Following on from our commentary of last week, we thought it’d be worthwhile just touching base given the ongoing market volatility that we’re seeing through the course of this week and providing you with some of our thoughts as to what’s driving that.
Clearly the ongoing spread of the coronavirus is the biggest negative in terms of financial market performance at the present point in time. Additionally, we saw a significant sell off in the oil price. Both Russia and OPEC failed to agree on curbing the oil supply and that resulted in a sharp fall in oil prices that ultimately fed through in terms of financial market performance. We saw that with energy stocks particularly being sold down heavily over the early part of this week.
Equally, governments have come to the fore and are looking to enact a number of stimulus packages and that resulted in a pickup in financial markets. But again, we believe that probably to be short lived until we start to see the peak cycle of infectious rates starting to decline.
So what does all that mean for strategy as far as we’re concerned? We’re continuing to focus on the look through as it relates to the coronavirus. We think it is and continues to be a cyclical phenomenon. But there’s no doubt it’ll continue to have an impact on financial markets in the short to medium term.
We’re continuing to refine our strategy. We’re continuing to look for opportunities we believe are starting to come to the fore given the extent of the sell down in financial markets. We are looking to balance those with what we see as those medium term risks. We are also trying to create strategies that can evolve through time but equally deliver on their longer term objectives.
As always, if you’re feeling uncomfortable, certainly feel free to reach out to your advisor.
We’ll also continue to provide these market updates as we go through what is likely to be an ongoing challenging period. If you’d like to receive these updates as they’re delivered, please click on the subscribe button at the bottom of this page.
Piers Bolger is Chief Investment Officer at Viridian Advisory
This post and some supporting materials may be regarded as general advice. That is, your personal objectives, needs or financial situations were not taken into account when preparing this information. Accordingly, you should consider the appropriateness of any general advice we may have given you, having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs before acting on it. Where the information relates to a particular financial product, you should obtain and consider the relevant product disclosure statement before making any decision to purchase that financial product.
The material in this post is correct and complete as of the data it was posted. Viridian is not responsible for, and expressly disclaims all liability for, damages of any kind arising out of use, reference to, or reliance on any information contained within this site.