Trending with Institutional Investors
Global Macro
The articles on this page reveal the topics that are receiving the most traffic from investors inside RFPnetworksTerminal, within one sub-asset class.
Each article summarises the key themes that investors are researching based on their engagement with content and or their search queries for that topic. These can be early signals of portfolio changes or new searches.
Is Inflation Headed Higher or Are We At Peak?
Inflation Protection Is Trending
Protecting portfolios from inflation is a key objective of every investor. Inflation protection is becoming even more critical as inflation heads higher.
As the official rhetoric has moved from transitory, to permanent, to all-time-highs, the focus on protecting portfolios from inflation is traversing all asset classes. The search query 'Inflation Protection' brings back hundreds of new research results every week. So whilst this topic is at number 10 in terms of clicks, in terms of sheer volume of impressions it would be firmly at number one.
What is happening is lots of institutional scrolling, and headline reading. Institutions seem to be searching for the ultimate solution to inflation protection. It does not exist. But there is always hope. In the meantime, the novel ideas and in-depth analysis of the conundrum by asset managers, is being well received.
The thought that central bankers can do much to change the broad sweep of inflation is, in my view, far-fetched. Lowering interest rates and keeping them down ensured that, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, the world escaped a dislocative deflationary recession, and experienced instead a reprieve from deflation. Their actions, however, had an inevitable consequence: the onset of a virulent inflation. This was perfectly predictable at the time, and, indeed, we predicted it.
There was, however, no money to be made from the insight that money had lost stability post-2008 – the car would swerve maybe towards deflation, maybe towards inflation, but the final result would certainly be inflationary, because the authorities’ obsession was (and is) to avoid deflation. The game changer was to be rightly prepared for inflation, and for the last ten years, we have been. To call it too early is, in our book, to call it on time.
Global Macro
We see danger ahead. Markets are still too high, and protection is expensive in an increasingly nervous world; common sense suggests one should invest conservatively, and in safe assets. In a world where people find themselves without the ability to pay commitments as they arise, forced selling drives prices. Among risky assets like equities, one of the counter-intuitive things in a liquidity crisis is that securities perceived as safest and most liquid go down sharply, because investors are forced to sell what they can, not what they want to. We therefore regard plentiful liquidity in the portfolio as overwhelmingly attractive; it allows us to make the most of the opportunities that arise in the aftermath of a crisis. But first we have to get through the storm.
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