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Goodbye 2019, and our guide for 2020 in global equities
Summary: The return in global equities have been much higher than even the wildest fantasies of market participants back in early January. Significant positive impulses from central banks and commitments of fiscal spending seem to have stopped the bleeding with global leading indicators suggesting the global economy moved into the recovery phase in October. What does that mean for equities in 2020? We also talk about the signs of rising inflation expectations and how this should be played in global equities.
With less than two weeks to New Year we are leaving 2019 with a feeling of bewilderment and a sense of “can this really continue?”, as the year shaped up very differently from what we expected a year ago. In early January before Powell’s famous U-turn consensus was that the Fed had made a gigantic policy mistake hiking the rate in December 2018 paying no attention to signals coming from financial markets. What endured was the second worst December for US equities since 1927. The Fed’s U-turn and subsequently easing of monetary policy followed by the majority of the world’s central banks lifted sentiment and equities erased the Q4 2018 losses by April 2019.
Since then the US-China trade war hamster wheel turned multiple times causing markets to be driven by tweets and trade news headlines frustrating market participants. During the second half of the year many countries (South Korea, Japan, Netherlands etc.) planned higher fiscal spending in 2020. The combination of stimulus from central banks and governments extended the momentum in global equities despite falling profit growth, which is currently negative for emerging market companies, and as of yesterday the NASDAQ 100 is up staggering 39.5% on a total return basis. In this impressive rally for the technology sector lies also the culprit to the short-lived outperformance of value stocks that occurred during the year. In a low rates and growth environment technology companies with monopolistic power is the preferred segment. But this trend could easily be challenged as we will see in our guide for 2020.
One of the interesting developments the past month is the steepening of the US yield curve (10-2Y) reaching the highest levels observed in 2019. The rise in the yield curve can be decomposed into multiple parts where one of them is inflation expectations and this factor observed through break-even rates is clearly a major explanation. Our head of commodity strategy, Ole S. Hansen, has lately talked about food inflation is also coming to live across many food categories. What are the implications for investors if inflation is finally picking up?