INVESTMENT THOUGHTS

Given everything that has transpired over the last few months, it is almost hard to believe that there is another half a year to go - a half that much like its predecessor will have its own set of opportunities and risks. We will look back at the first half of the year in our quarterly review, but for this week we wanted to provide our thoughts around the current investing landscape. This piece has been put together after reading numerous research reports as well as multiple conversations with teams we invest with.

In the last few weekly pieces that we wrote, we identified several factors that investors have cited as reasons for the equity market recovering in the way that it has. One of them is signs of optimism around the economy opening up and things slowly returning to normal. Different investors have differing opinions as to the time frame of a "return to normal" and, what normal would look like - that's what makes the market move. No matter what their opinions are, as data is slowly released, they will reassess their beliefs and their holdings and the market will move accordingly. Using research from Goldman Sachs and Natixis, here is where things currently stand.

Thoughts on why oil crashed, it's impact on the economy, and the capital markets.

Here are three things that have continually come up in our conversations with strategists, economists, and other financial professionals as well as in various reports that we have been reading.

So full disclosure - for my monthly thoughts piece, I was already planning on writing about the Coronavirus, but really more from the perspective of the Chinese economy, and not from the perspective of the recent global equity sell-off. But I did want to address the equity sell off before I dive deeper into my original thoughts.

In putting together my December Thoughts Piece, I touched on some of the different long-term risks numerous asset management firms outlined in their capital market assumptions. One of the risks that a few firms presented that I did not include in my piece was the long-term risk associated with climate change.