Our asset allocation approach starts by going very high in order to see the wood for the trees! Below we highlight six ‘Foundational Blocks’ we believe are crucial to get a global macro-economic and geopolitical view of the world as we enter 2022.

Emerging Markets

Emerging markets had a bad year in 2021. Relative valuations with Developed Markets are even more compelling now. Much of the underperformance of the EM Index was due to China’s heavy weighting therein. However, valuations in China, and indeed much of Asia, now reflect known risks. The Zero-Covid policy adopted by many countries in the region, especially China, placed greater pressure on these regional economies. But with many abandoning this policy and the west now looking like re-opening will gather pace through 2022, much of the pent-up demand for Asian goods and services should reappear. With most fund managers underweight the region it won’t take a lot of money to get Asian stocks moving higher again.

Asian Consumer

More than a third of the world’s population lives in India and China alone. When you add the populations of Pakistan, Bangladesh and the ASEAN economies, that number accounts for over half the world’s population. In contrast with the West, demographic trends in the region remains attractive – Asian consumers are growing in number and in wealth and crucially, credit penetration is still low. They are also moving up the value chain as regards what they are buying, where they are buying and how they are buying. China and South Korea have the highest e-commerce and internet penetration rates in the world. The majority of the populations in the Indian sub-continent and ASEAN still live in areas classified as rural, but urbanisation rates are rising and remains a significant factor underpinning this long-term trend and opportunity. Whilst these trends have benefitted many international brands, from Colgate to Apple, the bigger beneficiaries are increasingly local brands and services, including companies like, Flipkart and Marico in India, Li Ning and Meituan in China or SEA Ltd in Singapore.

In Conclusion

Despite a marginally more conservative positioning for most of 2021 we managed to deliver very strong absolute and risk-adjusted returns over the year. Whilst we remain optimistic on specific long-term themes and exposures within our portfolios, we note that high valuations together with the prospect of tighter monetary conditions (and consequently the risk of higher interest and discount rates), all pose risks to a market which has been, and still remains, overexposed to the broken 60-40 model through passive exposure to traditional long-only equity and bond portfolios. In contrast, we have significant exposure to alternative assets, including private assets, commodities, property and infrastructure, and to traditional hedge funds – allowing us to offer our clients differentiated portfolios with attractive long-term return potential in conjunction with strong short-term capital preservation characteristics.
Finally, we wish all our readers – clients, colleagues, and partners – a prosperous year ahead and hope that 2022 turns out to be the year where we all manage to realise outcomes well beyond our ambitions and expectations.

Inflation

For inflation to be sustained, one of two factors, if not both, need to be true. One need to see sustained consumer demand, driven by both demographic and credit growth, or a collective and sustained, long term fiscal and monetary policy measures, supporting both investment and income growth – aka. Financial Repression. However, in the Unites States 10,000 Americans turn 65…every day! In Europe demographics are even worse, with population growth virtually 0 with younger people studying longer or entering labour markets later. In short, the working age population in the rich world are in decline. At the same time, technological advance – automation of supply chains and the internet – will continue to place significant downward pressure on these already negative demographics. Finally, in the welfare state – the system we live in today where the state undertakes to protect the health and well-being of all its citizens – requires governments to direct capital to support negative demographics, not to mention the enormous amounts of debts they need to repay! President Biden’s Green New Deal is in many ways the type of fiscal policy required to achieve the required investment and income growth. But as we’ve seen, paying for such fiscal measures is near impossible. For these reasons, we struggle to see a sustained period of higher inflation and believe it more likely that the rich world will fall back into low-inflation, low-growth environment we were stuck in pre-pandemic. In the near term however, year-on-year price rises will remain high as a consequence of supply-demand mismatches coming out of economic lockdowns, which will put further pressure on central banks to pursue tighter monetary policies. But this is a short-term outcome to pandemic-related measures and base effects, which will neither sufficiently support investment, nor boost demographics. The prospect, if not the reality, of higher rates and tighter policies from many of the major global central banks will act as a psychological “dampener” on risk appetites until such time as it becomes clearer that inflationary pressures are abating once base effects wear off and as a result, rate rises will be more muted than generally expected. For this reason, we retain our view that inflation is transitory. That said, we remain underweight DM fixed income and prefer fixed income “proxies” like property and infrastructure benefitting from longer term structural trends and interest remaining lower for longer.

Digitalisation

The internet has revolutionised the world. The era we live in has been, and will continue to be, dominated by e-commerce, social media, Web 3, the automation of supply chains, and a world where devices increasingly interact with each other rather than humans. The Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated these trends, and we retain conviction in many of the underlying beneficiaries, including software, cloud-infrastructure, and semiconductors. It is now over a decade since Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner at Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote his essay on “Software is eating the world”, and this holistic trend is far from reaching maturity. Indeed, the Digitalisation theme is such a big opportunity, we have broken it into 4 sections, including:
Semiconductors
Robotics & Automation
Software & Cloud Infrastructure
Digital Entertainment
Each of these sub-industries will experience rapid and significant growth in the years ahead as the ongoing need for increasing and faster data-management accelerates.
Semiconductors has been a fantastic investment for us, and whilst we see continued growth in the industry, valuations are more challenging today and upside are no doubt less than it was a year ago. Similarly, Software and Cloud Infrastructure has been a fantastic investment, but whilst we retain some exposure, the longer-term asymmetry is perhaps less attractive. One area we are hugely excited about is Digital Entertainment, which includes Online Gaming and Web 3.0. Another area we are doing a lot of work on is Digital Payments and FinTech – a direct fallout of digitalisation trends, we also see Fintech as a significant beneficiary of Web 3.0.
The way the world is banking is rapidly changing. Whilst banks generally have little environmental impact, their social impact is significant, and we believe still underappreciated. Banks will most likely need to redirect their focus from financial services to financial betterment. With higher integration of predictive insights through the use of AI and higher degrees of data analysis, this will assist banks to anticipate their customers’ needs even before they do. Even pre-pandemic businesses and individuals faced numerous challenges in their day-to-day banking activities, and with the pandemic new challenges emerged and have put even further pressures on traditional banks. Clients are now looking for innovative solutions to tackle these issues, so client expectations are at their highest. In response to this over the last couple of years we have seen more and more businesses of all sizes shift from offline to online and creating a major acceleration in digital infrastructure to gain scale, security and broaden their target market. We can witness this even in many of the strategic partnerships taking place. Many traditional banks have formed JV’s and alliances with a number of different fintech companies. Nowadays traditional banks do not see each other as the biggest threat but are all focused to protect their market position from incumbent Silicon Valley – jeans and T-shirt wearing – FinTech companies. Jamie Dimon and Brian Moynihan should be worried…especially now that large tech giants such as Google and Alibaba are making serious moves into the loans business and are doing it in a way that allows for them to own superior insight as most of these transactions are taking place on their own platforms. Not to mention challenger banks such as Revolut, Point-of-Sale-Financing – aka Buy-now-Pay-later – businesses such as Affirm and Klarna, or the rise of new payment protocols within Cryptocurrencies. Coinbase and PayPal provides both consumers and merchants with the ability to pay and / or accept crypto payments. The network effect large platform companies benefit from, and the opportunity similar new platforms come with, is a very significant opportunity we see…not too far on the horizon.

Energy

It may appear counterintuitive to invest in oil, gas and mining companies these days given the short-sighted aversion towards them by many investors, but the simple truth is that:
like it or not the world will need carbon fuels for quite some time, if for nothing else but to ensure a viable transition to net-zero,
to the first point, all the metals required in the green energy sector that need to (by definition) be mined,
both carbon fuel and mining companies are urgently “re-inventing” themselves and using free cashflows to clean up their act and/or invest in clean energy sectors,
lack of investment leads to reduced production, which leads to lower supply which leads to higher prices which is plays into the hands of “less savoury” jurisdictions who can then increasingly hold the west to ransom
….is this what we want? In addition, as an investor you are rewarded for the risk at current valuations, whilst exposure acts as a hedge against near-term reflationary pressures.
These “foundational blocks” we believe are crucial in order to manage risks capital markets pose given where we are in both the economic, but also the longer-term debt cycle.

Smart Infrastructure

ESG, E-commerce and Big Data have rendered much of our current infrastructure outdated. Whilst not new to us, the world has finally come to a consensus that we need to look after our planet and the well-being of the societies we operate in. History has perhaps proven that capitalism is as good, if not better, an economic blueprint to operate in than any other – but not at any cost! We are big supporters of the transition to a Carbon Neutral world and believe this is a theme that will offer attractive and stable investment opportunities to investors, including sub-themes such as decarbonising the grid. Furthermore, Digitalisation has resulted in the need for infrastructure to either adapt or die, and like software, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the existing trends: more warehouses, more data centres, more Telecoms towers, and less high street shopping and bank branches. Similarly, we believe increasing investment in data centres will continue to facilitate the expansion of E-Commerce, the Internet-of-Things and 5G.

Covid-19 has been afflicting society and global market economies for almost 2 years now. In that (relatively short) time the medical advances as regards understanding the virus and creating vaccines which (in most cases) act very effectively to immunise and prevent the spread of Covid-19 has been nothing short of stupendous. Government handling of the pandemic (pretty much everywhere) rather less stupendous. The upshot of that, in our view, is that:
vaccines/treatments/immunities are now sufficient in scale and effectiveness to contain the worst side effects of the virus……this is never going away, we are just going to have to learn to live with it, and
as a direct result of i) people in most countries have had enough of the personal restrictions imposed, the cost to business, the mental health legacy and perhaps most important of all, the huge delay now affecting people suffering from very serious (non-covid) illnesses, like cancer, strokes, heart attacks etc.

COVID-19

Chart 10: The discount of Emerging Markets relative to Developed Markets are back to historically extreme levels.

Below we discuss some of the themes we have identified and play central role in all of our portfolios.

Whilst managing risk is crucial, and central to our investment philosophy, we also note the era we live in is unparalleled in history when it comes to innovation, technological change and opportunity.

Global Healthcare systems are expensive, and costs are rising fast. Covid-19 aside, the reality is that fewer and fewer patients receive the healthcare service they require. At the same time, innovation in life sciences and healthcare technology has been rising faster than at any point in history, and we are now on the cusp of entering the age of personalised medicine, enabled by genomics and new therapies, like Immunotherapy or CRISPR technology. Indeed, the speed and science behind the development of the m-RNA Covid-19 vaccines are proof that have entered a new era in healthcare. New technologies are driving significant innovation and in areas such as Tele-Medicine, Diagnostics and Robotic Surgery. These new and emerging trends within Healthcare, we believe, will have very significant consequences on Healthcare systems globally, including cost savings with the associated deflationary benefits and an increasing focus on prevention, rather than treatment. The benefits to investors will be very significant and we believe this to be a trend which is still in its relative infancy.

Innovation in Healthcare

Table 1: World Population Data