreck! US equities are horribly overpriced. Sell! And if we’re selling the US, we may as well sell everything else.
October 2020
It had to happen. At the very beginning of this month (September) the US equity markets finally wobbled after a long summer of positive price momentum. The chart below shows the S&P 500 for the last couple of years with the red line the 20 day moving average, the blue line the 200 day moving average.
September 2020
As it’s summer time and frankly most of us are past worrying about whether we’re in a V, U, or W (swoosh is the alternative designation for W) scenario, I thought it worth touching on two hard nosed charts that I think should make all of us a tad cautious as we head into the autumn. They’re both from quant analysts at French investment bank SocGen and they emerged in a publication called the SG Practical Quant Investor.
August 2020
In the depths of the market panic, one of the commonly expressed anxieties was that millions of equity-based retirement plans would be blown out of the water by plunging share prices. The message was - save more!
June 2020
As we head into May, more than a few investors I speak to are growing a tad nervous. They sense that markets might have got slightly ahead of themselves and are worried that once some of the more sordid realities of the Covid emergency become obvious – maybe no vaccine for years – sentiment might turn bearish again.
April 2020
Last month was a tad bruising for equity investors -and I say that with a considerable degree of understatement.
March 2020
President Xi of China must have been hoping that the new year might signal a break from his legion troubles. Those pesky tariff issues look like they might calm down and Hong Kong is looking less volatile than it did at the end of last year. And then along comes the coronavirus.
February 2020
There’s a general tendency amongst investors – and investment commentators – to be cautious about prospects for the new year. I, like most people, tend to invoke words like late cycle or fully valued which tends to signify a high level of caution.
January 2020
I like many thought that this year would be the year the markets 'turned' in anticipation of the always impending slowdown. In reality 2019 proved to bea fairly positive year for both equities and bonds.
December 2019
Overall in investment terms, I'm still cautiously optimistic though I would emphasize that word cautiously.
November 2019
My hunch is that at the global level we are not about to enter into a recession.
October 2019
Equity investors have turned skittish, with bond investors the main culprits for this troubling turn.
September 2019
I think it's fair to say that UK investors have seen better days. Uncertainty is rife and the national economy suddenly looks a tiny bit tender.
August 2019
Its long been assumed by many investors that the central bankers, especially those in the US, watch stockmarkets volatility like a hawk.
April 2019
So far, so good. 2019 is shaping up nicely. The FTSE All-Share index is up 7.2% year to date, with the MSCI World up 7.1%.
March 2019
If and when the next big market crash comes - and its probably a matter of when not if - a new, more drastic form of quantitative easing will make its debut.
February 2019
I think we can all agree that 2018 was one of those years best left forgotten - especially the last, torrid quarter.
January 2019
As we head into the festive break again, it's tempting to think (again) that we've had another exceptionalyear. In truth we haven't.
December 2018
At a recent investor event I was accosted by a fund director who claimed that I was another member ofthe bearish liberal journalist elite, always trying to talk down the "real" economy.
October 2018
It strikes this observer that there's never been a better time to think about defensive strategies -be they using structured products, absolute returns strategies or just good old fashioned hedging.
September 2018
My main worry at the moment is that investors are guilty of an element of cognitive dissonance when it comes to QE and its new, potentially ugly sibling quantitative tightening (QT).
August 2018
A few weeks ago, I visited an excellent investment event - the Amundi World Investment Forum.
