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Invesco Canada blog

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Alessio De Longis

Tactical Asset Allocation Views – May 2020


May 13, 2020
Subject | Active management | Coronavirus impact | Institutional

Our macro regime framework continues to signal that the global economy and all its major regions and countries are in a contraction regime. As widely expected, the economic data are beginning to reflect the disruption caused by quarantines and lockdowns, resulting in a significant deterioration in our leading economic indicators, which we expect to continue for some time. While global market sentiment has stabilized over the past month, it remains in a downward trend, suggesting markets are still expecting downward revisions to global growth expectations. As previously discussed, we believe this macro environment warrants a defensive portfolio posture. We have not made major changes to our asset allocation and continue to favour an overweight exposure in investment grade credit and defensive equity factors.

Continued

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Tactical asset allocation views – April 2020


April 15, 2020
Subject | Active management | Coronavirus impact | Institutional | Macro views

The COVID-19 global outbreak that started in early January represents an exogenous shock to the global growth cycle, at a time when the world economy was on the cusp of a new synchronized cyclical recovery. Driven by this shock, our macro framework moved into a global contraction regime in February (i.e., global growth expected to be below trend and decelerate).
 
This regime remains in place today and is broad-based across regions (Exhibit 1). Furthermore, given the increased severity of the lockdown and quarantine measures undertaken by governments around the world, it is highly likely that most, if not all, countries and regions will experience a significant recession in the first half of 2020. Therefore, we expect the economic data to deteriorate meaningfully over the next few months.
 
At this stage it is difficult to determine how long this macro environment will persist. Historically, contraction regimes in our framework have lasted on average six months with wide dispersions, ranging between two and 15 months across all episodes since the 1970s. We will continue to follow the data and the framework as it runs its course, but it is nonetheless valuable to compare the current downturn to recent episodes of financial turmoil, despite meaningful differences in the source of the shock and market imbalances.

Continued

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