Since we last discussed the odds of a recession here, the prospect of a recession has become consensus. The issue that remains under scrutiny is the duration and intensity of the recession. The slide in stock markets has destroyed nearly US$35trn of global wealth in H1 2022. In terms of timing, the European economy is headed for a recession by year-end, while the...
After the start of the global value rotation towards the end of 2021, thematic assets in Europe decreased from $371 billion to $276 billion as of 30 June 20221, mainly due to performance. A significant correction in many themes resulted in a slowdown in thematic flows but pointed to the relative resilience of the European thematic exchange traded funds (ETF)...
28 July 2022 was an historic day in both biology and artificial intelligence (AI). DeepMind, a firm specialising in AI research owned by Alphabet, made freely available the structural data on more than 200 million proteins from its AlphaFold tool. This represents data on roughly 1 million species and covers the vast majority of known proteins on earth1. In...
While the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and other developed world central banks are removing the punch bowl from the party, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is serving the Baijiu . Industrial metal prices could lift as they move to the afterparty. Developed world central banks removing the punchbowl Increasing fears of an economic recession are...
The digital asset ecosystem as a whole has retreated from all-time highs of over US$3 trillion in November 2021. Now sitting just below US$1 trillion in mid-July 20221, the drawdown of -73% has been vertiginous for the recently initiated. However, this is not the first time that such drawdowns have occurred in the digital asset ecosystem. In fact, it is fairly...
How have oil markets evaded the bearish sentiment in equities in the last six months? Have the fundamentals between the two risk markets really diverged or, as the OPEC1 claim, oil markets have simply been panicking? Is the discrepancy now getting corrected? Might the cure for high prices be high prices? Commodity prices are ultimately a function of demand and...
Taking stock of where we find ourselves roughly half way through 2022, a few things are very clear: - The Russia/Ukraine situation has created a source of stress in fossil fuel markets, contributing to rising price levels that feed into the inflation narrative, which remains high. - The world—with some regions pushing harder than others—continues to affirm its...
2022, so far, has been a year of the value style of investing outperforming the growth style, and few megatrends in recent years have been more growth oriented than cloud computing. Big stories and sales growth went from being in favour during 2020 and 2021 to being completely out of favour in an environment of higher inflation and interest rates. However, do we...
The widow maker trade is back. At over 136 yen to the US dollar, the yen is approaching levels of weakness last seen in the summer of 1998. Investors are now betting that the Bank of Japan (BOJ) under growing pressure to stabilise the yen will have to abandon its 0.25% cap on benchmark bond yields and allow them to rise. If this were to happen, it would have...
My hairdresser recently told me how her strategy of buying Apple shares before the end of the year had been serving her well. ‘Everybody wants an iPhone for Christmas, it’s simple”, she exclaimed. It may be that investing is much easier when everything is going up – at least if you are taking long positions. Or maybe one only needs to combine observation with...
It is important to categorise correctly. Marco Polo, when in Sumatra, thought that he had seen unicorns. “Very nearly as big” as the “wild elephants”, he wrote in ‘The Travels’. Sig. Polo in fact saw rhinoceroses. All month long obituaries for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) have been written1 as exposure to the liquidation of Three Arrows Capital, a hedge fund,...
2022 has marked a turn of events for Japan. The once regarded safe haven yen, has declined the most (-11.3%) among G101 currencies this year2. A large part of the Yen’s decline is rooted in the widening of policy divergence between the US and Japan. China, alongside Japan, is the only real major economy easing policy in 2022. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) also recently...
2022 has seen a number of major public policy shifts for digital assets in the United States, United (UK) Kingdom and the European Union (EU). Far from banning digital assets, the new announcements are overt and positive signs that digital assets are being integrated into existing regulatory and legislative frameworks in different parts of the world. Now that the...
The concept of physically removing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air has gained momentum in the midst of significant, sustained global focus on climate change. We see in Figure 1 that projects focused on carbon capture, utilisation and storage that are either in ‘advanced development’ or ‘early and announced’ phases jumped dramatically in 2021. Notably,...
What's Hot: Time to trade the dislocation between agricultural commodities and industrial metals A dichotomy has emerged within the commodity complex, evident from the divergent performance of agricultural commodities versus industrial metals. Over the short term, we expect this divergence to widen as the catalysts powering agricultural commodities performance...
Alas, it is settled. Inflation is not transitory. Its persistent uptick has serious implications for the global economy. The ongoing conflict, in addition to all the suffering it is causing in Ukraine, has created a further inflationary shock for the world. How are investors hedging themselves? Don’t be surprised by what the pandemic has done Post-pandemic...
2022 opened with a sharp decline. The Ukraine War added further uncertainty to an already complex situation with entrenched inflation and upcoming rate hikes. In this installment of the WisdomTree Quarterly Equity Factor Review1, we aim to shed some light on how equity factors behaved in Q1 2022 and how this may have impacted investors’ portfolios. - Value and...
The global economy is now embroiled in the most severe inflation shock since the 1970s. Inflation is showing a stubborn persistence evident from the recent readings on inflation globally. In March, the US headline Consumer Prices Index (CPI) hit 8.5% annually and the Producer Price Index (PPI) rose to 11.2%. In the euro-area, headline CPI inflation surged to 7.5%...