All Ahead of the Curve articles – Page 2
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Is small cap the next mean reversion trade?
By now, most investors have noticed a rebound in value relative to growth in equity markets. After underperforming growth over the past decade, value stocks are experiencing strong mean reversion and outperforming significantly.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Recalibrating alternative allocations for a new market
Geopolitics, inflation, and central bank policy have agitated financial markets in 2022, leaving returns and diversification in short supply. A comparison of global equities and bonds provides a sense of just how challenging the results have been.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Beefing up guardrails as risks rise in private credit
For US and European private credit firms, storm clouds are gathering.The recent rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE)have numbed activity in the leveraged loan and high-yield spaces.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Clearing up the ‘scaling’ confusion in carbon intensity
Today, a company’s carbon intensity is typically measured in one of two ways – scaling by revenue, or by EVIC (enterprise value including cash). The choice an investor makes can lead to differences in portfolio characteristics.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Are defensive strategies delivering?
Introducing ‘defensiveness’ to equity portfolios can take many forms. At the most explicit end of the spectrum, we can consider dialling down market exposure using derivative-based equity overlays – whether these are static protection programmes or more complex dynamically managed strategies which could even include some implicit volatility trading. At the more implicit end, promising reduced ‘downside capture’, we find a wide array of defensive long-only equity strategies.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: solving the Russian share ban
Index investors inherently choose to follow the market through exchange-traded and index funds, but the recent prohibition on trading Russian stocks and their removal from global benchmarks has created something of a conundrum.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: tie executive pay to climate targets
AllianzGI and Cevian Capital take very different approaches to how we manage equity portfolios, but we are both long-term and active owners of companies. Following a series of conversations about how to best implement ESG criteria in our portfolios, we have found a common perspective.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: China treads a careful path
Since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 the Chinese Communist Party has not put a foot wrong domestically. It has pursued economic growth alongside social cohesion, entrenching its prime objective of staying in power.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: The future looks bright for African private equity
The Russian-Ukrainian war and its related global impact may have a mixed effect on economic recovery in Africa, which is being driven by worldwide economic trends such as elevated commodity prices, a relaxation of lockdowns, and increased global trade. With further increases in commodity prices having a positive impact, increased inflation and further possible roll-backs in globalisation weigh on the recovery.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve – Late-stage growth: a growing priority in PE portfolios
With additional options to fund growth outside of an initial public offering (IPO), start-ups are staying private longer. The average age at which venture capital-backed companies go public has increased from about 4.5 years during the 1990s to about 6.5 years today.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: The rise of altcoins and potential institutional adoption
It is interesting to sit between traditional investors and the crypto-native communities: one has just started on the Bitcoin adoption curve while the other might already consider Bitcoin to be a ‘boomer coin’.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: M&A revival a potential risk to investment grade fundamentals
Following a brief but sharp decline, 2021 merger and acquisition (M&A) volumes have surpassed pre-pandemic levels as large corporations seek to gain scale and position themselves for continued growth in years to come.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Factors in political change
The evacuation of US and coalition troops and civilians from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover in August prompted us to examine other episodes of regime change and how equity markets reacted.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: The good, the bad and the ugly of momentum investing
Last year proved a remarkable one for momentum strategies. The tech giants that had done so well in recent years continued to outperform at the beginning of 2020, and the same high momentum names were further buoyed by investors’ preference for the digital over the physical economy with the onset of COVID-19.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: The future of quant credit
The past several decades have seen quantitative strategies established as an important feature of global equity markets. In 2019, less than one quarter of the more than $30trn (€25trn) of US equities was held by human-managed funds.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Will rising rates see value stocks win?
There is growing global anticipation that central banks are likely to increase short-term rates. The spectre of inflationary pressure on longer-term rates looms large. What does this mean for value and growth stocks? Value might be expected to come up top and growth to lose out. But this is not the whole story. We examined stock returns during several historical periods of rate increases in the US and UK to see which factor would ultimately come out on top, and when.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve - Green assets: An alternative to green bonds
Policy performance bonds, in which returns are linked to ESG outcomes, would be a positive alternative to green bonds
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Crypto assets
It is no longer prudent to ignore the potential of crypto assets
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Occupation could trump sex
There remains a great deal of popular debate about such things as the sex-linked glass ceiling, cliff, escalator and the ‘sticky’ floor, all of which imply that career opportunities are different for men and women.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Modelling the unmodellable
In January 2020, the world was on the verge of a pandemic. It would empower the state, increase the might of technology firms, speed up technological adaptation, upend cities and accelerate China’s rise.
