Portfolio

As the first Fed cut of this cycle approaches, this Strategy Insight looks at the cross-asset implications of a Treasury curve bull steepening. Investors should maintain a defensive positioning.

The Global Investment Strategy team downgraded global equities to underweight in late June. The latest reading from our MacroQuant model is consistent with this decision.

The market is pricing in a soft landing, but we see growing signs that the global economy is faltering. Investors should be defensively positioned.

We are growing positive on Growth assets with recession expectations increasing our optimism on entry points. Equities are led by APAC Private Equity, North America Venture Capital, and Europe Buyouts. Our outlook continues to improve on CRE within the Inflation & Diversification bucket while we are underweight Multi-Strategy amongst Hedge Funds. We maintain an overweight to Senior Direct Lending for Income with a preference for North America.

We project US Multifamily cap rates to increase from 5.2% to 6.5%. While we find an unfavorable risk-adjusted return on the asset, especially relative to other opportunities in CRE, cap rates are moving closer to peak.

At the asset class level, the GAA Quant model is overweight equities, underweight bonds, and neutral cash.

Concerns about the global economy have shifted from sticky inflation to faltering growth. Tight monetary policy is finally starting to bite. We suggest increasing portfolio defensiveness.

Informe especial

California and Technology are currently in a downturn but is not apparent from the performance of the NASDAQ. On its own, the job losses in the Tech sector are not significant enough to precipitate a US recession. However, when coupled with direct and indirect spill-over effects into other service sectors, the impact on consumption could trigger a recession. In North America, we are overweight Venture Capital and Private Credit, becoming more optimistic on CRE, and underweight Private Equity.

Informe especial

Smart beta or dumb beta? While the debate has been fierce for the US equity market, we investigate the efficacy of smart beta strategies in the overall EM equity universe and 11 individual EM Markets using both bottom-up and top-down approaches. The outperformance of multi-factor strategies in EM is largely driven by their stronger relative EPS. Investors can use multi-factor smart beta strategies to gain EM equity exposures more efficiently.

Informe especial

Investors often misjudge Global Macro managers. We outline key manager evaluation criteria and highlight the power of combining Macro Hedge Funds and Private Equity. Even for those who are not Macro Traders nor invest in Hedge Funds, this report may change the way you assess potential employees, partners, and even yourself—the most critical elements of any investment strategy.