Quarterly Investment Commentary

The last three years have given us two large market crashes (Q4 2018 & Q1 2020) followed by incredibly strong recoveries (Q1 2019 & Q2 2020). It has been a wild ride. Mixing your standard asset classes of equities and fixed interest hasn’t made a huge difference to your total returns in the period but […]

Well what a quarter that was! The global stockmarket having given investors 20% in 2019 took it back in full, in just four weeks. Coronavirus was the obvious trigger but markets looked too optimistically priced as we have been saying for a while now; so it wasn’t the only reason for the fall. The global

The end of a decade has no real meaning other than the meaning we give it and is just an arbitrary measure of time. It is jolly useful though for investment commentary writers who are struggling for anything to say in the face of the ongoing, relentless upwards march of all asset classes. It is

Quarter 3 moved sideways, upways, downways and every which way in response to hints of lower UK interest rates, Trump’s continued incompetence in dealing with the Chinese, the European Central Bank reducing interest rates/reintroducing quantitative easing, falling UK PMI indicators and signs of a general slowdown. The Chicago Volatility Index (VIX) moved to double digits

The first six months of 2019 have been extremely positive for investors and the best strategy has continued to be (as with the last decade) to buy equities as cheaply as possible. There were signs  of cash fleeing the markets following the losses of late 2018 but yet again the ‘market timers’, ‘active evangelists’, ‘pound–cost

Following the losses of last quarter this quarter decided to play mind games with investors as world stockmarkets posted near to double digit positive returns. If the nerves of ordinary investors weren’t already frayed by global politics, they may have snapped watching markets move so sharply up and down in the last year or so.

Quarter 4 of 2018 was an unforgettable one for investors and hopefully only a painful memory now. The same forecasters who couldn’t tell you in advance where the declines were going to come from will now tell you with certainty where they did. The benefit of hindsight allows these people to point to Trump’s spat

Quarter 3 saw a little less trauma in global markets compared with Q1 and Q2 this year, although no letup in the relentlessly negative newsflow and bonkers politics. Investors were noticeably more nervous this quarter which is perhaps the new normal as we get used to the 24-hour news cycle being pumped into our phones.

Quarter 1, 2018 and its losses should not have come as any surprise to investors, given the near 10-year bull run enjoyed by equities. Quarter 2 though, taught a valuable lesson to all investors about the folly of market timing. It would have been a very understandable investor who disinvested or at least reduced risk

At Altor we have recently had a period of abstention from both coffee and social media for the period of Lent. The idea was to encourage a period of reflection and change. As it turns out, the lack of coffee was a mistake but the peace achieved through the temporary deletion of Twitter, LinkedIN and