Last time out, we didn’t comment much on politics. While the new US administration was yet to take office, one had to assume that it would be thoughtful and logical in its policy agenda.

Politics don’t matter. At least that’s what you might have concluded from last quarter’s review which avoided any mention of the US election, the political turmoil in France or Germany, the mess in the Middle East or Ukraine.

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.