Quick Thoughts: Active Investors Wake Up Before a Revolution

• Trends that might have happened over the next decade or so are accelerated into 2020. Tele-health, remote learning, working from home, internet retail, and many technological innovations are changing commerce and our ways of living and interacting. We are not going back to “the way it was” pre-COVID-19, especially now that it seems the pandemic will be with us for many more months.
  
  
• Why are the US equity markets near all-time highs? One reason is because massive fiscal and monetary stimuli have put a backstop against corporate and personal insolvency. The downside risk has been reduced. Normally when you have a recession, the US equity markets drop on average around 40%.¹
  
  
• Due to tremendous social and economic changes, several notable companies are facing bankruptcy. Many of these “old economy” companies are closing more so because they are being disrupted by innovation, e.g., the “old” retail companies, than because of the economic slowdown. Their demise is primarily related to the acceleration of trends—changes in the way our economy and lives are structured.
  
  
• There are some companies that will not make it through this upheaval and there are others that will forge a new paradigm. We should invest in companies that are innovators in their industries, and equally important, we need to avoid companies that will be disrupted. It could be as important to avoid bad companies as it is to find good companies.
  
  
• Investors might look back on this time as a break from reversion-to-the-mean investing.

Over the next few months, it’s likely headlines will be filled with news on vaccine trials, political uncertainty, a deepening recession and more social unrest. But underlying this are fundamental disruptions in our economy that will impact how we live and work—this also presents opportunities for active investors who are observing the longer-term trends.

What Are the Risks?

All investments involve risks, including possible loss of principal. Stock prices fluctuate, sometimes rapidly and dramatically, due to factors affecting individual companies, particular industries or sectors, or general market conditions. To the extent a portfolio focuses on particular countries, regions, industries, sectors or types of investment from time to time, it may be subject to greater risks of adverse developments in such areas of focus than a portfolio that invests in a wider variety of countries, regions, industries, sectors or investments. Actively managed strategies could experience losses if the investment manager’s judgment about markets, interest rates or the attractiveness, relative values, liquidity or potential appreciation of particular investments made for a portfolio, proves to be incorrect. There can be no guarantee that an investment manager’s investment techniques or decisions will produce the desired results.

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