 05 September 2022 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. What's Happened Financial markets have continued to have a tough time. The summer rally, which appeared material, has fizzled and global stocks are almost back to the lows they hit in June.  28 March 2022 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. Since I wrote to you in January, 'growth' oriented stocks have continued to underperform the overall equity market. For example, the Scottish Mortgage investment trust that is perhaps the most popular 'growth' oriented investment strategy in the UK is down 11% since then whilst the global equity market is down only 1%. This has been driven, in part, by interest rates that continue to move higher. Investors who have performed poorly over the past six months or so have probably been exposed in one or both of the following ways:  17 January 2021 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. If we looked at only the overall level of the global stock market in the past few months we could be forgiven for saying that very little has happened. However, a ton has occurred under the surface as some of the more popular investments of recent years have seriously struggled. My sense is that these effects are only beginning to be more widely discussed (there was, for example, an article in the Sunday Times this weekend on the recent underperformance of the hugely popular Scottish Mortgage investment fund). The crucial question is whether this significant correction for such 'growth' oriented funds has reached its nadir or if we're only in the early stages of reversing what has been perhaps the biggest investing trend since the 2008 financial crisis. To understand where we are going I want to briefly review how we got here.  21 June 2021 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. Hi everyone, I wrote in April that the 'burgeoning problem is that the better the economy does, the more likely it is that support for the economy will be pared back.' Well, the economy has been rebounding well and on Wednesday we received the first major signal that support from the US Federal Reserve will indeed be pared back - and that's probably a big deal for markets around the world. 20 April 2021 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. Hi everyone, To understand where we are today it is useful to briefly recap from where we have come over the past 6 months. By September, stocks had already rebounded from their pandemic lows and, despite the global health and economic carnage, were sitting at all-time highs. That initial rise was led by stocks of companies that were expected to do relatively well out of the pandemic: the likes of Netflix, which we were all bingeing on at the time, and Zoom, which had become a staple of working life for many.  12 January 2021 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. Hi everyone, When I wrote to you in September tech stocks had been performing exceptionally well. I said this was due partly to the fact that, since the onset of the pandemic, we had done a lot more staying at home and doing things like watching Netflix rather than flying around the world. Since then, however, humanity has been given a light at the end of the Covid tunnel in the form of vaccines. One result has been that the stock prices of ‘Covid losers’ such as airlines have performed extremely well while the big tech stocks have mostly lost money. Despite our dark winter, the market is looking at 2021 as a year of normalisation, which, assuming we get a relatively smooth and successful vaccine rollout, makes sense to me. As ever, the question is what happens next?  30 September 2020 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. Hello everyone, There has been a lot to digest since I last wrote to you in April but I think the key points are:
The two key points are clearly related: there is far more money in the system. Therefore that money is worth less than it was (supply and demand). Therefore things that are valued in money terms (like stocks and houses) are worth more. It really is that simple. There has been more nuance under the surface.  20 April 2020 Investing involves the risk that your capital goes down as well as up; you may get back less than you invested. The commentary below is not intended as a recommendation for you to personally buy or sell any of the investments mentioned nor to take any investment action whatsoever. Hello everyone, My ‘cautiously optimistic base case’ outlined in my March 9th email that the lows were in was clearly wrong. This was principally because I underestimated the impact of the coronavirus on the behaviour of governments and people. Nevertheless, one of my key justifications for buying into the weakness was correct: central banks would take huge steps to support economies and, by extension, stock prices. The lesson may be that timing the market is incredibly difficult but buying stocks on weakness is usually a good idea.  This article is not intended to be financial advice specific to your particular circumstances.
Written by Scott Tindle, CFA March 24, 2020 Is now the time to buy stocks?  The below is not meant to be investment advice specific to any individual; it is for informational purposes only. What happened? In an echo of the Woodford affair from earlier this year, one of Britain’s largest fund managers has blocked investors from withdrawing their money. The affected fund - the M&G Property Portfolio Fund – has about £2.5 billion in it and much of it is owned by everyday UK investors like you. |