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In part 1 of his “Rapid Fire Questions”, equity strategist Philip Brooks shares his views on 3 key questions, focusing on market outlook and risks.
Question: What’s your take on the recent market volatility and rates outlook, under President Trump’s second term?
So today the market is very focused on some of the risk scenarios that are related to US trade policy and the impact on both the US economy and foreign markets.
The concern is that there will be a negative impact on US growth and also an impact on inflation - higher inflation and accordingly, higher interest rates.
While today we are definitely in a period of higher volatility, during Trump's prior presidency, we're actually experiencing a prolonged period of quite low volatility. And indeed, equity market volatility in the US was lower during President Trump's first presidency than under either of the Democratic presidencies that bookended him. So the prior eight years with President Obama, and the more recent four years with President Biden, both of those were periods of higher volatility in the US market than we saw under Trump. And so, yes today we are experiencing higher volatility. There's certainly a risk that that could continue, but actually we know from our prior experience during Trump's first presidency, that it doesn't necessarily relate in a period of higher volatility in markets.
Question: With the high volatility, should investors be concerned about the long-term opportunities in the US equity market?
The US market has a long history of very significant innovation. If we look at the data, the US market and US companies spend more on research and development, essentially innovation spending, than any other country in the world. And over time we know that innovation develops more competitive goods and services. At the company level, companies that are selling those more competitive goods or services can, as a result, generate higher returns and ultimately that will drive their share prices. So while today we are in a period of somewhat greater concern about the outlook for the US market, driven in large part by US tariff policy, so concerns potentially about slowing growth and higher inflation and higher interest rates, do they actually change the long-term opportunity set at the stock level for the US economy? And in our view, they don't. Now, we continue to find a range of very compelling opportunities across sectors in the US market.
Question: What are the risks to watch out for in the coming 6-12 months?
We do know that it's very unlikely that those tariff levels will be either zero, or as low as they were prior to President Trump's recent re-election. And so that scenario, a scenario of modestly slowing growth potentially even with the risk of a recession, although that's not our base case, coupled with higher inflation and higher interest rates, those are key risk events that we are assessing across portfolios today, and looking at how they impact different countries different sectors and of course, different companies.
Now, of course tariffs and trade policy are not the only risk to market. During the recent period we've also seen a range of geopolitical conflicts across different regions. If we do see those conflicts resolve over the coming months, that could actually be a very positive catalyst for financial markets, and in particular in Europe. We see that there has been, something of a valuation overhang on the US equity market because of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. If that conflict is resolved and we're certainly hopeful that it will be, then that could lead to a significant upward rerating of asset prices in Europe. So there's quite a good upside risk scenario there, should those conflicts come to an end.
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