While our article exploring why the markets haven’t corrected was written before Malaysia Airways MH17 was shot down by suspected Ukrainian levels, this only adds fuel to the discussion.
With stock markets at or close to historic highs and a wave of bad news for risk-assets this year – not least the threat of impending interest rate rises and declining US GDP growth – equities have remained alarmingly resilient.
Here, FE Trustnet reporter Daniel Lanyon asks Rowan Dartington’s Guy Stevens and Equilibrium’s Mike Deverell for the reasons why.
Neil Woodford’s newly launched equity income fund has seen a wave of retail money over the past month or so, leading experts to worry that some investors are overly exposed to defensive large cap UK dividend payers.
In this article, FE Trustnet editor Joshua Ausden highlights some of the multi-billion pound funds that are highly correlated to Woodford’s process, which investors may wish to cut their exposure to if they’ve recently bought into the former Invesco manager.
Performance of funds over 3yrs
Source: FE Analytics
The resilience of financial markets has been seen as a positive by some, but head of FE Research Rob Gleeson is unconvinced.
To kick off the week, he explained why the lack of market direction has prompted him to allocate a hefty portion of his pension to Standard Life GARS, until a better buying opportunity presents itself.
Data and research is absolutely central to all FE Trustnet articles, so naturally we have to include a quantitative study in the stories of the week.
In this article, senior reporter Alex Paget examines the case for property funds as a direct alternative to bonds, measuring how much income they have generated for investors over the past three years.
This one is for all the passive enthusiasts out there, identifying three of the passive funds that have beaten the vast majority of their actively managed rivals in recent years by some distance.
Performance of fund and sector over 10yrs
Source: FE Analytics
The pick of the bunch has to be the Close FTSE techMARK tracker, which is number one in its IMA Technology & Telecoms sector over the past decade.