There’s often periods of time in finance-land where things are boring for weeks or months on end. Markets slowly meandering on their natural upwards path, volatility low, economic data “meh”, corporate earnings “fine”, economic outlook “okay”, valuations “reasonable”...
Then there’s periods like today...
Markets are noisy. And accompanying this is the deafening noise from financial media and the commentator community.
Of course, there was one major “theme” – being inflation and interest rates. We now have lumped on that a second theme, being Russia invading Ukraine.
What does it all mean?
There’s been a bit of volatility in the markets to begin the year. If you haven’t learned previously, “volatility” is the investment adviser’s preferred term for describing periods such as this. For some reason an accurate description of events – “a massive wave of selling that sees months’ worth of gains evaporate in a matter of days” – just doesn’t seem quite so comforting to their clients. It's potentially going to be a wild ride with the 'bears' and 'bulls' fighting it out. Central banks are trying to set interest rates and the rest of the market is trying to guess their next move is going to be. Money to be made, wealth to protect...
What a strange year, yet as we get ready to farewell 2021 we’ll take a brief look at where markets are positioned along with some discussion about what we should be focusing on as we enter the new year.
Not everything is as it seems....
The markets are a bit of a roller-coaster at present. Anxiety is high and investors are wondering what inflation means, what the impact of the conflict in Ukraine will be, where interest rates are going and what China is doing. What's the investment outlook and where is the opportunity?