Posts Tagged global bonds

April 2025 was a historic month for stock markets, which declined rapidly upon President Trump’s announcement of huge international trade tariffs, then rose almost as quickly when he reined back on them.

The mood among institutional investors has deteriorated in recent weeks, due to US-centric concerns. Trade tariffs, sticky inflation and slowing growth are the dominant topics of conversation.

We are at a point in time where US stocks are dominating all others, in terms of both their outright size and the strength of their returns. In 2024, the MSCI USA index gained 24.6%, almost double the 12.4% return achieved by the rest of the world (MSCI World ex-USA). However, 2025 does bring a mixed outlook for unemployment and inflation, in the US and elsewhere, therefore it will be interesting to see if investment returns can remain so strong in the coming year.

2024 always promised to be a busy year for elections, with one half of the world’s population heading to the polls. As far as financial markets are concerned, political surprises have now bubbled up in several countries within a short period of time. With much still to be decided by voters, there is greater uncertainty in the short-term investment outlook. However, inflation remains on a declining path in the UK, US and Europe, while economic growth appears strong.

A Steady Start to 2024 -
The year has begun on a tentative footing following the excesses of November and December, when asset prices galloped higher. Investors have paused to reflect on the ‘wall of worry’ that is said to accompany most bull markets. 

Investors enter 2024 with optimism -
Global stocks closed 2023 with their fourth largest annual return of the last twenty years. But those gains mostly came from a narrow group. The seven largest companies in the US - Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Facebook & Tesla – returned a colossal 111% on average.

For investors, February proved something of a mixed bag following very strong performance from risk assets in January.

Against a backdrop of slow global growth, stubbornly high inflation, rising interest rates and growing geo-political tensions, markets continued to perform poorly in Quarter 3.