Market participants are now certain that there will be no ‘technical’ recession, and the sunlit uplands of equities frolicking in fine weather await.

When you write reviews with a quarterly cadence, sometimes it’s hard to think of new things to say. Things go up, things go down, things go sideways, or some variant thereof.

‘Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.’ This quotation has turned out to be prophetic, at least over the past quarter. There wasn’t any point agonizing about geopolitics or how expensive markets were; it was futile worrying about the path of interest rates or inflation. All you had to do was buy stocks exposed to artificial intelligence (AI) and weight loss drugs; this was a policy which took you to the US and (to a lesser extent) to Denmark.

You can never erase your digital footprint. With that in mind, we thought it might be worth revisiting the prognostications of this review at the beginning of 2023. It is a cause of regret that, while broadly correct, we were not banging the drum for risky assets. That would have been the right call, as most equity and bond markets had a very good 2023.

When you write a review with a quarterly cadence, the onus is on you to produce something new, even when the landscape hasn’t changed that much.

And still, we wait. The economy in the developed world is not yet responding to its monetary medicine…

It is a year since interest rates started to rise substantially around the developed world. It is hard to overstate the amount of ink spilt since trying to determine whether…