My apologies for leaving things so long between blogs, but it has been an upside down time, with so many events needing to play out in order to make fundamental sense!
We have had the US election results and the projected impact of a new President (in waiting), announcements as to the success of various vaccine programmes and the expected roll-out of more than one version from next month and of course, the departure of two of the Prime Minister’s leading advisers..oh and the continuing impasse surrounding Brexit.
In terms of how all of this has affected investment markets, firstly to address the United States (they sneeze and everybody else coughs, if you’ll forgive the poor analogy), there has been some positive movement in mainstream shares (at the expense of profit-taking in smaller company and technology shares), but with the continuing issues surrounding covid and also the fact that the current President will remain in office for a further month or so, coupled to the fact that the much-needed stimulus programme is not yet being rolled out (pretty spitelful really), their investment markets are up,but not by any significant margin as yet!
Looking at our home market, the news of vaccine success saw our sharemarket (as well as most other countries it has to be said) rise by around 5% in one day and this upward trend continued through last week and into the early part of this week, building on the much needed recovery in share values within the UK. As you will see from the attached overview of investment sectors, the UK has, finally, performed better than the others this month. A win’s a win right now!
With the new-found confidence in shares, there has been a move away from more traditional ‘safe’ haven investments such as gilts, where returns may be poor by comparison but at least they are relatively secure.
In terms of the overall impact on your own investments, all of the above will have been a massive positive, with hopefully more to follow as we roll on through to December and perhaps some sort of agreement with the EU on how business can progress in the new world!
With regard to the link below, unfortunately our usual ‘direct’ link isn’t working, so if you click on this one and then click ‘Investments’ within the black bar, at the top left of the main page and then click on ‘A-Z sectors,’ this will take you to the page.
https://www.trustnet.com/fund/price-performance/o/ia-unit-trusts?tab=fundOverview