With volatility likely to continue, how can a systematic approach help to weather tough macro and style environments? Matus Mrazik, Fund Manager, Systematic Equities, discusses why he and the team take a ‘macro agnostic’ approach to investing, focusing on what they believe they can predict with some statistical degree of certainty.
Recent major events have, unsurprisingly, caused significant market volatility across risk assets. In the last quarter of 2021 global equities struggled, largely driven by a repricing of macro expectations given higher-than-expected inflation numbers. Given that distant cashflows are discounted more heavily than stocks with cheaper valuations, this disproportionately impacted expensive growth stocks. Meanwhile, though commodity markets had already been rising for some time as inflation fears grew, growing geopolitical tensions and the subsequent invasion of Ukraine pushed expectations higher.
In an attempt to manage inflation, several central banks have started to increase interest rates. This follows a prolonged period of very low rates, and loose monetary policy in general, to which the investment world had become accustomed. Given the changing backdrop, this naturally leads investors to ask, how will the new environment affect different investment strategies?
