Alla Harmsworth

This essay considers the role of tokens and crypto assets as investments.

We started the year having discussions with a large number of chief investment officers (CIOs) and allocators. In this short note, we reflect on the key common messages that came out of those discussions, points of consensus and important open questions for the outlook. We reflect on how those perspectives overlap with our view that a change in macro regime is the most likely description of the outlook. There was strong agreement among investors on a positive view for risk assets and an overweight position in the US. The area of most agreement in terms of where to increase allocations was private assets, especially private debt. We discuss the key issues that investors have raised across equities, fixed income and alternative assets, and also their views on crypto.

This note outlines five investment themes for 2025. These are not necessarily trades for the coming year, but rather issues that asset owners need to think about—even if some implications are longer term. They are topics which we believe necessitate a change in investors’ expectations and in their asset allocations.

A fast energy transition incurs social and political costs that will probably be deemed unacceptable. It is imperative for investors to consider the ramifications of an energy transition that exceeds a timeframe beyond 2050.

In this note we summarise the key talking points that came up in meetings with investors over the last four months. We hope this is a useful summary of what is on investors’ minds and of our views on these topics. The key issues that investors wanted to discuss were debt sustainability, hard versus soft landing and the appropriate allocation to real and private assets.

While there is a very active debate between investors about the tactical prognosis for the market, and with good reason, there are also controversies that relate more to market structure. We explore a number of these topics in this note and what they mean for investor positioning.

We gathered a group of AB’s senior investors across asset classes last week to reflect on the recent bout of market volatility and what it means for future positioning

Our latest quarterly note considers the interaction of tactical and strategic views. One complication for investors is that there has been a significant muddying of the waters between cyclical and structural inflation, even though the forces at work have been very different.

In this note, we discuss feedback from recent meetings with clients around the world, where common themes emerge: The cyclical vs structural inflation outlook has become more muddied.

In this note, we discuss five recent books that we think are important for contemporary debates about the strategic outlook. This is not a traditional book review that intends to offer a detailed overview of the whole work in each case. The publications have been chosen as recent books that fit into the debate about what we see as the core fundamental and strategic issues that will change the way investors must think about how they invest, govern their decisions, form views and, ultimately, design portfolios. It is these aspects of the books that we draw out and discuss, offering conclusions for investors

In this quarterly paper we look at recent flow activity across asset classes discussing which aspects of these trends seem set to persist and what this means for asset allocation.

Three mega-forces seem set to dominate the investment landscape for the next decade or longer, with major implications for the macro regime and portfolio design.

We think the approach to benchmarking used by much of the industry should be questioned. Our thesis is that we are in a new regime, with different structural forces compared to those that existed prior to the pandemic. This raises questions about the validity of benchmarks that were set before.

We spent several days in late January with a group of Chief Investment Officers and senior asset allocators. This was useful both as a way to hear the key concerns for a significant group of investors and as an opportunity to think about what one might do in response. The focus of the discussions was very much strategic, so (thankfully) the path of central-bank interest rates and soft versus hard economic landing were not among the topics. Instead, the debate was on structural macro forces, the long-term outlook for returns, how various parts of the investment industry might fare, and what all this means for the broader economy. In this short note, we will summarize a few of the key topics that we think are of general interest.

This is not an outlook in the traditional sense of what we expect to transpire in 2024. Instead, we address the key portfolio allocation questions we think will need to be discussed this year, even if their effects may not play out for years

As investors prepare to turn the calendar to 2024, we explore notable issues that run the gamut from private allocations to the prognosis for active equity management.

This short note reviews what we see as some of the key allocation controversies that have come up in recent client meetings and that are likely to underpin flows in coming quarters.

This note considers the macro impact of artificial intelligence (AI), which raises profound questions about how knowledge is obtained, what we mean by “truth” and what counts as “explanation.” AI is necessarily political—it would be a mistake to narrowly frame it as a quantitative topic. While there is a narrative of boosting growth, AI could also widen the distribution of wealth, which increases second-order social risks. It also raises questions about the future of democracy and introduces new types of geopolitical uncertainty. Moreover, AI might further entrench the power of corporations versus governments and labor. The key strategic investment challenge is pricing the potential for higher growth and profit share versus the potential for greater fundamental macro uncertainty via societal pressures and geopolitics. Markets are quick to price the former but poor at the latter. AI also raises questions on the future of employment and retirement, the passivization of short-term investment strategies and who gets to control the development of new technologies.

There is currently a huge debate about the appropriate role of ESG investing. We argue that, far from being an isolated topic, it is intimately linked to the big fault lines of the investment industry, i.e. active versus passive, public versus private assets, and the challenge of preserving purchasing power in a new inflation regime.

This short note draws out common themes from our recent conversations and meetings with clients across the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. The questions we were asked ranged from monetary policy and inflation to strategic asset allocation, the impact of artificial intelligence and market liquidity. There was almost no pushback to our suggestion that equilibrium inflation will be higher, but that does not mean investors have changed their strategic asset allocation to reflect this. There was a general view that allocations to private assets are going up, especially private debt, though there were also questions on the system wide impact of this development on liquidity and the cycle. We found no consensus at all on the tactical outlook, which many investors have found especially hard to navigate. When traveling to meet with clients, it’s striking how often common topics surface. This could, of course, suggest that we are all in one giant echo chamber, but it does seem to reflect shared concerns. Below, we summarize themes that emerged in recent meetings across the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. They run the full gamut from strategic to tactical and from macroeconomic to portfolio construction.

A narrow market, led higher by a small number of stocks, has been doubly painful for many investors in 2023. First, a strong consensus for more cautious positioning earlier this year removed a tailwind, and it’s difficult to outperform when leadership is concentrated in a few large cap names. In this note, we discuss what this landscape means for investors, especially as it pertains to the attractiveness of more strategic positions.

Deglobalization, a shrinking working-age population and climate change are set to define the strategic investment outlook.

Emerging-market equities seem tactically attractive versus developed-market stocks, and many investors may be underweight. Strategically, there's a case for considering China as a distinct allocation building block.

Balancing different time horizons always presents challenges. It may be intellectually ugly to hold different positions over short horizons and long horizons, but sometimes the macro setup suggests it's the right way to proceed.

In this note, we explore four key issues that asset owners will need to face in 2023, rather than a typical list of forecasts for market outcomes in the year ahead. They relate to more strategic problems-but ones that asset owners will need to grapple with this year.

As economic growth slows, investors face a pressing need to distinguish tactical positioning from strategic-allocation decisions. We share our current thoughts on positioning portfolios with respect to major return streams.

A changing regime with higher and more volatile inflation and less trended markets, an evolution of ESG and questions on “appropriate” passive indices all demand a reassessment of the role of active management. This suggests asset owners may set limits on passive allocations.

Deglobalization demands attention from strategic investors, given its far-reaching implications for risk, return, correlation and-ultimately-portfolio construction. This is not adequately reflected in portfolios today.

Factors have rebounded over the past year, and we see a compelling strategic case for their place in asset allocation. That case is about more than filling a return gap.

Some investors feel that this year's massive changes in public-market valuations mean that the migration to private assets is done. We disagree.

Diversification is a well-traveled topic that has become more urgent in the past few years as investors grapple with potential changes in a longstanding correlation regime and the implications for portfolio construction.

With stocks down and yields up, strategic investors face pressing questions: Are bonds back? Is the real asset trade done? Do investors still need to allocate to private assets? The answers must come in the context of what we view as a regime change for inflation, which will put real return potential squarely in the spotlight.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and inflation are two of the biggest strategic trends in investing right now. We suggest the two are linked in a variety of ways, with profound implications for inflation, what we mean by ESG and the investing profession. There’s an intimate linkage and elements of tension. This was the case before the war in Ukraine, but the current conflict has thrust it into the spotlight.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has triggered a global humanitarian crisis and severely disrupted the macroeconomic landscape. How should investors adapt their strategic asset allocations?

It may be easy to take a bearish stance on equities today, but there's a case for stocks to generate positive real returns on a strategic basis going forward. High household equity allocations may actually be warranted, elevated valuations don't necessarily spell doom, populist pressures on earnings growth are surmountable, and falling correlations within the equity market create more "potential energy" for active management to add alpha.

In this note, we discuss four strategic issues that could have far-reaching implications for asset owners in the year ahead. Our subject matter is strategic, not tactical, so this is in no way an attempt to provide a comprehensive "2022 outlook."

The painful banality of lower future returns will force a continuation in the huge reallocation from public to private assets. However, we think that expectations for the advantages of private assets may already be too high in some areas-private assets are an important part of the future of asset allocation, but not a panacea.

How should asset owners think about their future engagement with asset managers? We think that both external economic forces and internal investment-industry forces will change this interaction. What should asset owners want from asset managers? What should they pay for? The common view is that asset managers are under pressure, but over the next five years, we think asset owners may feel the same pressure, too - driving change in their investment approach.