In October the average prudential balanced portfolio returned -1.95% (September: -1.59%). Top performer is Metropolitan (-1.35%); while Namibia Asset Management (-2.80%) takes the bottom spot. For the 3 month period Allan Gray, takes top spot, outperforming the ‘average’ by roughly 1.4%. On the other end of the scale Stanlib underperformed the ‘average’ by 0.9%.
How will the new US president impact global financial markets?
The US elections during October were undoubtedly the most important news event of the last quarter of 2016. Hillary Clinton was credited with a handsome lead over Donald Trump until the day before the elections by the main stream media. Was this based on objective opinion polls or was it just a premeditated campaign against a candidate that is not part of the political establishment in the US? Hillary Clinton of course is firmly entrenched in the political establishment as wife of a former president and as former Secretary of State during President Obama’s first term of office. So these media have clearly betrayed their own bias for the political establishment and cannot lay any claim to independent reporting. I guess these media will quickly sweep this under the carpet and will want the public to quickly forget about their biased reporting.
The fact that president elect Trump is ostensibly not part of the political establishment has raised the hopes, and fears, of many that the US will experience nothing short of a political and economic revolution under his leadership, hopes of those who want to see a change from the past, fears of those who prefer to have the status quo maintained.
Uncertainty of course is not good for financial markets and causes volatility. Analysts are trying to forecast what the consequences might be of the policies they think the new president will adopt or he promoted during the course of the election campaign. If the new presidency proves to be a political and economic revolution, there will be winners and losers and you will not want to be betting on the wrong horse in terms of your investment decisions. So how should you respond to this situation?